William Graham Sumner
An essay oj commentary
and selections by
Major Contributors to Social Science Series
Alfred mc clung lee, General Editor
William Graham Sumner
###
MAURICE R. DAVIE
William Graham Sumner Professor Emeritus
of Sociology, Yale University
THOMAS Y. CfiOWELL COMPANY
New York, Established 1834
Copyright © 1963 by Thomas Y. Crowell Company
All Rights Reserved
First Printing, May, 1963
Second Printing, November, 1965
Third Printing, January, 1967
Fourth Printing, August, 1968
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph
or any other means, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages
in a review to be published in a magazine or newspaper.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-9193
Series design by Laurel Wagner
Manufactured in the United States of America by The Colonial Press Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to the following pub-
lishers for permission to quote from their publications as indicated
below:
Ginn and Company, Boston: William Graham Sumner, Folkways,
1907, reprinted in 1940. Special thanks are due to the publisher for
permission to quote so extensively in the section entitled "Folkways/'
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York: Harris E. Starr,
William Graham Sumner, 1925; Charles H. Cooley, Sociological
Theory and Social Research, 1930.
Yale University Press, New Haven: William Graham Sumner, War
and Other Essays, edited by Albert Galloway Keller, 1911; The Chal-
lenge oi Facts and Other Essays, edited by Albert Galloway Keller,
1914; The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, edited by Albert Gallo-
way Keller, 1919; Essays of William Graham Sumner, 2 vols., edited
by Albert Galloway Keller and Maurice R. Davie, 1934; What Social
Classes Owe to Each Other, originally published by Harper and
Brothers in 1883, reprinted by Yale University Press in 1925; The
Science of Society, 1927.
Wigrw
Editor's Foreword
Undergraduates often find a great challenge in reading a seminal
thinker's major contributions to social science in their original form.
But students are usually offered either volume-length works containing
stimulating passages embedded in outworn discussions, or brief ex-
cerpts included with those of other authors in general collections of
readings. The longer works tend to be repetitious and wordy, and
some now appear misguided. At the same time, excerpts in general
collections do not give enough of a contributor's work to make him
come alive.
In planning the present series, John T. Hawes, Director of the
College Department of the Thomas Y. Crowell Company, and I
sought manuscripts free from either of the above weaknesses. The
editors were asked to dig out the main lines of a contributor's method
and thought from the verbiage and the dated materials obscuring
them, and to make available, in one slim volume, a critical essay
together with the most significant and interesting passages in a con-
tributor's writings. The volumes in the series, considered as a whole,
thus give the student an understanding of the diverse ways of thought
that have gone into the making of the social science discipline as we
now know it.
The series has been edited and written so that each little book can
be read for its own merits and without need of additional props. Each
contains the seminal ideas of an author which still remain alive today
but does not gloss over his weaknesses. Each book provides a critical
vignette of the social scientist as he is now seen. Each book, too,
should be interesting to college sophomores and especially to under-
graduate majors in the various social sciences.
What all volumes in the series have in common is an educative
conception. They are all efforts to interest undergraduates in some of
v
V1 editor's foreword
the great "originals" of social science and thus to stimulate further
exploration of important ideas and methods. The editor-critic who
has done each volume has been free to follow his own professional
judgment in analyzing his major contributor and in selecting signifi-
cant excerpts from his works. Each volume thus has an individuality
deriving from its editor-critic as well as from its subject.
The books in this series are intended to enrich introductory courses
in the various social sciences. For more advanced courses, they will
permit the student to become acquainted with the meatiest contribu-
tions of many selected social scientists rather than the few whose
works he might read more extensively. Advanced students will find
these books invaluable for the purposes of review.
ALFRED MC CLUNG LEE
Preface
I have tried in the pages that follow to present in a concise and or-
derly manner the essence of Sumner's views and contributions in the
field of social science. Having largely omitted reference to his earlier
career as an economist, to his books and essays on banking, currency,
and public finance, and to his biographies of Alexander Hamilton,
Andrew Jackson, and Robert Morris, I have concentrated on his more
sociological writings. In making this selection, it has been my inten-
tion, not to limit this presentation to Sumner's present relevance for
sociology, but to give a full picture of the mature social scientist and
his most significant work as an important episode in the history of
social thought.
Sumner was a pioneer in the development of the science of soci-
ology. He introduced, in 1875, the first course in this subject to be
taught in any university and he wrote the first volume — Folkways —
to become an American classic in this field. He was on the firing line
in the early battle for applying the scientific method to the study of
human society. His insistence on dispassionate analysis, classification,
comparison, sequence-making, and law-derivation in the field of hu-
man affairs, was a novel approach in his time, when the traditional
study of mankind consisted in appeal to the supernatural or to au-
thority, reliance on intuition or on pure logic, and the like, with no
thought of subjecting notions to rigorous verification, and when,
indeed, at least in certain quarters, it was regarded as quite improper
to consider men and society as natural phenomena. Although such
problems still remain, this is a far more scientifically sophisticated
age, and to Sumner belongs considerable credit in helping to bring it
about. While he remains essentially a nineteenth-century figure, Sum-
ner is less time-bound than most of the early leaders in this field.
vii
Vlll
PREFACE
Two different aspects of Sumner are revealed in his life and work.
One is that of a man of action— a popular lecturer, publicist, advocate,
even a politico-economic moralist, engaged in the main intellectual
controversies of his time. This is most evident in his published essays
and is treated in the section on Sumner's political theory in this vol-
ume. The other and more enduring aspect is that of Sumner as a
scholar, engaged in scientific pursuits. This found expression in his
remarkable career as a teacher and in his authorship of the famous
Folkways. Sumner himself recognized the disparity between his
scholastic and his public activities, and he explained his presence in
^ the public arena as motivated by a sense of duty.
When he began his public activities, the country was suffering from
the consequences of the Civil War; in later years it faced new and
complex problems arising from increasing industrialization and ur-
banization. The period of the 1880's and 1890's, when Sumner was
most active in public affairs, was a turning point in the social and
economic history of the United States, with the disappearance of the
frontier and the emergence of big business, trusts, and labor unions,
and all the questions regarding rights and public welfare which these
created. The relation of the government to business was a matter of
increasing concern. It was also a period of general inefficiency of gov-
ernment and political administration, and an age of proposed helter-
skelter reforms of either a sentimental or a socialistic nature. These
Sumner opposed, holding that all sound development must be slow,
that it must be unhurried and based on scientific knowledge of the
forces at work, of which we still knew little. For this reason he became
a gradualist and took the position of laissez-faire, using concepts drawn
from Darwin and Spencer to buttress his conservative outlook.
On the other hand, in his more sociological work he was radical in
the sense of getting at the root of the matter. He had the ability to
ask fundamental questions and the courage to pursue their investiga-
tion wherever it might lead and however many cherished and tradi-
tional notions it might trample underfoot. He always went directly
to the heart of a matter and kept his eye on the main issue. In his
mental composition there was nothing of the sentimental or of the
abstractly speculative; on the contrary, the practical predominated.
It was m part his passion for the clear, definite, and practical that
made his attitude toward the metaphysical and intuitional so hostile
As his biographer, Harris E. Starr [William Graham Sumner, 1925,
p. 526] relates: "All Sumner's research, writing, and teaching had
PREFACE IX
a practical end in view. He was forever trying to discover that which
would contribute to more successful living here upon the earth; labor-
ing to get men to adopt right principles of action; endeavoring to
train up youth to go out and be good citizens. His was preeminently
.a life of service in the interest of a better world. The assurance which
Sumner always displayed, his positiveness of statement, his uncon-
cealed contempt for opinions and theories which he considered su-
perficial, and his matter-of-fact assumption of superior knowledge in
his own particular field, led some to charge him with intellectual,
pride and arrogance. While perhaps he cannot be freed altogether
from this indictment, it must also be admitted that he displayed a very
fine type of humility. He was always conscious of the limitations of
his own knowledge and of the vastness of the unexplored country
which stretches out on every side of the thinker and teacher. It was
impossible for him not to take a positive position upon any matter
which presented itself to him for judgment or action; but he was quick
to change in the light of more facts or more mature deliberation."
Sumner was essentially a realist, preoccupied with things rather
than words, actual behavior rather than speculation. He devoted his
life to an objective study of the characteristics of human society and
the laws governing its operation and development. Nowhere in his
writings is this more clearly seen than in his Folkways, to which the
greatest amount of attention is bestowed in this analysis of his work.
In treating his Folkways ideas as well as other topics, I have quoted
extensively from Sumner, partly to give the reader a flavor of the
man, but more importantly to record exactly what Sumner said on
various topics. It is frequently the fate of classical writings that many
refer to them but seldom read them and that misinterpretations arise
and persist through oral transmission. Especially does this appear to
be true where the views are controversial. I have tried to choose what
I consider the clearest statement of Sumner's views on each particular
subject. While some attempt is made to relate Sumner's thoughts to
the main currents of the intellectual history of his time, there is no
effort to evaluate them. He needs neither praise nor apology nor de-
fense. Here was a great figure in the history of social science, and here
are the views he held and the generalizations he made — expressed
mainly in his own words so that the reader may know in succinct form
exactly what Sumner said.
New Haven, Connecticut m. r. d.
January, 1963
Contents
Editor's Foreword v
Preface vii
i. Life, Writings, and Methods i
2. Conception oi the Field of Sociology 12
3. Political Theory 2 5
4. Folkways 44
William .Graham Sumner
Life, Writings, and Methods
LIFE
William Graham Sumner was born at Paterson, New Jersey, on
October 30, 1840. He died at Englewood, New Jersey, on April 12,
1910, and was buried in Guilford, Connecticut. He was the son of
Thomas Sumner, a mechanic, who came to the United States from
Lancashire, England, in 1836 and married here Sarah Graham, also
of English birth. She died when William Graham Sumner was eight
years old. "This is about all I know of my ancestry," he once wrote
[Essays of William Graham Sumner, I, 3]. "My father told me that
he had seen his own great-grandfather, who was a weaver in Lan-
cashire. They were all artisans and members of the wages class. It is
safe to say that I am the first of them who ever learned Latin and
algebra."
Sumner grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and was educated in
the public schools of that city. He graduated at Yale College in 1863,
and in the summer of that year went to Europe. He spent the winter
of 1863-64 in Geneva, Switzerland, studying French and Hebrew.
He was at Gottingen for the next two years, studying ancient lan-
guages, history, and biblical science. Regarding his professors of
biblical science, he stated: "They taught me rigorous and pitiless
methods of investigation and deduction. . . . their method of study
was nobly scientific, and was worthy to rank, both for its results and
its discipline, with the best of the natural science methods" [Ibid.,
II, 61]. In April, 1866, he went to Oxford University, where he
studied Anglican theology. There his love for political science, which
dated back to his boyhood, was re-awakened and intensified by read-
ing Buckle and by discussions with his fellow-students. "We used, in
our conversations at Oxford, to talk about Buckle and the ideas which
A WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
he had then set afloat, and the question which occupied us the most
was whether there could be a science of society, and, if so, where it
should begin and how it should be built. . . . We agreed, however,
that social science must be an induction from history, that Buckle
had started on the right track, and that the thing to do was to study
history. The difficulty which arrested us was that we did not see how
the mass of matter to be collected and arranged could ever be so
mastered that the induction could actually be performed if the notion
of an 'induction from history' should be construed strictly ' [Ibid.,
11,8].
In 1866 Sumner was elected Tutor at Yale and in September of
that year he took up his duties there. He was ordained deacon in the
Protestant Episcopal Church in 1867 and priest in 1869. He resigned
the tutorship in March, 1869, to become assistant to the Rector of
Calvary Church in New York City. From September, 1870, to Sep-
tember, 1872, he was Rector of the Church of the Redeemer at Mor-
ristown, New Jersey.
In June of 1872 he was elected Professor of Political and Social
Science at Yale College, a title which he held until he retired in
1909. With reference to this shift in career from the ministry he
commented: "When I came to write sermons, I found to what a
degree my interest lay in topics of social science and political econ-
omy. ... It was at this period that I read, in an English magazine,
the first of those essays of Herbert Spencer which were afterward
collected into the volume The Study of Sociology. These essays im-
mediately gave me the lead which I wanted, to bring into shape the
crude notions which had been floating in my head for five or six
years, especially since the Oxford days. The conception of society,
of social forces, and of the science of society there offered was just
the one which I had been groping after but had not been able to
reduce for myself. It solved the old difficulty about the relation of
social science to history, rescued social science from the dominion
of the cranks, and offered a definite and magnificent field for work,
from which we might hope at last to derive definite results for the
solution of social problems. It was at this juncture (1872) that I was
offered the chair of Political and Social Science at Yale. I had always
been very fond of teaching and knew that the best work I could ever
do in the world would be in that profession; also, that I ought to be
in an academical career. I had seen two or three cases of men who,
LIFE, WRITINGS, AND METHODS 3
in that career, would have achieved distinguished usefulness, but who
were wasted in the parish and the pulpit" [Ibid., II, 9- 10 ]-
In 1875 Sumner offered a course in Sociology, which was the first
course in that subject to be given in any university in America, if not
in' the world. Of the development of his thoughts which led to this
innovation, he stated:
"I was definitely converted to evolution by Professor Marsh's
horses* some time about 1875 or l8 76. I had re-read Spencer's Social
Statics and his First Principles, the second part of the latter now
absorbing all my attention. I now read all of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel,
and quite a series of the natural scientists. I greatly regretted that I
had no education in natural science, especially in biology; but I found
that the philosophy of history and the 'principles of philology/ as
I had learned them, speedily adjusted themselves to the new concep-
tion, and won a new meaning and power from it. As Spencer's
Principles of Sociology was now coming out in numbers, I was con-
stantly getting evidence that sociology, if it borrowed the theory of
evolution in the first place, would speedily render it back again en-
riched by new and independent evidence. I formed a class to read
Spencer's book in the parts as they came out, and believe that I began
to interest men in this important department of study, and to prepare
them to follow its development, years before any such attempt was
made at any other university in the world. I have followed the growth
of the science of society in all its branches and have seen it far surpass
all the hope and faith I ever had in it. I have spent an immense
amount of work on it, which has been lost because misdirected. The
only merit I can claim in that respect is that I have corrected my
own mistakes. I have not published them for others to correct"
[Ibid., II, 10-11].
Since fifteen years were to pass before a second scholar introduced
a course in sociology, namely, Albion W. Small at Colby College,
it is of special interest to note the pioneer development of the subject
by Sumner. In 1879 he had a controversy with President Noah Porter
of Yale who objected to his use of Spencer's Study of Sociology in
his senior class (Sumner, by the way, taught only seniors and graduate
* This refers to the fossil horses collected by Othniel C. Marsh, the first director
of .the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. These fossils
showed, among other things, the evolution from a several-toed to a one-toed
type (Editor's note).
4 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
students), on the ground that reading this book would bring "intel-
lectual and moral harm to the students/' The controversy lasted for
over a year, and extended beyond academic walls. Sumner prepared
to resign rather than submit to such interference with his conduct
of his course. The university authorities yielded, and Sumner won a
victory for academic freedom.
As indicated by the Yale University catalogues during his teaching
career, Sumner's basic course in sociology underwent modifications
in subject matter and emphasis. In 1885 the prospectus stated: 'The
course in sociology will include an elementary study of human
palaeontology, archaeology, and ethnology." In 1887 he labeled the
course "Anthropology: a very elementary course in pre-historic science
and the origin of civilization; introduction to ethnology and soci-
ology." The same year, incidentally, he introduced a course in "The
Logic and Method of the Social Sciences," perhaps the first course
ever to be given in methods of social research. In 1888 he called his
course for seniors "Social Science," and specified among other things
that "the course will be occupied entirely with positive information
and scientific method, and will not take up any of the subjects of
criticism and speculation popularly connected with 'social science/ "
In 1895 he renamed the course "The Science of Society," a title he
maintained until he retired. To him this included anthropology and
ethnology, with emphasis on the origins of civilization and the devel-
opment of institutions, and a series of lectures on systematic sociology
in which all topics were "treated exclusively in the light of historical
anthropology and ethnology." Sumner thus clearly followed the cul-
tural approach to sociology, in the tradition of Spencer, Tylor, and
Lippert, which he developed into a generalizing science. Toward the
end of the century he introduced graduate courses along the lines of
the major social institutions, which constituted the basis of organiza-
tion of what would have been his magnum opus on The Science of
Society.
In 1899 he began to write out a textbook of sociology from material
he had used in lectures during the previous ten or fifteen years. At a
certain point in that undertaking he found that he wanted to intro-
duce his own treatment of popular usages and traditions, but found
that he could not do justice to the subject in a single chapter of his
text. Sumner therefore turned aside to write a treatise on Folkways,
which he published in 1907. As his pupil and successor, Albert G.
Keller, recounts it ["Memorial Address," in The Challenge of Facts
LIFE, WRITINGS, AND METHODS 5
and Other Essays, pp. 446-47], "He had written a very considerable
mass of manuscript, when it began to be borne in upon him that
there underlay his whole conception of the evolution and life of
human society a certain unifying and basic idea — and that this must
be developed before the main treatise should be pushed to comple-
tion. In tracing the evolution of the several social forms (the indus-
trial organization, marriage and the family, religion, government, and
so on ) he had observed that they all went back to an origin in popular
habit and custom; that these conventions and habitudes formed the
'prosperity-policy' of the society practicing them; that they exercised
a coercion upon the individual to conform to them, though they
were not codified by any authority — though their origin was lost in
the mystery of the far past. He saw that some explanation of the
nature of these 'folkways' formed for him the indispensable pre-
liminary to the analysis of the various forms of the societal institutions
which came out of them. And so he set the bulky first manuscript of
his Science oi Society aside and devoted many months to laying bare
the rock upon which he planned to build a science of society or
sociology that should not be, as much so-called sociology is, a byword
and an object of merriment to scientists in other fields. This was the
origin of that notable book of 1907 concerning whose grave impor-
tance to all succeeding scientific study of human society there can be
no two opinions."
Folkways will be discussed in detail below. Sumner did not live to
finish his general text on sociology, which was brought to completion
by Keller in a four-volume work published in 1927 under the title
of The Science oi Society.
WRITINGS
Sumner's bibliography consists of some three hundred items, in-
cluding books and articles [see Essays oi William Graham Sumner,
II, 479-507]. They range mainly over the fields of economics, political
science, and sociology. While Sumner was always primarily a soci-
ologist in method and point of view, his more strictly sociological
writings — aside from the posthumous The Science oi Society in which
Keller collaborated — included Folkways (1907), What Social Classes
Owe to Each Other (1883), and numerous essays written between
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
1873 and 1910, which have been re-published in the following col-
lections, all printed by the Yale University Press— the first four edited
by Albert G. Keller and the last two by Albert G. Keller and Maurice
K. Davie:
War and Other Essays. 1911
Eaith Hunger and Othei Essays. 1913
The Challenge of Facts and Othei Essays. 1914
The Forgotten Man and Othei Essays. 19x9
Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner. 1924
(Selected from the above four collections)
Essays of William Graham Sumner. 2 vols. 1934
(A further selection from the collected essays, plus three new
items)
Sumner's most lasting achievement in sociology is his Folkways,
which is of significance also to anthropology, social psychology'
psychiatry, education, economics, and political science. This volume
especially, but also many of his shorter pieces, shows immense erudi-
tion. Sumner had learned since middle age eight European languages
—Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Danish, and
Swedish-m addition to the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and
German which he already possessed, and he utilized them in gather-
ing ethnographic and historical comparative data for his study of man
and society.
Sumner's sociological writings were primarily concrete and descrip-
tive rather than abstract and theoretical. He was not at his best in
a long and systematic exposition. Even Folkways, which is the most
profound of his writings, is labored and hard to read and not well
organized. Sumner's main contribution to sociological theory lay not
so much in the development of a system as in the introduction of
concepts which he firmly established on a broad comparative factual
basis. These numerous concepts, now generally accepted as a part of
sociological theory, will be treated below.
The essential quality of Sumner's writing is more evident in his
shorter pieces— the essays. These are inimitable in both content and
exposition. Here Sumner wrote with energetic conviction. His style
was keen and epigrammatic. His more popular utterances were
polemic; he became dogmatic, and overstated his position in the heat
of controversy. He was an uncompromising foe of the unscientific sen-
LIFE, WRITINGS, AND METHODS 7
timentality which characterized much of the quasi-sociological writ-
ings and movements of his generation. He lashed out against socialists,
sentimentalists, world-reformers, metaphysicians, ethical philosophers.
He was as much opposed to those who would array the House of
Want against the House of Have as he was against the beneficiaries
of a protective tariff. He was against privilege in any form as wrong
economically, morally, and socially. He could see no ethical difference
between the poor plundering the rich and the rich plundering the
poor. He was a vigorous advocate of hard money, free trade, and
laissez-faire. The element of the preacher is not absent from these
writings. His Social Classes is an exhortation to independent thought
and action, self-reliance, and individual initiative. But Sumner was
not so much an exhorter to morals as a denouncer of immorality.
"Protectionism," he bursts out in the preface to his book of that
title,* "arouses my moral indignation. It is a subtle, cruel, and unjust
invasion of one man's rights by another. It is done by force of law.
It is at the same time a social abuse, an economic blunder, and a
political evil. The moral indignation which it causes is the motive
which draws me away from the scientific pursuits which form my
real occupation, and forces me to take part in a popular agitation.
The doctrine of a 'call' applies in such a case, and every man is bound
to take just so great a share as falls in his way. That is why I have
given more time than I could afford to popular lectures on this
subject, and it is why I have now put the substance of those lectures
into this book." As Keller remarks in an editorial preface to the Essays
of William Graham Sumner [I, xii-xiii], "he was a good hater of
sham, hypocrisy, and weak sentimentality. What makes the sparks
fly in many of these shorter pieces is precisely that moral indignation;
not a few of the attacking essays, and a number of the less aggressive
ones, might be called lay sermons." And as Harry Elmer Barnes justly
comments: "If one adds to this initial zeal the influence of genuine
love for aspiring young students, commanding personality, wide learn-
ing, splendid dogmatism, and mastery of incisive English which makes
his essays models of terse nineteenth-century critical prose, it is not
difficult to understand Sumner's reputation." t
* Protectionism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1885), reprinted in
The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, pp. 9-111; 10-11 quoted.
T Barnes and Howard Becker, Social Thought from Lore to Science (Boston:
D. C. Heath and Company, 1938), II, 956.
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
METHODS
While Sumner was a strong advocate of the application of the
scientific method to the study of social phenomena, he had little to
do with formal methodology. The most telling comment on his
method is that made by Charles Horton Cooley in his analysis of
Sumner's Folkways:
"What is the most successful work of research that American
sociology has produced? No doubt opinions would differ about this,
but it seems to me, on reflection, that if a vote were taken, bearing
in mind that the question refers to factual methods and results as
distinguished from more speculative sociology, a plurality of the
voters, if not a majority, would probably be found to favor Sumner's
Folkways.
"What strikes me most strongly when I consider this question is
that Folkways does not conform to any of the current canons of
methodology. It is not quantitative; it does not proceed by statistical
method; it is not made up of case studies; it is not psychoanalytic, nor
yet behavioristic, according to the doctrine of the sect that goes by
that name, since much of the material it uses is based on sympathetic
imagination. Moreover, it is not in any great measure a work of direct
observation at all! It is almost all secondhand. And, last and worst,
its objectivity is open to question. There is reason to think that
Sumner was by no means an unbiased man, but was, on the contrary,
noted for a somewhat dogmatic individualism and pessimism that
were not without influence upon his treatment of the folkways.
"Nearly all that I have said of Sumner's Folkways might also be
said of Darwin's Origin of Species, which, so far as method is con-
cerned, was a work of much the same character. They are both books
m which the author seems quite regardless of everything except col-
lecting the greatest possible body of pertinent facts and striving to
make out what they mean.
"I think I see at least two inferences that we can well draw from
his case. The first regards the power of an abundant factual material.
It is this, together with his vigorous personality and style, that more
than anything else gives Sumner his immense influence. There are
pages of facts, fresh, fascinating, well presented facts, for each idea.
You are led to assimilate the subject in a natural, enjoyable way. It
took great patience to accumulate all this material, and admirable
LIFE, WRITINGS, AND METHODS 9
reserve to withhold and brood over it until his ideas were mature
and fit to shape into a lucid book. . . .
"Another lesson is the old one of self-reliance. It is a matter of
history that every one who has done anything important in the past
has done it partly by resisting immediate and contemporary influences
and finding a way of his own. There are plenty of us elders to tell
the young student just what to do and how to do it. He can learn
a great deal from us, no doubt, but only on condition that he rely
first of all on his own judgment and common sense. The best authori-
ties agree that science is nothing more than common sense refined
and perfected, and if a rule of methodology appears, on fair considera-
tion, to be opposed to common sense, he is sage, I think, in dis-
regarding it."*
Sumner was a great humanist, and his Folkways, along with De
Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Veblen's The Theory of
the Leisure Class, is used by Robert Redfield to illustrate his conten-
tion that social science is an art as well as a science and is closely
related to humanistic endeavors. t None of the three authors Redfield
cites used formal methods in the sense of performing specified and
formalized operations on restricted and precisely identified data. Yet
each of these books made great contributions to the understanding
of man in society because ( 1 ) it shows a perception of some aspect
of human nature, (2) it brings forward significant generalizations,
and (3) it reveals a fresh and independent viewpoint. Specifically
Redfield comments: "Like the apprehension of the humanly signifi-
cant, the making of the generalization is a work of imagination.
Sumner did not find out that there is such a thing as the mores by
learning and applying some method of research. He discovered it by
watching the people around him and by using the observations
recorded by other men and then by making a leap of thought across
many diversities to apprehend the degree of uniformity that deserves
the term 'mores/ "
Sumner himself had much to say on the nature and function of
science and the necessity of cultivating the scientific attitude of mind,
as the following excerpts suggest [Essays of William Graham Sumner,
1,30,44,49-50, 50-51]:
* Sociological Theory and Social Research, 1930, pp. 325-27, quoted by per-
mission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York,
t "The Art of Social Science,'' American Journal of Sociology, 54 (November,
1948), 181-90.
10 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
"I should want to make the definition of science turn upon the
method employed, and I would propose as a definition: knowledge
of reality acquired by methods which are established in the confidence
of men whose occupation it is to investigate truth. In Pearson's book*
he refers constantly to the opinions and methods of scientific scholars
as the highest test of truth. I know of no better one; I know of none
which we employ as constantly as we do that one; and so I put it
in the definition. I propose to define science as knowledge of reality
because 'truth' is used in such a variety of senses. I do not know
whether it is possible for us ever to arrive at a knowledge of 'the truth'
in regard to any important matters. I doubt if it is possible. It is not
important. It is the pursuit of truth which gives us life, and it is to
that pursuit that our loyalty is due."
"The only security [against dogmatism] is the constant practise of
critical thinking. We ought never to accept fantastic notions of any
kind; we ought to test all notions; we ought to pursue all propositions
until we find out their connection with reality. That is the fashion
of thinking which we call scientific in the deepest and broadest sense
of the word. It is, of course, applicable over the whole field of human
interests, and the habit of mind which insists on finding realities is
the best product of an education which may be properly called
scientific."
"Here I may notice, in passing, the difference between science and
religion in regard to the habits of thought which each encourages.
No religion ever offers itself except as a complete and final answer to
the problems of life. No religion ever offers itself as a tentative solu-
tion. A religion cannot say: I am the best solution yet found, but I
may be superseded tomorrow by new discoveries. But that is exactly
what every science must say. Religions do not pretend to grow; they
are born complete and fully correct and our duty in regard to them
is to learn them in their integrity. . . . Every science contains the
purpose and destiny of growth as one of its distinguishing character-
istics; it must always be open to re-examination and must submit to
new tests if such are proposed. Consequently the modes and habits
of thought developed by the study of science are very different from
those developed by the study of religion. This is the real cause/ 1
think, of the antagonism between science and religion which is
vaguely felt in modern times, although the interest is lacking which
would bring the antagonism into an open conflict."
* Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science (London: A. & C. Black, 1911).
LIFE, WRITINGS, AND METHODS 11
"As your education goes on, you ought to gain in your power of
observation. Natural incidents, political occurrences, social events,
ought to present to you new illustration of general principles with
which your studies have made you familiar. You ought to gain in
power to analyse and compare, so that all the fallacies which consist
in presenting things as like, which are not like, should not be able
to befog your reason. You ought to become able to recognize and
test a generalization, and to distinguish between true generalizations
and dogmas on the one hand, or commonplaces on another, or
whimsical speculations on another. You ought to know when you
are dealing with a true law which you may follow to the uttermost;
when you have only a general truth; when you have an hypothetical
theory; when you have a possible conjecture; and when you have only
an ingenious assumption. These are most important distinctions on
either side."
Sumner was a pioneer and lifelong champion of the objective and
scientific approach to the study of social phenomena. He held that
social phenomena are subject to law, and he saw "no means of ad-
vancing sociology save by the cultivation of a trained judgment
through the careful study of sociological phenomena and sequences"
[The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, p. 419]. To him the basic
data of social science are behavioristic and ethnographic or cultural.
He laid special stress on the comparative or cross-cultural method, in
which he pioneered; otherwise, he maintained, our generalizations
tend to be culture-bound, that is, limited to a particular culture at a
particular time. He promoted the idea of the cross-cultural survey,
which may be said to have begun with Spencer's Descriptive Sociology
and to have been continued after Sumner by G. P. Murdock at Yale
in what is now the joint enterprise of the Human Relations Area
Files. Sumner collected, analyzed, and classified a tremendous mass
of material on a great number and variety of societies and cultures,
much of which provided the substance of his Folkways and the post-
humous The Science of Society. He followed the so-called inductive
method— fact-gathering until the scales tip in one direction. He dis-
liked theory of any speculative kind, even as a starting-point for
investigation. A thematic thread in all his work was an uncompromis-
ing insistence upon reality. He strove always to treat of the actual
and real, and to base his conclusions on a solid body of facts. This
insistence on empirical evidence characterized all his writings and
teaching.
Conception of the Field
of Sociology
DEFINITION OF SOCIETY
Life in society, said Sumner, is the life of a human society on this
earth. A human society he defined as "a group of human beings liv-
ing in a cooperative effort to win subsistence and to perpetuate the
species." This definition, typical of his realistic approach, rests
squarely upon the well-known facts of all organic life. The conditions
of the definition set no limitation on the size of the group that is
taken to constitute a society: the family, the nation, or even the
whole race of mankind satisfies the conditions.
"A man with liis wife and his children constitutes a society, for its
essential parts are all present, and the number more or less is imma-
terial. A certain division of labor between the sexes is imposed by
nature. The family as a whole maintains itself better under an organ-
ization with division of labor than it could if the functions were
shared so far as possible. From this germ the development of society
goes on by the regular steps of advancement to higher organization,
accompanied and sustained by improvements in the arts" [War and
Other Essays, p. 174; The Science of Society, pp. 6-7].
LIFE CONDITIONS
The elementary conditions of the life of a human society, said Sum-
ner, are set by the nature of human beings and the nature of the
earth. 'We have already become familiar, in biology, with the tran-
scendent importance of the fact that life on earth must be main-
12
CONCEPTION OF THE FIELD OF SOCIOLOGY 13
tained by a struggle against nature, and also by a competition with
other forms of life. In the latter fact biology and sociology touch.
Sociology is a science which deals with one range of phenomena pro-
duced by the struggle for existence, while biology deals with another.
The forces are the same, acting on different fields and under different
conditions. The sciences are truly cognate. Nature contains certain
materials which are capable of satisfying human needs, but those
materials must, with rare and mean exceptions, be won by labor, and
must be fitted to human use by more labor. As soon as any number of
human beings are struggling each to win from nature the material
goods necessary to support life, and are carrying on this struggle side
by side, certain social forces come into operation. The prime condi-
tion of this society will lie in the ratio of its numbers to the supply
of materials within its reach" [War and Other Essays, pp. 173-74]-
STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE AND COMPETITION OF LIFE
In Sumner's thinking, these two concepts, although related, are
quite distinct. As the following excerpts show, he held that the strug-
gle for existence is a process in which an individual and nature are the
parties, whereas the competition of life is a process in which the
parties are men who strive with each other. It is the latter which is
the societal element and which produces societal organization. This
he made much of, as we shall see, in his development of social theory.
On the other hand, his conception of the struggle for existence, a con-
ception which retains a nineteenth-century emphasis, became an ele-
ment in his politico-economic views, as will be observed below in his
opposition to schemes of social reform and to government inter-
ference. Sumner maintained that ills which belong to the struggle for
existence should be borne by individuals alone and not be an object
of government intervention.
"The struggle for existence must be carried on under life conditions
and in connection with the competition of life. The life conditions
consist in variable elements of the environment, the supply of mate-
rials necessary to support life, the difficulty of exploiting them, the
state of the arts, and the circumstances of physiography, climate,
meteorology, etc., which favor life or the contrary. The struggle for
existence is a process in which an individual and nature are the parties.
The individual is engaged in a process by which he wins from his
environment what he needs to support his existence. In the competi-
14 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
tion of life the parties are men and other organisms. The men strive
with each other, or with the flora and fauna with which they are
associated. The competition of life is the rivalry, antagonism, and
mutual displacement in which the individual is involved with other
organisms by his efforts to carry on the struggle for existence for
himself. It is, therefore, the competition of life which is the societal
element, and which produces societal organization.
"The number present and in competition is another of the life
conditions. At a time and place the life conditions are the same for a
number of human beings who are present, and the problems of life
policy are the same. This is another reason why the attempts to satisfy
interest become mass phenomena and result in folkways. The indi-
vidual and social elements are always in interplay with each other if
there are a number present. If one is trying to carry on the struggle
for existence with nature, the fact that others are doing the same in
the same environment is an essential condition for him. Then arises
an alternative. He and the others may so interfere with each other
that all shall fail, or they may combine, and by cooperation raise their
efforts against nature to a higher power. This latter method is indus-
trial organization. The crisis which produces it is constantly renewed,
and men are forced to raise the organization to greater complexity and
more comprehensive power, without limit. Interests are the relations
of action and reaction between the individual and the life conditions,
through which relations the evolution of the individual is produced.
That evolution, so long as it goes on prosperously, is well living, and
it results in the self-realization of the individual, for we may think
of each one as capable of fulfilling some career and attaining to some
character and state of power by the developing of predispositions
which he possesses.
"It would be an error, however, to suppose that all nature is a
chaos of warfare and competition. Combination and cooperation are
so fundamentally necessary that even very low life forms are found in
symbiosis for mutual dependence and assistance. A combination can
exist where each of its members would perish. Competition and com-
bination are two forms of life association which alternate through the
whole organic and superorganic domains. The neglect of this fact
leads to many socialistic fallacies. Combination is of the essence of
organization, and organization is the great device for increased power
by a number of unequal and dissimilar units brought into association
for a common purpose" [Folkways, pp. 16-17].
CONCEPTION OF THE FIELD OF SOCIOLOGY
ANTAGONISTIC COOPERATION
'This combination has been well called antagonistic cooperation.
It consists in the combination of two persons or groups to satisfy a
great common interest while minor antagonisms of interest which
exist between them are suppressed. . . . Antagonistic cooperation is
the most productive form of combination in high civilization. It is
a high action of the reason to overlook lesser antagonisms in order
"to work together for great interests. Political parties are constantly
forced to do it. In the art of the statesman it is a constant policy.
The difference between great parties and factions in any parliamen-
tary system is of the first importance; that difference consists in the
fact that parties can suppress minor differences, and combine for
what they think most essential to public welfare, while factions divide
and subdivide on petty differences. Inasmuch as the suppression of
minor differences means a suppression of the emotional element,
while the other policy encourages the narrow issues in regard to which
feeling is always most intense, the former policy allows far less play
to feeling and passion" [Ibid., pp. 17-18].
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
The only use which Sumner seems to have made of this concept
was in connection with schemes of social reform which he thought
would lead to the survival of the less fit members of society. "We
have noticed that the relations involved in the struggle for existence
are twofold. There is first the struggle of individuals to win the means
of subsistence from nature, and secondly there is the competition of
man with man in the effort to win a limited supply. The radical
error of the socialists and sentimentalists is that they never distinguish
these two relations from each other. They bring forward complaints
which are really to be made, if at all, against the author of the uni-
verse for the hardships which man has to endure in his struggle with
nature. The complaints are addressed, however, to society; that is, to
other men under the same hardships. The only social element, how-
ever, is the competition of life, and when society is blamed for the
ills which belong to the human lot, it is only burdening those who
have successfully contended with those ills with the further task of
conquering the same ills over again for somebody else. Hence liberty
perishes in all socialistic schemes, and the tendency of such schemes
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
is to the deterioration of society by burdening the good members
and relieving the bad ones. The law of the survival of the fittest was
not made by man and cannot be abrogated by man. We can only,
by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest. If a man
comes forward with any grievance against the order of society so far
as this is shaped by human agency, he must have patient hearing and
full redress; but if he addresses a demand to society for relief from
the hardships of life, he asks simply that somebody else should get
his living for him. In that case he ought to be left to find out his
error from hard experience" [War and Other Essays, pp. 176-77]-
"If we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one
possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest. The
former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti-civiliza-
tion ' [Essays oi William Graham Sumner, II, 56].
CONQUEST OVER NATURE; CAPITAL
Sumner maintained that there is no boon in nature; that all the
blessings mankind enjoys are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and
study.
"If we look at any part of the earth's surface in a state of nature
as it is when given to man, instead of finding that it fills any notion
of gift or boon, we find that it offers a task of appalling magnitude.
It is covered with trees, or stones, or swamps; or hostile animals of
various kinds occupy it; or malaria stands guard over it. Between the
boon and any use by man stands a series of obstacles to be overcome;
dangerous and toilsome work to be done. It is a chance for the man
to maintain the struggle for existence if he is strong enough to con-
quer obstacles; if not, then he may lie down and die of despair on
the face of the boon and not a breeze, or a leaflet, or a sunbeam will
vary its due course to help or pity him. This is the only attitude in
which we find nature when we come face to face with her in her
original attitude toward mankind; it is only when we come to meet
her, armed with knowledge, science, and capital, that we force back
her limitations and win some wider and easier chances of existence
for ourselves" [Ibid, I, 387-88].
Again, monopoly, he held, is in nature, and relaxation of monopoly
is one of the triumphs of civilization. "Every man who stands on the
earth's surface excludes every one else from so much of it as he covers;
every one who eats a loaf of bread appropriates to himself for the
CONCEPTION OF THE FIELD OF SOCIOLOGY yj
time-being the exclusive use and enjoyment of so many square feet of
the earth's surface as were required to raise the wheat; every one who
burns wood to warm himself, or uses the fiber of cotton or wool to
clothe himself, appropriates in monopoly a part of the land so far as
the land is of utility or interest to man. Perhaps the most funda-
mental fact which makes this world a world of toil and self-denial is
that two men cannot eat the same loaf of bread. This pitiless and
hopeless monopoly is, in the last analysis, the reason for capital and
rent, for property and rights, for law and the state, for poverty and
inequality. ... If now, we build houses several stories high, so that
several men can, in effect, stand on the same square feet of the
earth's surface, or if we make the same number of square feet bear
two loaves of bread instead of one, we break the monopoly of nature,
but we do it by capital and the arts of civilization. Whatever we
have, therefore, which is worth having is not a boon of nature, but a
conquest of civilization from nature" [Ibid., I, 386-87].
The conquest of civilization from nature, the advance from original
destitution and barbarism to civilization, was epitomized to Sumner
in property and capital. "Property," he declared, "is the strongest,
deepest, most universal interest of mankind. It is the most funda-
mental condition of the struggle for existence; that is to say, of the
welfare of mankind" [Ibid., I, 231].
"Property is the condition of civilization. It is just as essential to
the state, to religion, and to education as it is to food and clothing.
In the form of capital [here Sumner was referring to tools and other
instruments of production, which he called energy stored up against
the struggle for existence] it is essential to industry, but if capital were
not property it would not do its work in industry. If we negative or
destroy property we arrest the whole life of civilized society and put
men back on the level of beasts" [Ibid., II, 129].
"The reason why man is not altogether a brute is because he has
learned to accumulate capital, to use capital to advance to a higher
organization of society, to develop a completer cooperation, and so to
win greater and greater control over nature" [What Social Classes
Owe to Each Other, p. 69].
THE MAN-LAND RATIO; LAW OF POPULATION
As intimated above, Sumner held that the most important limiting
condition on the status of human societies is the ratio of the number
x 8 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
of their members to the supply of materials necessary to support life
or, since all subsistence comes ultimately from the land, to the amount
of land at their disposal. "It is this ratio of population to land which
determines what are the possibilities of human development or the
limits of what man can attain in civilization and comfort" [Essays
oi William Graham Sumner, I, 174]. Drawing from the Malthusian
doctrine of population and the Ricardian law of rent, he formulated
this relationship into a law of population: "Population tends to in-
crease up to the limit of the supporting power of the environment
(land), on a given stage of the arts, and for a given standard of living"
[The Science oi Society, p. 46]. Numbers bear a direct relation to the
industrial arts and an inverse relation to the standard of living. Neither
term of the man-land ratio is fixed; and man has the capacity to alter
them, by operating upon the arts of life on the land side of the ratio
and upon the standard of living on the man side. Thus, an advance
in the arts of production or the economy may serve to support a
larger number of people on the same standard or the same number
of people on a higher standard, or, if great enough, as in the case
of the Industrial Revolution, to support both an increased popula-
tion and a higher standard of living.
If the stores of nature were unlimited, or if the last unit of the sup-
ply she offers could be won as easily as the first, there would be no
social problem, according to Sumner's reasoning.
"On the side of the land also stands the law of the diminishing
return as a limitation. More labor gets more from the land, but not
proportionately more. Hence, if more men are to be supported, there
is need not of a proportionate increase of labor, but of a dispropor-
tionate increase of labor. The law of population, therefore, combined
with the law of the diminishing returns, constitutes the great under-
lying condition of society. Emigration, improvements in the arts, in
morals, in education, in political organization, are only stages in the
struggle of man to meet these conditions, to break their force for a
time, and to win room under them for ease and enlargement. Ease
and enlargement mean either power to support more men on a given
stage of comfort or power to advance the comfort of a given number
of men. Progress is a word which has no meaning save in view of the
laws of population and the diminishing return, and it is quite natural
that anyone who fails to understand those laws should fall into doubt
which way progress points, whether towards wealth or poverty. The
laws of population and the diminishing return, in their combination,
CONCEPTION OF THE FIELD OF SOCIOLOGY 19
are the iron spur which has driven the race on to all which it has
ever achieved, and the fact that population ever advances, yet ad-
vances against a barrier which resists more stubbornly at every step
of advance, unless it is removed to a new distance by some conquest
of man over nature, is the guarantee that the task of civilization will
never be ended, but that the need for more energy, more intelligence,
and more virtue will never cease while the race lasts" [War and Other
Essays, pp. 175-76].
UNDER-POPULATION AND OVER-POPULATION
Sumner affirmed that so long as the population is low in propor
tion to the amount of land, at a given stage of the arts, life is easy
and the competition of man with man is weak. Where more persons
are trying to live on a square mile than it can support, at the existing
stage of the arts, life is hard and the competition of man with man
is intense. He was thus led to contrast the two type-conditions of
under-population and over-population, and to indicate their far-reach-
ing social significance.
"When a country is under-populated newcomers are not competi-
tors, but assistants. If more come they may produce not only new
quotas, but a surplus besides, to be divided between themselves and
all who were present before. In such a state of things land is abundant
and cheap. The possession of it confers no power or privilege. No one
will work for another for wages when he can take up new land and
be his own master. Hence it will pay no one to own more land than
he can cultivate by his own labor, or with such aid as his own family
supplies. Hence, again, land bears little or no rent; there will be no
landlords living on rent and no laborers living on wages, but only a
middle class of yeoman farmers. All are substantially on an equality,
and democracy becomes the political form, because this is the only
state of society in which the dogmatic assumption of equality, on
which democracy is based, is realized as a fact. The same effects are
powerfully re-enforced by other facts. In a new and under-populated
country the industries which are most profitable are the extractive
industries. The characteristic of these, with the exception of some
kinds of mining, is that they call for only a low organization of labor
and small amount of capital. Hence they allow the workman to be-
come speedily his own master, and they educate him to freedom,
independence, and self-reliance. At the same time, the social groups
20 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
being only vaguely marked off from each other, it is easy to pass from
one class of occupations, and consequently from one social grade, to
another. Finally, under the same circumstances education, skill, and
superior training have but inferior value compared with what they
have in densely populated countries. The advantages lie, in an under-
populated country, with the coarser, unskilled, manual occupations,
and not with the highest developments of science, literature, and
art. . . .
"If now we turn for comparison to cases of over-population we see
that the struggle for existence and the competition of life are intense
where the pressure of population is great. This competition draws out
the highest achievements. It makes the advantages of capital, educa-
tion, talent, skill, and training tell to the utmost. It draws out the
social scale upwards and downwards to great extremes and produces
aristocratic social organizations in spite of all dogmas of equality.
Landlords, tenants (i.e., capitalist employers), and laborers are the
three primary divisions of any aristocratic order, and they are sure to
be developed whenever land bears rent and whenever tillage requires
the application of large capital. At the same time liberty has to un-
dergo curtailment. A man who has a square mile to himself can easily
do as he likes, but a man who walks Broadway at noon or lives in a
tenement-house finds his power to do as he likes limited by scores of
considerations for the rights and feelings of his fellowmen. Further-
more, organization with subordination and discipline is essential in
order that the society as a whole may win a support from the land.
In an over-populated country the extremes of wealth and luxury are
presented side by side with the extremes of poverty and distress. They
are equally the products of an intense social pressure. The achieve-
ments of power are highest, the rewards of prudence, energy, enter-
prise, foresight, sagacity, and all other industrial virtues are greatest;
on the other hand, the penalties of folly, weakness, error, and vice are
most terrible. Pauperism, prostitution, and crime are the attendants
of a state of society in which science, art, and literature reach their
highest developments. . . .
"Now it is evident that over-population and under-population are
only relative terms. Hence as time goes on any under-populated na-
tion is surely moving forward towards the other status, and is speedily
losing its natural advantages which are absolute, and also that relative
advantage which belongs to it if it is in neighborly relations with
nations of dense population and high civilization; viz., the chance to
CONCEPTION OF THE FIELD OF SOCIOLOGY 21
borrow and assimilate from them the products, in arts and science,
of high civilization without enduring the penalties of intense social
pressure" [War and Other Essays, pp. 183-85].
It was from such considerations that Sumner developed the con-
cept of earth hunger— "the apparently insatiable desire to get more
land." This he used in a theory of migration which he illustrated by
the population movement to the New World.
"With more land, there are higher wages, because no one will work
for wages which are convertible into less goods than the laborer could
get out of the land when used in the most lavish and wasteful man-
ner. With more land, the manual unskilled laborer is raised in com-
parison with the skilled and educated laborer, that is, the masses are
raised in comparison with the classes. When there is plenty of land,
the penalties of all social follies, vices, and ignorance are light. Each
man has plenty of the 'rights of man' because he need only be, in
order to be a valuable member of society; he does not need high
training and education, as he would in an old and crowded society
with a strict organization, high discipline, intense competition, and
weighty sanctions upon success or failure.
"These facts of the social order are of the most fundamental and
far-reaching importance. They are the facts which control the fate
of the human race and produce the great phenomena which mark
ages of history. They are the facts which, since the great geographical
explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, have spread the
population of the European nations over the globe. The most enter-
prising nations seized the advantage first and have pushed it farthest.
The movements of population have been accelerated by all the in-
ventions which have facilitated transportation and communication"
[Essays oi William Graham Sumner, I, 187-88].
To Sumner the great significance of the discovery of America was
the winning of a new continent for the labor class; and it was on the
basis of the factors outlined above that democracy developed. "We
are not free and equal because Jefferson put it into the Declaration
of Independence that we were born so; but Jefferson could put it
into the Declaration of Independence that all men are born free and
equal because the economic relations existing in America made the
members of society to all intents and purposes free and equal" \Ibid
I, 458-59].
"It was the industrial and social power of the masses of the popu-
lation in a new country with unlimited land which made us demo-
22 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
cratic. It is the reflex influence of the new countries on the old centers
of civilization which is breaking down aristocracy, and making them
democratic too" [Ibid., I, 445].
ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL DETERMINISM
Sumner was thus an economic determinist — not in the doctrinaire
sense of Karl Marx, but in the belief that economic institutions are
more basic than other institutions. He maintained that political and
social institutions find their basis in economic fact, and that the stage
of the industrial organization existing at any time is the controlling
social factor. "It controls us all because we are all in it. It creates the
conditions of our existence, sets the limits of our social activity, regu-
lates the bonds of our social relations, determines our conceptions of
good and evil, suggests our life-philosophy, molds our inherited po-
litical institutions, and reforms the oldest and toughest customs, like
marriage and property" [Ibid., I, 93].
It was the opening of the new continents and the great discoveries
and inventions which made the modern age: "This combination has
produced an industrial revolution, which is bringing in its train revo-
lutions in philosophy, ethics, religion, politics, and all other relations
of human society; for whenever you touch economic and industrial
causes, you touch those which underlie all the others and whose
consequences will inevitably ramify through all the others. The phi-
losophers and all the resolution-makers of every grade come running
together and shouting paeans of victory to the rising power and the
coming glory; and, therefore, they claim that they have made it all.
It is totally false. They are themselves but the product of the forces,
and all their philosophies and resolutions are as idle as the waving of
banners on the breezes. Democracy itself, the pet superstition of the
age, is only a phase of the all-compelling movement. If you have
abundance of land and few men to share it, the men will all be equal.
Each landholder will be his own tenant and his own laborer. Social
classes disappear. Wages are high. The mass of men, apart from lazi-
ness, folly, and vice, are well off. No philosophy of politics or ethics
makes them prosperous. Their prosperity makes their political phi-
losophy and all their other creeds. It also makes all their vices, and
imposes on them a set of fallacies produced out of itself. It is only
necessary to look about us in the world of today to see how true this
all is" [Ibid., I, 185-86].
CONCEPTION OF THE FIELD OF SOCIOLOGY 23
AUTOMATIC FORCES; EVOLUTION
Thus Sumner believed that the existence of society is conditioned
by natural and social forces and that its phenomena are not arbitrary
or accidental but are subject to laws, which it is the business of
science to investigate. He maintained that men must do with social
laws what they do with physical laws — learn them, obey them, and
conform to them. He saw little field in them for arbitrary inter-
vention, for change by direct social effort. The basic law is evolution,
which he conceived of as an automatic process. In this respect he
followed Darwin rather than Spencer, although he never formulated
any theory of social evolution. This was done by Keller* who used
it as the organizing principle of The Science of Society, stressing
the Darwinian factors of variation, selection, transmission, and
adaptation. To Sumner and Keller the essential meaning of evolution
was adaptive change whereby whole cultures or their component parts
alter in form and function during the passage of time in response to
changes in life conditions.
For example, Sumner wrote [Ibid., II, 123, 124]: "The industrial
system has changed often and it will change again. Nobody invented
former forms. No one can invent others. It will change according to
conditions and interests, just as the gilds and manors changed into
modern phases. . . . The world of human society is what has resulted
from thousands of years of life. It is not a system any more than a
man sixty years old is a system. It is a product. To talk of making
another system is like talking of making a man of sixty into some-
thing else than what his life has made him."
This aspect of Sumner's thinking was most vigorously expressed in
his essay on "The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over," from
which the following excerpt is taken [Ibid., I, 104-06] : "If this poor
old world is as bad as they say, one more reflection may check the
zeal of the headlong reformer. It is at any rate a tough old world. It
has taken its trend and curvature and all its twists and tangles from
a long course of formation. All its wry and crooked gnarls and knobs
are therefore stiff and stubborn. If we puny men by our arts can do
anything at all to straighten them, it will only be by modifying the
tendencies of some of the forces at work, so that, after a sufficient
time, their action may be changed a little and slowly the lines of
* Societal Evolution, rev. ed. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931).
24 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
movement may be modified. This effort, however, can at most be only
slight, and it will take a long time. In the meantime spontaneous
forces will be at work, compared with which our efforts are like those
of a man trying to deflect a river, and these forces will have changed
the whole problem before our interferences have time to make them-
selves felt. The great stream of time and earthly things will sweep on
just the same in spite of us. It bears with it now all the errors and
follies of the past, the wreckage of all the philosophies, the frag-
ments of all the civilizations, the wisdom of all the abandoned ethical
systems, the debris of all the institutions, and the penalties of all the
mistakes. It is only in imagination that we stand by and look at and
criticize it and plan to change it. Every one of us is a child of his age
and cannot get out of it. He is in the stream and is swept along with
it. All his sciences and philosophy come to him out of it. Therefore
the tide will not be changed by us. It will swallow up both us and
our experiments. It will absorb the efforts at change and take them
into itself as new but trivial components, and the great movement of
tradition and work will go on unchanged by our fads and schemes.
The things which will change it are the great discoveries and inven-
tions, the new reactions inside the social organism, and the changes
in the earth itself on account of changes in the cosmical forces. These
causes will make of it just what, in fidelity to them, it ought to be.
The men will be carried along with it and be made by it. The utmost
they can do by their cleverness will be to note and record their
course as they are carried along, which is what we do now, and is
that which leads us to the vain fancy that we can make or guide the
movement. That is why it is the greatest folly of which a man can be
capable, to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social
world."
While the above citation is an extreme statement of Sumner's
views, taken from a popular essay of a controversial nature, it never-
theless reflects his abounding faith in the laws of nature and his con-
ception of evolution as a process which cannot be extensively altered
by social effort. Sumner saw little future for intelligent social planning
and, as is shown in the following section, he had no faith in the
state as an institution capable of promoting the public welfare.
Political Theory
Although Sumner wrote and lectured extensively on political matters,
he never published any systematic treatment of political theory. His
reputation as a contributor to political theory rests upon a clear and
vigorous elaboration of certain specific topics. Here again is made
evident Sumner's realistic approach, emphasizing power politics,
pressure groups, bureaucracy, and the like, and his opposition to gov-
ernment intervention for practical as well as theoretical reasons. In
the terminology of his day this section might better have been en-
titled Sumner's "political economy/' His writings in this field reflect
Sumner as a man of action, even as a political and economic moralist,
in contrast to his more sociological and scholarly work, best evidenced
in a later section entitled Folkways.
CONCEPT OF THE STATE
Sumner conceived the state as a practical institution. He had little
patience with philosophical and metaphysical views.
"As an abstraction, the State is to me only All-of-us. In practice
— that is, when it exercises will or adopts a line of action — it is only
a little group of men chosen in a very haphazard way by the majority
of us to perform certain services for all of us. The majority do not go
about their selection very rationally, and they are almost always dis-
appointed by the results of their own operation. Hence 'the State,'
instead of offering resources of wisdom, right reason, and pure moral
sense beyond what the average of us possess, generally offers much
less of all those things. Furthermore, it often turns out in practice
that 'the State' is not even the known and accredited servants of the
State, but, as has been well said, is only some obscure clerk, hidden
*5
26 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
in the recesses of a Government bureau, into whose power the chance
has fallen for the moment to pull one of the stops which control the
Government machine. In former days it often happened that 'the
State* was a barber, a fiddler, or a bad woman. In our day it often
happens that 'the State* is a little functionary on whom a big func-
tionary is forced to depend" [What Social Classes Owe to Each
Other, pp. 9-10].
The state, he often repeated, has nothing, and can give nothing,
which it does not take from somebody, mainly through taxation of
those who have earned and saved. Because of its unique power, con-
trol of the state is often sought by groups to advance their own
interests and to exploit others.
"The state is the greatest monopoly of all; it can brook no rival
or colleague in its domain; it is necessarily sole and supreme. If the
state is purely a civil organization this monopoly character of it is
beneficial; if, however, the state enters as an agent into the industrial
or social relations of its own subjects, it becomes the greatest and
worst of all monopolies, the one best worth having under one's con-
trol, the best prize of base struggles, and the most powerful engine
by which some men may exploit others" [Essays of William Graham
Sumnei, II, 240].
Indeed, Sumner believed that the history of the human race is one
long story of attempts by certain persons and classes to obtain con-
trol of the power of the state in order to live luxuriously off the earn-
ings of others. "Autocracies, aristocracies, theocracies, and all other
organizations for holding political power have exhibited only the
same line of action. It is the extreme of political error to say that if
political power is only taken away from generals, nobles, priests,
millionaires, and scholars, and given to artisans and peasants, these
latter may be trusted to do only right and justice, and never to abuse
the power; that they will repress all excess in others, and commit none
themselves. They will commit abuse, if they can and dare, just as
others have done. The reason for the excesses of the old governing
classes lies in the vices and passions of human nature — cupidity, lust,
vindictiveness, ambition, and vanity. These vices are confined to no
nation, class, or age. They appear in the church, the academy, the
workshop, and the hovel, as well as in the army or the palace. They
have appeared in autocracies, aristocracies, theocracies, democracies,
and ochlocracies, all alike. The only thing which has ever restrained
these vices of human nature in those who had political power is law
POLITICAL THEORY 2 7
sustained by impersonal institutions" [What Social Classes Owe to
Each Other, pp. 30-31].
"The true rule which every state which is to be sound and enduring
must set for itself in deciding to whom political functions may be
entrusted, is that political rights and political duties, political bur-
dens and political privileges, political power and political respon-
sibility must go together and, as far as may be, in equal measure"
[Essays ot William Graham Sumner, II, 196].
OPPOSITION TO GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION
Sumner was opposed to any increase in the power of government
and its extension as an agency of social reform. He commented:
"Whenever we try to get paternalized we only succeed in getting
policed" [Ibid., II, 149]. As he looked out over the Western world
in the opening decade of the twentieth century he thought he saw a
new era emerging in which the ruling ideas would be socialism, im-
perialism, and militarism. He looked upon all three as the enemy of
the free individual. He was convinced that they would necessitate
stronger and more elaborate governmental machinery and that this
would be disastrous to republican institutions and to democracy.
Sumner maintained that when the old-fashioned theories of state
interference, such as were developed in Rome and the Middle Ages,
are applied to the new democratic state, the result is the inciting of
conflict among separate interests within the society for larger shares of
the product of industry [Ibid., II, pp. 136-49]- Th e more powerful
the state is made, the greater will be the prize for those who control
it, and the more intense the struggle of pressure groups. In his con-
ception, there was no place for the state as an agency of social wel-
fare, at least with reference to the kind of proposals then current in
an age of hasty and ill-considered reforms. These proposals, largely
German in origin (Socialpolitik), he designated "speculative legis-
lation," as dealing with unverified and unverifiable propositions and
lacking all guarantees of their practicability or of the nature of their
results [The Challenge oi Facts and Other Essays, pp. 215-19]. In
the same category he placed all proposed social legislation based on
ethics or sentiment. His views in this respect were best expressed in
an essay of general import in which he contrasted purposes and con-
sequences [Ibid., I, 11, 12-13, 13-14* Vt] :
"Motives and purposes are in the brain and heart of man. Conse-
2 8 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
quences are in the world of fact. The former are infected by human
ignorance, folly, self-deception, and passion; the latter are sequences
of cause and effect dependent upon the nature of the forces at work.
When, therefore, a man acts, he sets forces in motion, and the con-
sequences are such as those forces produce under the conditions ex-
isting. They are entirely independent of any notion, will, wish, or
intention in the mind of any man or men. Consequences are facts
in the world of experience. If one man discharges a gun at another
and kills him, he may say afterwards that he 'did not know that it
was loaded/ He did not mean to kill. The consequences remain; they
are such as follow from the structure of a gun, the nature of explo-
sives, and the relative adjustment of the men and the things. Of
course this proposition is so simple and obvious that no demonstra-
tion can add to it. . . .
"Since consequences are entirely independent of motives and pur-
poses, ethics have no application to consequences. Ethics apply only
to motives and purposes. This is why the whole fashion, which is
now so popular and which most people think so noble, of mixing
ethics into economics and politics, is utterly ignorant and mischievous.
All policies are deliberate choices of series of acts; whether we wish
good or ill, when we choose our acts, is of no importance. The only
important thing is whether we know what the conditions are and
what will be the effects of our acts. To act from notions, pious hopes,
benevolent intentions, or ideals is sentimentalism, because the mental
states and operations lack basis in truth and reality. Policies, there-
fore, which have not been tested by all the criteria which science
provides are not to be discussed at all. Somebody's notion that they
would work well and give us a gain, or that there is great need of
them, because he thinks he sees a great evil at present, are no grounds
of action for sober-minded men. . . . We live in the midst of a
mass of illustrations of the fact that laws do not produce the conse-
quences which the legislator intended. They give rise to other con-
sequences, such, namely, as the forces which they set in operation,
under the conditions which exist, necessarily produce. . . .
"Whenever any policy is adopted, all the consequences of it must
be accepted— those which are unwelcome as well as those which are
welcome. This works both ways, for there are good consequences of
an evil policy as well as bad consequences of a good policy. It is clear,
however, that in the adoption of a policy the considerations which
should be taken into account are those which are deduced from the
POLITICAL THEORY 29
conditions existing and from the relations of cause and effect in the
world of experience. They are not ethical at all, and the introduction
of ethical notions or dogmas can never do anything but obscure the
study of the facts and relations which alone should occupy atten-
tion. . . .
"In fact the judgment of probable consequences is the only real
and sound ground of action. It is because men have been ignorant of
the probable consequences, or have disregarded them, that human
history presents such a picture of the devastation and waste of human
energy and of the wreck of human hopes. If there is any salvation
for the human race from woe and misery it is in knowledge and in
training to use knowledge. Every investigation of the world in which
we live is an enlargement of our power to judge of probable conse-
quences when cases arise in which we shall be compelled to act. The
difference between motives and consequences, therefore, is seen to
be a gulf between the most divergent notions of human life and of
the way to deal with its problems. It is most essential that all of us
who believe in the scientific view of life and its problems should ex-
tricate ourselves completely from the trammels of the sentimental
view, and should understand the antagonism between them, for the
sentimental view has prevailed in the past and we live now in a con-
fusion between the two."
To individualistic Sumner the only things which really tell in the
welfare of man on earth are "hard work and self-denial (in technical
language, labor and capital), and these tell most when they are
brought to bear directly upon the effort to earn an honest living, to
accumulate capital, and to bring up a family of children to be indus-
trious and self-denying in their turn. I repeat that this is the way to
work for the welfare of man on earth; and what I mean to say is that
the common notion that when we are going to work for the social
welfare of men we must adopt a great dogma, organize for the reali-
zation of some great scheme, have before us an abstract ideal, or
otherwise do anything but live honest and industrious lives, is a great
mistake" [War and Other Essays, p. 186].
LAISSEZ-FAIRE
For almost forty years Sumner defended the cause of laissez-faire
against the rising tide of protectionism, socialism, and government
intervention. Among the reasons for his stand were his conception of
3° WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
the proper role of government and individual freedom, the assump-
tion that modern society is too complex for government to interfere
in efforts to improve it, that we know so little about the forces at
work that we should proceed slowly and allow greater play for natural
adjustment. 'To err in prescribing for a man," he said, "is at worst
to kill him; to err in prescribing for a society is to set in operation
injurious forces which extend, ramify, and multiply their effects in
ever new combinations throughout an indefinite future. It may pay
to experiment with an individual, because he cannot wait for medical
science to be perfected; it cannot pay to experiment with a society,
because the society does not die and can afford to wait" [Ibid., pp.
171-72].
Sumner's understanding of the meaning and role of laissez-faire was
best expressed in an essay of that title, from which the following
excerpts are taken [Essays of William Graham Sumner, II, 468, 469,
472,475,476-77]:
"The story goes that a certain French minister of state, desiring to
exert himself for the benefit of the governed, called the merchants of
Paris to a conference. He asked them what he could do for them. His
idea of doing something for them was not as new as he supposed it
was. In fact, they had had a large experience of that sort of thing
already. They therefore answered Xaissez-nous faire/ Their answer
has passed into a proverb and a maxim. . . .
"A fair rendering of the answer of the French merchants would be:
'Let us manage for ourselves/ They did not propose to do without
management. There is no sign in what they said or in what they did
that they thought that brains could not be applied to trade and indus-
try so as to develop and improve them. What they dreaded and
declined with thanks was the proposition to define lines of action
for them according to the wisdom of a statesman. Even if he took
them into counsel they could not be induced to cooperate in the work
of laying down rules for themselves which must, in the nature of the
case, be rigid, arbitrary, hard to change, dictated by some dogma or
ideal, and not such as the development of trade and industry would
from time to time call for. . . .
"Laissez-faire is so far from meaning the unrestrained action of
nature without any intelligent interference by man, that it really
means the only rational application of human intelligence to the
assistance of natural development. . . .
"The doctrine and precept of laissez-faire do not preclude the at-
POLITICAL THEORY 31
tainment of positive results from investigation, nor the formulation
of accurate statements of those results, nor the most elaborate verifi-
cation of those results. The students of the laissez-faire school have
done nearly all that ever has yet been done in the way of actual
achievement under all these heads. Laissez-faire means: Do not
meddle; wait and observe. Do not regulate; study. Do not give orders;
be teachable. Do not enter upon any rash experiments; be patient
until you see how it will work out. . . .
"Laissez-faire is a maxim of policy. It is not a rule of science. Here
we have another point of cardinal importance in the social wrangle of
the day. No sound thinking is possible if we fail to distinguish cor-
rectly the domain of art from that of science. Science deals with what
is true. The laws which it discovers admit of no exceptions, and when
correctly stated cannot be overstated. The scientific man has reached
the limit of his domain when he has laid down what he has found
to be true. It is immaterial whether anybody believes it or profits by
it or not. Here there is no room for maxims. There is nothing approx-
imate or rough that is not imperfect, needing more work put on it.
When, however, we go over to the domain of art, that is, of the ap-
plication of scientific laws by human intelligence to the fulfillment
of our purposes, we have come upon an entirely different domain.
The limitations of our intelligence and the complications of natural
phenomena as they actually occur prevent all clear, absolute, and
unmodified rules. Maxims alone are in order over the whole domain
of art. They embody long experience of mankind in the work or art,
that is, in getting along as well as is practically possible towards the
goal we want to reach under the circumstances in which we find our-
selves and with the means at our disposal. . . .
"When we go over to statecraft, we go over to art — to the domain,
not of truth but of expediency, not of scientific laws but of maxims.
The statesman then may well be guided by maxims drawn from his-
tory and experience. No maxim is more than approximately wise, for
wisdom cannot be put into absolute statements and injunctions.
Statecraft is to be guided all the time by the active reason and intel-
ligent conscience. This is the domain of ethics also. Laissez-faire be-
longs here, where it had its birth and where alone, so far as I know,
the English economists, who have given us all the political economy
we possess, have used it. If the statesman proposes to interfere with
exchange, then laissez-faire comes in as a general warning, not as an
absolute injunction: Let them manage for themselves. Laissez-faire
32 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
is the only maxim which allows of the correct use of history and
statistics to secure such knowledge as shall properly guide the states-
man in his task."
ANTAGONISM OF DEMOCRACY AND PLUTOCRACY
Democracy, Sumner wrote, is a political form in which the ultimate
power lies with the demos, the people. "In practice, democracy means
that all those who are once admitted to political power are equal and
that the power lies with the numerical majority of these equal units"
[Ibid., II, 223]. As mentioned above, he held that democracy in
the United States was rooted in the physical, economic, and social
circumstances of the country. The closing of the frontier and the
advancing industrial organization he foresaw as making democracy
more difficult [Ibid., I, 208-35; H> 3°4 _ 59]- Among the threats to
democracy the greatest, he thought, was plutocracy, and he spent
most of the more polemical moments of his life attacking it.
"A plutocracy," he stated in an essay written in the i88o's [Ibid.,
II, 223], "is a political form in which the real controlling force is
wealth. This is the thing which seems to me to be really new and
really threatening; there have been states in which there have been
large plutocratic elements, but none in which wealth seemed to have
such absorbing and controlling power as it threatens us." In What
Social Classes Owe to Each Other [pp. 102-03, 108-09] he. traced its
development as follows:
"In modern times the great phenomenon has been the growth of
the middle class out of the mediaeval cities, the accumulation of
wealth, and the encroachment of wealth, as a social power, on the
ground formerly occupied by rank and birth. The middle class has
been obliged to fight for its rights against the feudal class, and it has,
during three or four centuries, gradually invented and established in-
stitutions to guarantee personal and property rights against the arbi-
trary will of kings and nobles. In its turn wealth is now becoming a
power in the State, and, like every other power, it is liable to abuse
unless restrained by checks and guarantees. There is an insolence of
wealth, as there is an insolence of rank. A plutocracy might be even
far worse than an aristocracy. . . .
"The plutocrats are simply trying to do what the generals, nobles,
and priests have done in the past — get the power of the State into
their hands, so as to bend the rights of others to their own advantage;
POLITICAL THEORY 33
and what we need to do is to recognize the fact that we are face to
face with the same old foes — the vices and passions of human nature."
Sumner described a plutocrat and his mode of operation as follows
[Essays oi William Graham Sumner, II, 228]: "A plutocrat is a man
who, having the possession of capital, and having the power of it at
his disposal, uses it, not industrially, but politically; instead of em-
ploying laborers, he enlists lobbyists. Instead of applying capital to
land, he operates upon the market by legislation, by artificial mo-
nopoly, by legislative privileges; he creates jobs, and erects combina-
tions, which are half political and half industrial; he practises upon
the industrial vices, makes an engine of venality, expends his inge-
nuity, not on processes of production, but on 'knowledge of men/
and on the tactics of the lobby. The modern industrial system gives
him a magnificent field, one far more profitable, very often, than that
of legitimate industry."
Jobbery — which Sumner defined as "any scheme which aims to
gain, not by the legitimate fruits of industry and enterprise, but by
extorting from somebody a part of his product under the guise of
some pretended industrial undertaking" — is the vice of plutocracy
and "it is the especial form under which plutocracy corrupts a demo-
cratic and republican form of government. . . . The greatest job of
all is a protective tariff. It includes the biggest log-rolling and the
widest corruption of economic and political ideas" [What Social
Classes Owe to Each Other, pp. 141, 143].
The new foe of plutocracy, in Sumner's opinion, must be met as
the old foes were met — by institutions and guarantees. "The problem
of civil liberty is constantly renewed. Solved once, it re-appears in
a new form. The old constitutional guarantees were all aimed against
kings and nobles. New ones must be invented to hold the power of
wealth to that responsibility without which no power whatever is
consistent with liberty" [Ibid., p. 109].
Here is another reason why Sumner was opposed to state inter-
ference. The wise policy in regard to the public interest "is to mini-
mize to the utmost the relations of the state to industry. As long as
there are such relations, every industrial interest is forced more or
less to employ plutocratic methods. . . . The way to minimize the
dangers to democracy, and from it, is to reduce to the utmost its
functions, the number of its officials, the range of its taxing power,
the variety of its modes of impinging on the individual, the amount
and range of its expenditures, and, in short, its total weight; for among
34 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
the other vices and errors of the prevailing tendency, this is one of
the worst, that we do not see that whatever extends the functions of
the state increases its weight" [Essays of William Graham Sumner,
II, 230, 234].
Because of Sumner's emphasis on the societal importance of prop-
erty and capital, his defense of the doctrine of laissez-faire, and his
acceptance of the Darwinian concepts, he has come, ironically, to be
regarded in some circles, as to his political views, as a defender of the
status quo and a champion of the economically elect. The strongest
advocates of Sumner's political philosophy today are probably to be
found among the very class which looked upon him as its enemy
when he denounced protectionism. Modern opponents of Sumner's
views have tended to transform him into the patron saint of every-
thing he detested. He railed against plutocracy, jobbery, and privilege
in any form. He was conservative in his conception that all sound
development must be slow, unhurried, and based on scientific knowl-
edge, and he urged reliance on individual effort rather than legislative
action to advance human welfare, but in all this, instead of being "a
friend of capitalists," he was actually a champion of the common man
— the Forgotten Man, as vigorously set forth in his essay of that title
and in his book on What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.
The latter is an impassioned vindication of individualism. It should
be read in the setting of its time, when the population was predomi-
nantly rural and agricultural, but its main thesis has application to
the general problem of life in society, for it is a clear call to the
standard of individual liberty under law as guaranteed by a free state.
CIVIL LIBERTY
Sumner wrote a great deal on the subject of rights and liberty. This
was in part to counteract the popular and traditional notions based
on metaphysics and sentiment. The only real liberty, he maintained,
is civil liberty — a structure of laws and institutions which brings rights
and duties into equilibrium. He regarded it as the greatest civil good,
the great end for which modern states exist. With liberty should go
responsibility.
"Civil liberty, the only real liberty which is possible or conceivable
on earth, is a matter of law and institutions. It is not metaphysical
at all. Civil liberty is really a great induction from all the experience
of mankind in the use of civil institutions; it must be defined, not in
POLITICAL THEORY 35
terms drawn from metaphysics, but in terms drawn from history and
law. It is not an abstract conception; it is a series of concrete facts.
These facts go to constitute a status — the status of a free man in a
modern jural state. It is a product of institutions; it is embodied in
institutions; it is guaranteed by institutions. It is not a matter of
resolutions, or 'declarations/ as they seemed to think in the last cen-
tury. It is unfriendly to dogmatism. It pertains to what a man shall
do, have, and be. It is unfriendly to all personal control, to officialism,
to administrative philanthropy and administrative wisdom, as much
as to bureaucratic despotism or monarchical absolutism. It is hostile
to all absolutism, and people who are well-trained in the traditions
of civil liberty are quick to detect absolutism in all its new forms.
Those who have lost the traditions of civil liberty accept phrases"
[Essays oi William Graham Sumner, I, 314].
Under civil liberty, he stated, we have come to a form of society
which is based not on prescribed status but on free contract. In the
Middle Ages men were united by custom and prescription into asso*
ciations, ranks, guilds, and communities of various kinds. These ties
endured as long as life lasted. Consequently society was dependent,
throughout all its details, on status, and the tie or bond was senti-
mental. In the modern state, and in the United States more than
anywhere else, the social structure is based on contract, and status is
of the least importance.
"A society based on contract is a society of free and independent
men, who form ties without favor or obligation, and cooperate with-
out cringing or intrigue. A society based on contract, therefore, gives
the utmost room and chance for individual development, and for all
the self-reliance and dignity of a free man. That a society of free men,
cooperating under contract, is by far the strongest society which has
ever yet existed; that no such society has ever yet developed the full
measure of strength of which it is capable; and that the only social
improvements which are now conceivable lie in the direction of more
complete realization of a society of free men united by contract, are
points which cannot be controverted" [What Social Classes Owe to
Each Other, p. 27].
This concept of civil liberty is closely tied in with the doctrine of
individualism, for Sumner further stated: "The institutions of civil
liberty leave each man to run his career in life in his own way, only
guaranteeing to him that whatever he does in the way of industry,
economy, prudence, sound judgment, etc., shall redound to his own
3" WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
welfare and shall not be diverted to some one else's benefit. Of course
it is a necessary corollary that each man shall also bear the penalty
of his own vices and his own mistakes. If I want to be free from any
other man's dictation, I must understand that I can have no other
man under my control" [Essays oi William Graham Sumner, I, 474].
One of the cardinal principles of civil liberty, according to Sumner,
is equality before the law, "because it leaves each man to run the
race of life for himself as best he can. The state stands neutral but
benevolent. It does not undertake to aid some and handicap others
at the outset in order to offset hereditary advantages and disad-
vantages, or to make them start equally. Such a notion would belong
to the false and spurious theory of equality which is socialistic" [Ibid.,
II, 115].
"It is often affirmed, and it is true, that competition tends to dis-
perse society over a wide range of unequal conditions. Competition
develops all powers that exist according to their measure and degree.
The more intense competition is, the more thoroughly are all the
forces developed. If, then, there is liberty, the results can not be equal;
they must correspond to the forces. Liberty of development and equal-
ity of result are therefore diametrically opposed to each other. If a
group of men start on equal conditions, and compete in a common
enterprise, the results which they attain must differ according to in-
herited powers, early advantages of training, personal courage, energy,
enterprise, perseverance, good sense, etc., etc. Since these things differ
through a wide range, and since their combinations may vary through
a wide range, it is possible that the results may vary through a wide
scale of degrees. Moreover, the more intense the competition, the
greater are the prizes of success and the heavier are the penalties of
failure. This is illustrated in the competition of a large city as com-
pared with that of a small one. Competition can no more be done
away with than gravitation. Its incidence can be changed. We can
adopt as a social policy, Woe to the successful/ We can take the
prizes away from the successful and give them to the unsuccessful.
It seems clear that there would soon be no prizes at all, but that in-
ference is not universally accepted. In any event, it is plain that we
have not got rid of competition— i.e., of the struggle for existence
and the competition of life. We have only decided that, if we cannot
all have equally, we will all have nothing. Competition does not
guarantee results corresponding with merit, because hereditary con-
ditions and good and bad fortune are always intermingled with merit,
POLITICAL THEORY 37
but competition secures to merit all the chances it can enjoy under
the circumstances for which none of one's fellowmen are to blame"
[Ibid., II, 152-53].
INDIVIDUALISM VS. SOCIAL REFORM BY LEGISLATION
It follows from the above line of reasoning that a man in a free
state cannot claim help from, and cannot be charged to give help to,
another.
"In a free state every man is held and expected to take care of
himself and his family, to make no trouble for his neighbor, and to
contribute his full share to public interests and common necessities.
If he fails in this he throws burdens on others. He does not thereby
acquire rights against the others. On the contrary, he only accumu-
lates obligations toward them; and if he is allowed to make his defi-
ciencies a ground of new claims, he passes over into the position of a
privileged or petted person — emancipated from duties, endowed with
claims. This is the inevitable result of combining democratic political
theories with humanitarian social theories, ft would be aside from my
present purpose to show, but it is worth noticing in passing, that one
result of such inconsistency must surely be to undermine democracy,
to increase the power of wealth in the democracy, and to hasten the
subjection of democracy to plutocracy; for a man who accepts any
share which he has not earned in another man's capital cannot be an
independent citizen" [What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, pp.
39-40].
Sumner was thus opposed to legislative measures of social reform,
at least to such measures as were proposed in his time. He thought
that social reformers failed to make a distinction between ills which
belong to the struggle for existence and those which are due to the
imperfections and errors of civil institutions. The latter are a proper
object of agitation and may be corrected by associated effort. The
former belong to the natural hardships of life, and we cannot blame
our fellow men for our share of them. This class of ills, he said, is
constantly being grouped and generalized and made the object of
social schemes which take the form of making those who have share
with those who have not. An important element in Sumner's think-
ing was the assumption, current in his time, that poverty is corre-
lated with ignorance, vice, and misfortune; that is, mainly with in-
dividual rather than social factors. Sumner was opposed to "reform-
3° WHXIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
ers, philanthropists, humanitarians, and would-be managers-in-general
of society" as being amateurs in social science [Ibid., pp. 112-1?
116-17 quoted].
"The amateur social doctors are like the amateur physicians— they
always begin with the question of remedies, and they go at this with-
out any diagnosis or any knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of
society. They never have any doubt of the efficacy of their remedies.
They never take account of any ulterior effects which may be appre-
hended from the remedy itself. It generally troubles them not a whit
that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or
even a reconstitution of human nature. Against all such social quack-
ery the obvious injunction to the quacks is, to mind their own busi-
ness
The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humani-
tarianism was depicted by Sumner as follows [Ibid., pp. 123-24]: "A
and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to
do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological
point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his
position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on
society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the
Forgotten Man. For once let us look him up and consider his case,
for the characteristic of all social doctors is, that they fix their minds
on some man or group of men whose case appeals to the sympathies
and the imagination, and they plan remedies addressed to the partic-
ular trouble; they do not understand that all the parts of society hold
together, and that forces which are set in action act and react through-
out the whole organism, until an equilibrium is produced by a re-
adjustment of all interests and rights. They therefore ignore entirely
the source from which they must draw all the energy which they
employ in their remedies, and they ignore all the effects on other
members of society than the ones they have in view. They are always
under the dominion of the superstition of government, and, forget-
ting that a government produces nothing at all, they leave out of
sight the first fact to be remembered in all social discussion— that
the State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some
other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and
saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man."
Almost all legislative effort to prevent vice, Sumner asserted, is
really protective of vice, because all such legislation saves the vicious
man from the penalty of his vice. "Nature's remedies against vice are
POLITICAL THEORY 39
terrible. She removes the victims without pity. A drunkard in the
gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tend-
ency of things. Nature has set up on him the process of decline and
dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their
usefulness. Gambling and other less mentionable vices carry their
own penalties with them. Now, we never can annihilate a penalty.
We can only divert it from the head of the man who has incurred
it to the heads of others who have not incurred it. A vast amount of
'social reform' consists in just this operation. The consequence is that
those who have gone astray, being relieved from Nature's fierce dis-
cipline, go on to worse, and that there is a constantly heavier burden
for the others to bear. Who are the others? When we see a drunkard
in the gutter we pity him. If a policeman picks him up, we say that
society has interfered to save him from perishing. 'Society' is a fine
word, and it saves us the trouble of thinking. The industrious and
sober workman, who is mulcted of a percentage of his day's wages
to pay the policeman, is the one who bears the penalty. But he is the
Forgotten Man. He passes by and is never noticed, because he has
behaved himself, fulfilled his contracts, and asked for nothing" [Ibid. y
pp. 131-32].
"The fallacy of all prohibitory, sumptuary, and moral legislation
is the same. A and B determine to be teetotalers, which is often a
wise determination, and sometimes a necessary one. If A and B are
moved by considerations which seem to them good, that is enough.
But A and B put their heads together to get a law passed which shall
force C to be a teetotaler for the sake of D, who is in danger of
drinking too much. There is no pressure on A and B. They are hav-
ing their own way, and they like it. There is rarely any pressure on D.
He does not like it, and evades it. The pressure all comes on C. The
question then arises, Who is C? He is the man who wants alcoholic
liquors for any honest purpose whatsoever, who would use his liberty
without abusing it, who would occasion no public question, and
trouble nobody at all. He is the Forgotten Man again, and as soon
as he is drawn from his obscurity we see that he is just what each
one of us ought to be" [Ibid., pp. 132-33].
THE FORGOTTEN MAN
"Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer,
ready to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because
40 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not
appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to
make a contract and fulfill it, with respect on both sides and favor
on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the
country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every
particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the' idle, and the
shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the
independent and productive laborer. But we stand with our backs to
the independent and productive laborer all the time. We do not
remember him because he makes no clamor; but i appeal to you
whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all,
and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect
him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing." Also against the
burdens of state favoritism in public offices, jobbery, the tariff, etc.
[Essays of William Graham Sumnei 7 1, 477; see also 478-93 for other
types of cases].
"If we go to find him, we shall find him hard at work tilling the
soil to get out of it the fund for all the jobbery, the object of all the
plunder, the cost of all the economic quackery, and the pay of all the
politicians and statesmen who have sacrificed his interests to his
enemies. We shall find him an honest, sober, industrious citizen,
unknown outside his little circle, paying his debts and his taxes,
supporting the church and the school, reading his party newspaper,
and cheering for his pet politician" [What Social Classes Owe to
Each Other, p. 145].
To Sumner the "Forgotten Man" was thus the industrious, in-
dependent and self-supporting person, not the "poor" or "weak"
individual; nor the "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished" to whom Presi-
dent Franklin D. Roosevelt was referring when he revived the term
during the Great Depression.* Said Sumner: "Such is the Forgotten
Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays — but he always pays —
yes, above all, he pays. He does not want an office; his name never gets
into the newspaper except when he gets married or dies. He keeps
production going on. He contributes to the strength of parties. He
is flattered before election. He is strongly patriotic. He is wanted,
whenever, in his little circle, there is work to be done or counsel to
be given. He may grumble some occasionally to his wife and family,
but he does not frequent the grocery or talk politics at the tavern.
Consequently, he is forgotten. He is a commonplace man. He gives
* The Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937.
POLITICAL THEORY 4 1
no trouble. He excites no admiration. He is not in any way a hero (like
a popular orator); or a problem (like tramps and outcasts); nor
notorious (like criminals); nor an object of sentiment (like the poor
and weak); nor a burden (like paupers and loafers); nor an object
out of which social capital may be made (like the beneficiaries of
church and state charities); nor an object for charitable aid and
protection (like animals treated with cruelty); nor the object of a
job (like the ignorant and illiterate); nor one over whom sentimental
economists and statesmen can parade their fine sentiments (like
inefficient workmen and shiftless artisans) . Therefore, he is forgotten."
[Essays oi William Graham Sumner, I, 492-93]-
"Yet who is there whom the statesman, economist, and social
philosopher ought to think of before this man? If any student of
social science comes to appreciate the case of the Forgotten Man,
he will become an unflinching advocate of strict scientific thinking
in sociology, and a hard-hearted sceptic as regards any scheme of
social amelioration. He will always want to know, Who and where
is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?"
[What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, p. 149].
PRIVATE CHARITY
It is not to be inferred from the above presentation that Sumner
was opposed to charity or philanthropy or mutual aid. He relegated
them to the domain of private relations, where personal acquaintance
and personal estimates may furnish the proper limitations and guaran-
tees. "A man who has no sympathies and no sentiments would be a
very poor creature; but the public charities, more especially the legis-
lative charities, nourish no man's sympathies and sentiments. Further-
more, it ought to be distinctly perceived that any charitable and
benevolent effort which any man desires to make voluntarily, to see
if he can do any good, lies entirely beyond the field of discussion.
It would be as impertinent to prevent his effort as it is to force co-
operation in an effort on some one who does not want to participate
in it. What I choose to do by way of exercising my own sympathies;
under by own reason and conscience is one thing; what another mar*
forces me to do of a sympathetic character, because his reason and
conscience approve of it, is quite another thing" [Ibid., pp. i57"5 8 ]-
Sumner asked himself the question: What is the reason why we
should help each other? He answered it by the following illustration,
4 2 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
which is the closest he came to formulating any theory of mutual aid
or private welfare work. "Suppose that a man, going through a wood,
should be struck by a falling tree and pinned down beneath it. Sup-
pose that another man, coming that way and finding him there,
should, instead of hastening to give or to bring aid, begin to lecture
on the law of gravitation, taking the tree as an illustration. ... We
may philosophize as coolly and correctly as we choose about our duties
and about the laws of right living; no one of us lives up to what he
knows. The man struck by the falling tree has, perhaps, been careless.
We are all careless. Environed as we are by risks and perils, which
befall us as misfortunes, no man of us is in a position to say, 'I know
all the laws, and am sure to obey them all; therefore I shall never
need aid and sympathy/ At the very best, one of us fails in one way
and another in another, if we do not fail altogether. Therefore the
man under the tree is the one of us who for the moment is smitten.
It may be you to-morrow, and I next day. It is the common frailty
in the midst of a common peril which gives us a kind of solidarity
of interest to rescue the one for whom the chances of life have turned
out badly just now. Probably the victim is to blame. He most always
is so. A lecture to that effect in the crisis of his peril would be out
of place, because it would not fit the need of the moment; but it
would be very much in place at another time, when the need was to
avert the repetition of such an accident to somebody else. Men, there-
fore, owe to men, in the chances and perils of this life, aid and
sympathy, on account of the common participation in human frailty
and folly. This observation, however, puts aid and sympathy in the
field of private and personal relations, under the regulation of reason
and conscience, and gives no ground for mechanical and impersonal
schemes" [Ibid., pp. 158-59].
SOCIAL DUTY
To return to the thesis of What Social Classes Owe to Each Other:
to social reformers, Sumner said, this really means What Ought Some-
of-us— the prosperous, virtuous, respectable, self-reliant— do for
Others-of-us— the less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for
existence— through the agency of the state. His own answer was that
the state does not owe "anything to anybody except peace, order,
and the guarantee of rights."
"Rights should be equal, because they pertain to chances, and all
POLITICAL THEORY 43
ought to have equal chances so far as chances are provided or limited
by the action of society. This, however, will not produce equal results,
but it is right just because it will produce unequal results — that is,
results which shall be proportioned to the merits of individuals. We
each owe it to the other to guarantee mutually the chance to earn,
to possess, to learn, to marry, etc., against any interference which
would prevent the exercise of those rights by a person who wishes to
prosecute and enjoy them in peace for the pursuit of happiness. If
we generalize this, it means that All-of-us ought to guarantee rights
to each of us" [Ibid., p.. 164].
"But if we can expand the chances we can count on a general and
steady growth of civilization and advancement of society by and
through its best members. In the prosecution of these chances we
all owe to each other good-will, mutual respect, and mutual guaran-
tees of liberty and security. Beyond this nothing can be affirmed as
a duty of one group to another in a free state" [Ibid., pp. 168-69].
"Every man and woman in society has one big duty. That is, to
take care of his or her own self. This is a social duty. For, fortunately,
the matter stands so that the duty of making the best of one's self
individually is not a separate thing from the duty of filling one's place
in society, but the two are one, and the latter is accomplished when
the former is done" [Ibid., p. 113].
4
Folkways
The most important sociological treatise that Sumner wrote was
Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Man-
ners, Customs y Mores, and Morals, originally published in 1907. Of
this work Harry Elmer Barnes commented, "it is not inaccurate to
say that it is unsurpassed as a sociological achievement by any single
volume in any language and that it has made the sociological treat-
ment of usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals essentially a
completed task."* This volume is generally regarded as one of the
classics in sociology, t "It was selling in the nineteen twenties," com-
ments John Chamberlain, "at a faster pace than it had ever achieved
in Sumner's lifetime. And now, in i960, a full half-century after its
author's passing, it has reached the ultimate in canonization with the
publication of a paperback edition." J In this work Sumner originated
the normative approach to social phenomena by viewing behavior as
patterned by cultural norms or social codes which contain the notion
of what ought to be and which exert moral pressure on the individual
to conform to them. J Sumner also pioneered in developing a func-
tional theory of culture, || since he interpreted the folkways as ways
of satisfying needs and serving the interests of men in groups. And
* Introduction to the History of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948), p. 157.
t Cf. Margaret Wilson Vine, An Introduction to Sociological Theory (New
York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1959), p. 104.
t "Beyond Relativism," The Freeman (March, i960), p. 58.
J Cf. Nicholas S. Timasheff, Sociological Theory (New York: Doubleday and
Company, 1955), pp. 69, 243, 295.
|| Cf. Walter Buckley, "Structural-Functional Analysis in Modern Sociology," in
Becker and Boskoff, eds., Modern Sociological Theory (New York: Dryden Press
1957), p. 237.
44
FOLKWAYS 45
he formulated the theory of cultural relativism by marshaling proof
to demonstrate that "the mores can make anything right and prevent
condemnation of anything/ 7
In his Preface to Folkways Sumner tells how he coined the term
"folkways" and gave new meaning to the Latin word "mores." "I
formed the word 'folkways' on the analogy of words already in use
in sociology. I also took up again the Latin word 'mores' as the best
I could find for my purpose. I mean by it the popular usages and
traditions, when they include a judgment that they are conducive to
societal welfare, and when they exert a coercion on the individual to
conform to them, although they are not coordinated by any authority.
I have also tried to bring the word 'Ethos' into familiarity again.
'Ethica,' or 'Ethology/ or 'The Mores' seemed good titles for the
book, but Ethics is already employed otherwise, and the other words
were very unfamiliar. Perhaps 'folkways' is not less unfamiliar, but
its meaning is more obvious. I must add that if any one is liable to
be shocked by any folkways, he ought not to read about folkways
at all."
In another connection he elaborated on the choice of terms, as
follows [Folkways, pp. 36-37] : " 'Ethology' would be a convenient
term for the study of manners, customs, usages, and mores, including
the study of the way in which they are formed, how they grow or
decay, and how they affect the interests which it is their purpose to
serve. The Greeks applied the term 'ethos' to the sum of the charac-
teristic usages, ideas, standards, and codes by which a group was dif-
ferentiated and individualized in character from other groups. 'Ethics'
were things which pertained to the ethos and therefore the things
which were the standard of right. The Romans used 'mores' for
customs in the broadest and richest sense of the word, including the
notion that customs served welfare, and had traditional and mystic
sanction, so that they were properly authoritative and sacred. It is a
very surprising fact that modern nations should have lost these words
and the significant suggestions which inhere in them. The English
language has no derivative noun from 'mores,' and no equivalent for
it. The French moeurs is trivial compared to 'mores.' The German
Sitte renders 'mores' but very imperfectly. The modern peoples have
made morals and morality a separate domain, by the side of religion,
philosophy, and politics. In that sense, morals is an impossible and
unreal category. It has no existence, and can have none. The word
46 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
'moral' means what belongs or appertains to the mores. Therefore
the category of morals can never be defined without reference to
something outside of itself."
The first two chapters of Folkways are devoted to fundamental
notions of the folkways and of the mores and to characteristics of the
mores. Sumner summarized his thesis in the following words [Ibid.,
p.iv]:
"The folkways are the habits of the individual and customs of the
society which arise from efforts to satisfy needs; they are intertwined
with goblinism and demonism and primitive notions of luck, and so
they win traditional authority. Then they become regulative for suc-
ceeding generations and take on the character of a social force. They
arise no one knows whence or how. They grow as if by the play of
internal life energy. They can be modified, but only to a limited
extent, by the purposeful efforts of men. In time they lose power,
decline, and die, or are transformed. While they are in vigor they
very largely control individual and social undertakings, and they pro-
duce and nourish ideas of world philosophy and life policy. Yet they
are not organic or material. They belong to a superorganic system of
relations, conventions, and institutional arrangements. The study of
them is called for by their social character, by virtue of which they
are leading factors in the science of society."
The rest of this section will be concerned with an elaboration of
this thesis and a discussion of numerous concepts which Sumner
introduced in relation to it, — the arrangement being largely that of
the writer's but the thought entirely Sumner's.
DEFINITION AND MODE OF ORIGIN
"If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology
and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we per-
ceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not
with thoughts. Every moment brings necessities which must be satis-
fied at once. Need was the first experience, and it was followed at
once by a blundering effort to satisfy it. . . . Need was the impelling
force. Pleasure and pain, on the one side and the other, were the rude
constraints which defined the line on which efforts must proceed.
The ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain is the only
psychical power which is to be assumed. Thus the ways of doing
things were selected, which were expedient. They answered the pur-
FOLKWAYS 47
pose better than other ways, or with less toil and pain. Along the
course on which efforts were compelled to go, habit, routine, and
skill were developed. The struggle to maintain existence was carried
on, not individually, but in groups. Each profited by the other's
experience; hence there was concurrence towards that which proved
to be most expedient. All at last adopted the same way for the same
purpose; hence the ways turned into customs and became mass
phenomena. Instincts were developed in connection with them. In
this way folkways arise. The young learn them by tradition, imitation,
and authority. The folkways, at a time, provide for all the needs of
life then and there. They are uniform, universal in the group, impera-
tive, and invariable. As time goes on, the folkways become more and
more arbitrary, positive, and imperative. If asked why they act in a
certain way in certain cases, primitive people always answer that it is
because they and their ancestors always have done so. A sanction also
arises from ghost fear. The ghosts of ancestors would be angry if the
living should change the ancient folkways" [Ibid., p. 2].
THE FOLKWAYS AS A SOCIETAL FORCE
"The operation by which folkways are produced consists in the
frequent repetition of petty acts, often by great numbers acting in
concert or, at least, acting in the same way when face to face with
the same need. The immediate motive is interest. It produces habit
in the individual and custom in the group. It is, therefore, in the
highest degree original and primitive. By habit and custom it exerts
a strain on every individual within its range; therefore it rises to a
societal force to which great classes of societal phenomena are due.
Its earliest stages, its course, and laws may be studied; also its influ-
ence on individuals and their reaction on it. It is our present purpose
so to study it. We have to recognize it as one of the chief forces by
which a society is made to be what it is. Out of the unconscious
experiment which every repetition of the ways includes, there issues
pleasure or pain, and then, so far as the men are capable of reflection,
convictions that the ways are conducive to societal welfare. These two
experiences are not the same. The most uncivilized men, both in the
food quest and in war, do things which are painful, but which have
been found to be expedient. Perhaps these cases teach the sense of
social welfare better than those which are pleasurable and favorable
to welfare. The former cases call for some intelligent reflection on
4& WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
experience. When this conviction as to the relation to welfare is
added to the folkways they are converted into mores, and, by virtue
of the philosophical and ethical element added to them, they win
utility and importance and become the source of the science and the
art of living" [Ibid., p. 3]
MOTIVES OF HUMAN ACTION
Sumner thus conceived of the folkways as group efforts to satisfy
human needs or interests. Behind these interests, as impelling to
action, he postulated four great motives, expressed in their most
elementary terms as hunger, love, vanity, and fear. These he also
regarded as the main socializing forces, being the stimuli which drove
men into society and held them there. About them gathered folkways
and mores which, as we shall later see, developed into institutions
looking toward the maintenance and protection of life, the perpetua-
tion of life, and satisfaction and self-expression in life.
"There are four great motives of human action which come into
play when some number of human beings are in juxtaposition under
the same life conditions. They are hunger, sex passion, vanity, and
fear (of ghosts and spirits). Under each of these motives there are
interests. Life consists in satisfying interests, for 'life/ in a society,
is a career of action and effort expended on both the material and
social environment. However great the errors and misconceptions may
be which are included in the efforts, the purpose always is advantage
and expediency. The efforts fall into parallel lines, because the condi-
tions and the interests are the same. It is now the accepted opinion,
and it may be correct, that men inherited from their beast ancestors
psychophysical traits, instincts, and dexterities, or at least predisposi-
tions, which give them aid in solving the problems of food supply,
sex commerce, and vanity. The result is mass phenomena; currents
of similarity, concurrence, and mutual contribution; and these pro-
duce folkways. The folkways are unconscious, spontaneous, unco-
ordinated. It is never known who led in devising them, although we
must believe that talent exerted its leadership at all times" [Ibid.,
pp. 18-19].
UNCONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF FOLKWAYS
"It is of the first importance to notice that, from the first acts by
which men try to satisfy needs, each act stands by itself, and looks
FOLKWAYS 49
no further than the immediate satisfaction. From recurrent needs
arise habits for the individual and customs for the group, but these
results are consequences which were never conscious, and never fore-
seen or intended. They are not noticed until they have long existed,
and it is still longer before they are appreciated. Another long time
must pass, and a higher stage of mental development must be reached,
before they can be used as a basis from which to deduce rules for
meeting, in the future, problems whose pressure can be foreseen. The
folkways, therefore, are not creations of human purpose and wit. They
are like products of natural forces which men unconsciously set in
operation, or they are like the instinctive ways of animals, which are
developed out of experience, which reach a final form of maximum
adaptation to an interest, which are handed down by tradition and
admit of no exception or variation, yet change to meet new condi-
tions, still within the same limited methods, and without rational
reflection or purpose. From this it results that all the life of human
beings, in all ages and stages of culture, is primarily controlled by a
vast mass of folkways handed down from the earliest existence of the
race, having the nature of the ways of other animals, only the topmost
layers of which are subject to change and control, and have been
somewhat modified by human philosophy, ethics, and religion, or by
other acts of intelligent reflection" [Ibid., pp. 3-4].
LANGUAGE AS AN EXAMPLE OF FOLKWAYS
Sumner cited language as an outstanding example of the folkways.
Language is habit and custom; it is formed by acts of judgment,
although the consideration is slight, the judgment is vague and un-
conscious, and the authority of tradition prevails. "Language is a
product of the folkways which illustrates their operation in a number
of most important details. Language is a product of the need of co-
operative understanding in all the work, and in connection with all
the interests, of life. It is a societal phenomenon. It was necessary
in war, the chase, and industry so soon as these interests were pursued
cooperatively. Each group produced its own language which held that
group together and sundered it from others. All are now agreed that,
whatever may have been the origin of language, it owes its form and
development to usage" [Ibid., pp. 133-34].
5° WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
ORIGINS LOST IN MYSTERY
"No objection can lie against this postulate about the way in which
folkways began, on account of the element of inference in it. All
origins are lost in mystery, and it seems vain to hope that from any
origin the veil of mystery will ever be raised. We go up the stream
of history to the utmost point for which we have evidence of its
course. Then we are forced to reach out into the darkness upon the
line of direction marked by the remotest course of the historic stream.
This is the way in which we have to act in regard to the origin of
capital, language, the family, the state, religion, and rights. We never
can hope to see the beginning of any one of these things. Use and
wont are products and results. They had antecedents. We never can
find or see the first member of the series. It is only by analysis and
inference that we can form any conceptions of the 'beginning' which
we are always so eager to find" [Ibid., pp. 7-8].
THE STRAIN TOWARD IMPROVEMENT AND CONSISTENCY
'The folkways, being ways of satisfying needs, have succeeded
more or less well, and therefore have produced more or less pleasure
or pain. Their quality always consisted in their adaptation to the
purpose. If they were imperfectly adapted and unsuccessful, they
produced pain, which drove men on to learn better. The folkways are,
therefore, (1) subject to a strain of improvement towards better
adaptation of means to ends, as long as the adaptation is so imperfect
that pain is produced. They are also (2) subject to a strain of con-
sistency with each other, because they all answer their several pur-
poses with less friction and antagonism when they cooperate and
support each other. The forms of industry, the forms of the family,
the notions of property, the constructions of rights, and the types of
religion show the strain of consistency with each other through the
whole history of civilization. The two great cultural divisions of the
human race are the oriental and the occidental. Each is consistent
throughout; each has its own philosophy and spirit; they are separated
from top to bottom by different mores, different standpoints, differ-
ent ways, and different notions of what societal arrangements are
advantageous. In their contrast they keep before our minds the pos-
sible range of divergence in the solution of the great problems of
FOLKWAYS 51
human life, and in the views of earthly existence by which life policy
may be controlled. If two planets were joined in one, their inhabitants
could not differ more widely as to what things are best worth seeking,
or what ways are most expedient for well living" [Ibid., pp. 5-6].
CONTINUOUS PROCESS OF MAKING FOLKWAYS
"The process of making folkways is never superseded or changed.
It goes on now just as it did at the beginning of civilization. 'Use
and wont' exert their force on all men always. They produce famili-
arity, and mass acts become unconscious. The same effect is produced
by customary acts repeated at all recurring occasions. The range of
societal activity may be greatly enlarged, interests may be extended
and multiplied, the materials by which needs can be supplied may
become far more numerous, the processes of societal cooperation may
become more complicated, and contract or artifice may take the place
of custom for many interests; but, if the case is one which touches
the ways or interests of the masses, folkways will develop on and
around it by the same process as that which has been described as
taking place from the beginning of civilization. The ways of carrying
on war have changed with all new inventions of weapons or armor,
and have grown into folkways of commanding range and importance.
The factory system of handicrafts has produced a body of folkways
in which artisans live, and which distinguish factory towns from
commercial cities or agricultural villages. The use of cotton instead
of linen has greatly affected modern folkways. The applications of
power and machinery have changed the standards of comfort of all
classes. The folkways, however, have kept their character and author-
ity through all the changes of form which they have undergone"
[Ibid. y p. 35].
THE ALEATORY ELEMENT
While the folkways are the expedient ways of serving men's inter-
ests, there is another element in the conditions of life which has
called for a different type of adjustment. This is the presence of luck,
or variation from the expected, which Sumner termed the aleatory
element. It is the factor of chance or, as more commonly viewed,
mischance, which can seriously affect man's welfare. In a more derived
sense, it is the inexplicable at a given stage of knowledge, the great
5 2 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
unknown. Nowadays civilized man has at hand a practical adaptation
to this element in the form of insurance. Primitive man could only
ascribe its operation to the agency of ghosts and spirits and engage
in religious rites in an attempt to control it. Sumner regarded the
aleatory element as one of the basic factors in the development of
religion.
"If we should try to find a specimen society in which expedient
ways of satisfying needs and interests were found by trial and failure,
and by long selection from experience, as broadly described in sec. 1
above,* it might be impossible to find one. Such a practical and
utilitarian mode of procedure, even when mixed with ghost sanction,
is rationalistic. It would not be suited to the ways and temper of
primitive men. There was an element in the most elementary experi-
ence which was irrational and defied all expedient methods. One
might use the best known means with the greatest care, yet fail of
the result. On the other hand, one might get a great result with no
effort at all. One might also incur a calamity without any fault of
his own. This was the aleatory element in life, the element of risk and
loss, good or bad fortune. This element is never absent from the
affairs of men. It has greatly influenced their life philosophy and
policy. On one side, good luck may mean something for nothing, the
extreme case of prosperity and felicity. On the other side, ill luck
may mean failure, loss, calamity, and disappointment, in spite of the
most earnest and well-planned endeavor. The minds of men always
dwell more on bad luck. They accept ordinary prosperity as a matter
of course. Misfortunes arrest their attention and remain in their
memory. Hence the ills of life are the mode of manifestation of the
aleatory element which has most affected life policy. Primitive men
ascribed all incidents to the agency of men or of ghosts and spirits.
Good and ill luck were attributed to the superior powers, and were
supposed to be due to their pleasure or displeasure at the conduct
of men. This group of notions constitutes goblinism. It furnishes a
complete world philosophy. The element of luck is always present in
the struggle for existence. That is why primitive men never could
carry on the struggle for existence, disregarding the aleatory element
and employing a utilitarian method only. The aleatory element has
always been the connecting link between the struggle for existence
* This Section 1 of Folkways, entitled "Definition and Mode of Origin/' is repro-
duced on pp. 46-47.
FOLKWAYS "
and religion. It was only by religious rites that the aleatory element
in the struggle for existence could be controlled" [Ibid., pp. 6-7].
IN-GROUP AND OUT-GROUP
One of the great conceptual contributions which Sumner made to
the understanding of the structure and mode of operation of social
groups is his basic functional distinction between the in-group or
we-group and the out-group or others-group. The members of an
in-group are comrades to each other and have a common interest
against every other group. The sentiment which prevails inside the
we-group, among its members, is that of peace and cooperation; the
sentiment which prevails inside of a group towards all outsiders is
that of suspicion, distrust, hostility and war. These two sentiments
are consistent with each other; in fact, they necessarily complement
each other, because any group, in order to be strong against an outside
enemy, must be well disciplined, harmonious, and peaceful inside.
Thus there arise two codes of morals and two sets of mores, one for
comrades inside and the other for strangers outside, common products
of the same situation.
"The conception of 'primitive society' which we ought to form is
that of small groups scattered over a territory. The size of the groups
is determined by the conditions of the struggle for existence. The
internal organization of each group corresponds to its size. A group
of groups may have some relation to each other (kin, neighborhood,
alliance, connubium, and commercium) which draws them together
and differentiates them from others. Thus a differentiation arises
between ourselves, the we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or
the others-groups, out-groups. The insiders in a we-group are in a
relation of peace, order, law, government, and industry, to each other.
Their relation to all outsiders, or others-groups, is one of war and
plunder, except so far as agreements have modified it. If a group is
exogamic, the women in it were born abroad somewhere. Other
foreigners who might be found in it are adopted persons, guest
friends, and slaves" [Ibid., p. 12].
SENTIMENTS IN THE IN-GROUP
AND TOWARD THE OUT-GROUP
"The relation of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that
of hostility and war towards others-groups are correlative to each
54
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
other. The exigencies of war with outsiders are what make peace
inside, lest internal discord should weaken the we-group for'war
These exigencies also make government and law in the in group in
order to prevent quarrels and enforce discipline. Thus war and peace
the" lo^r !f ° th r nd deveI °P ed «*h other, one wi h n
the group, the other m the inter-group relation. The closer the
neighbors and the stronger they are, the intenser is the warfare and
SentimenJf ^ S **,**"»* ° Tgm ™ ti0n and disci P«^ <* ^h.
Sent ments are produced to correspond. Loyalty to the group, sacrifice
*eneJ if 7* T™* ** ^^ ^hood witfiin war
^L^Trfl^ ^ getheX ' C ° mm0n P roducts of Sesame
tr ;? fi r 1r and sentiments constitute a s °^ Philoso-
phy. It is sanctified by connection with religion. Men of an others-
group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-
group waged war. The ghosts of the latter will see with pleasure their
ta kniin 3 ; p,un e I UP the / ght / 3nd W1 " hel P them - V*ue -S
in Killing, plundering, and enslaving outsiders" Ubid., pp 12-iv see
also essay on "War" in Esssys of William Graham i££ ft£
73]
ETHNOCENTRISM
The sentiment of cohesion, internal comradeship, and devotion to
the m-group carried with it a sense of superiority Jany ouSroup and
readiness to defend the interests of the in-group'agaj the £K>
To this group attitude Sumner gave the name of ethnocentriZ'
Ethnocentrism is the technical name for this view of things n wS
one s own group is the center of everything, and all others a e Tea led
and rated with reference to it. Folkways correspond to it to cot
both the inner and the outer relation. Each group nourishes its wn
pnde and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own d vhnfe Zd
the only ght ones, and ,f ,t observes that other groups have other
folkways these excite its scorn. Opprobrious epithets aJderS f on
these differences. Tig-eater/ 'cow-eater/ Wcumcised/ 'jabberers '
are epithets of contempt and abomination. The Tups called the
Portuguese by a derisive epithet descriptive of bird^ wh ch have
feathers around their feet, on account of trousers. For C present
purpose the most important fact is that ethnocentrism leads a S
to exaggerate and intensify everything in their own folkw ys whfch
FOLKWAYS 55
is peculiar and which differentiates them from others. It therefore
strengthens the folkways" [Ibid., p. 13].
ILLUSTRATIONS OF ETHNOCENTRISM
"When Caribs were asked whence they came, they answered, We
alone are people/ The meaning of the name Kiowa is 'real or principal
people/ The Lapps call themselves 'men/ or 'human beings/ The
Greenland Eskimo think that Europeans have been sent to Greenland
to learn virtue and good manners from the Greenlanders. Their high-
est form of praise for a European is that he is, or soon will be, as
good as a Greenlander. The Tunguses call themselves 'men/ As a
rule it is found that nature peoples call themselves 'men/ Others are
something else— perhaps not defined— but not real men. In myths
the origin of their own tribe is that of the real human race. They do
not account for the others. The Ainos derive their name from that
of the first man, whom they worship as a god. Evidently the name
of the god is derived from the tribe name. When the tribal name
has another sense, it is always boastful or proud. The Ovambo name
is a corruption of the name of the tribe for themselves, which means
'the wealthy/ Amongst the most remarkable people in the world for
ethnocentrism are the Seri of Lower California. They observe an
attitude of suspicion and hostility to all outsiders, and strictly forbid
marriage with outsiders.
"The Jews divided all mankind into themselves and Gentiles. They
were the 'chosen people/ The Greeks and Romans called all outsiders
'barbarians.' In Euripides' tragedy of Iphigenia in Aulis Iphigenia
says that it is fitting that Greeks should rule over barbarians, but not
contrariwise, because Greeks are free, and barbarians are slaves. The
Arabs regarded themselves as the noblest nation and all others as
more or less barbarous. In 1896, the Chinese minister of education
and his counselors edited a manual in which this statement occurs:
'How grand and glorious is the Empire of China, the middle king-
dom! She is the largest and richest in the world. The grandest men
in the world have all come from the middle empire/ In all the
literature of all the states equivalent statements occur, although they
are not so naively expressed. In Russian books and newspapers the
■ civilizing mission of Russia is talked about, just as, in the books and
journals of France, Germany, and the United States, the civilizing
mission of those countries is assumed and referred to as well under-
5" WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
stood. Each state now regards itself as the leader of civilization, the
best, the freest, and the wisest, and all others as inferior. Within a
few years our own man-on-the-curbstone has learned to class all for-
eigners of the Latin peoples as 'dagoes/ and 'dago' has become an
epithet of contempt. These are all cases of ethnocentrism" [Ibid,
pp. 14-15].
PATRIOTISM AND CHAUVINISM
Closely related to ethnocentrism is the modern sentiment of
patriotism, both in its rationality and in its extravagant exaggeration.
"Patriotism is a sentiment which belongs to modern states. It stands
in antithesis to the mediaeval notion of catholicity. Patriotism is
loyalty to the civic group to which one belongs by birth or other
group bond. It is a sentiment of fellowship and cooperation in all
the hopes, work, and suffering of the group. Mediaeval catholicity
would have made all Christians an in-group and would have set them
in hostility to all Mohammedans and other non-Christians. It never
could be realized. When the great modern states took form and
assumed control of societal interests, group sentiment was produced
in connection with those states. Men responded willingly to a de-
mand for support and help from an institution which could and did
serve interests. The state drew to itself the loyalty which had been
given to men (lords), and it became the object of that group vanity
and antagonism which had been ethnocentric. For the modern man
patriotism has become one of the first of duties and one of the
noblest of sentiments. It is what he owes to the state for what the
state does for him, and the state is, for the modern man, a cluster
of civic institutions from which he draws security and conditions of
welfare. The masses are always patriotic. For them the old ethno-
centric jealousy, vanity, truculency, and ambition are the strongest
elements in patriotism. Such sentiments are easily awakened in a
crowd. They are sure to be popular. Wider knowledge always proves
that they are not based on facts. That we are good and others are
bad is never true. By history, literature, travel, and science men are
made cosmopolitan. . . .
"That patriotism may degenerate into a vice is shown by the in-
vention of a name for that vice: chauvinism. It is a name for boastful
and truculent group self-assertion. It overrules personal judgment and
FOLKWAYS 57
character, and puts the whole group at the mercy of the clique which
is ruling at the moment. It produces the dominance of watchwords
and phrases which take the place of reason and conscience in de-
termining conduct. The patriotic bias is a recognized perversion of
thought and judgment against which our education should guard us"
[Ibid., p. 15].
"right" and "true"
The folkways are "right" and "true," and out of them developed
ethics and norms of welfare, also a world philosophy and a life policy.
"The folkways are the right ways to satisfy all interests, because they
are traditional, and exist in fact. They extend over the whole of life.
There is a right way to catch game, to win a wife, to make one's self
appear, to cure disease, to honor ghosts, to treat comrades or
strangers, to behave when a child is born, on the warpath, in council,
and so on in all cases which can arise. The ways are defined on the
negative side, that is, by taboos. The 'right' way is the way which
the ancestors used and which has been handed down. The tradition
is its own warrant. It is not held subject to verification by experience.
The notion of right is in the folkways. It is not outside of them, of
independent origin, and brought to them to test them. In the folk-
ways, whatever is, is right. This is because they are traditional, and
therefore contain in themselves the authority of the ancestral ghosts.
When we come to the folkways we are at the end of our analysis.
The notion of right and ought is the same in regard to all the folk-
ways, but the degree of it varies with the importance of the interest
at stake. The obligation of conformable and cooperative action is far
greater under ghost fear and war than in other matters, and the social
sanctions are severer, because group interests are supposed to be at
stake. Some usages contain only a slight element of right and ought.
It may well be believed that notions of right and duty, and of social
welfare, were first developed in connection with ghost fear and other-
worldliness, and therefore that, in that field also, folkways were first
raised to mores. 'Rights' are the rules of mutual give and take in the
competition of life which are imposed on comrades in the in-group,
in order that the peace may prevail there which is essential to the
group strength. Therefore rights can never be 'natural' or 'God-given,'
or absolute in any sense. The morality of a group at a time is the
5° WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
sum of the taboos and prescriptions in the folkways by which right
conduct is defined. Therefore morals can never be intuitive. They
are historical, institutional, and empirical.
"World philosophy, life policy, right, rights, and morality are all
products of the folkways. They are reflections on, and generalizations
from, the experience of pleasure and pain which is won in efforts to
carry on the struggle for existence under actual life conditions. The
generalizations are very crude and vague in their germinal forms.
They are embodied in folklore, and all our philosophy and science
have been developed out of them.
"The folkways are necessarily 'true' with respect to some world
philosophy. Pain forced men to think. The ills of life imposed re-
flection and taught forethought. Mental processes were irksome and
were not undertaken until painful experience made them unavoid-
able. With great unanimity all over the globe primitive men followed
the same line of thought. The dead were believed to live on as ghosts
in another world just like this one. The ghosts had just the same
needs, tastes, passions, etc., as the living men had had. These tran-
scendental notions were the beginning of the mental outfit of man-
kind. They are articles of faith, not rational convictions. The living
had duties to the ghosts, and the ghosts had rights; they also had
power to enforce their rights. It behooved the living therefore to
learn how to deal with ghosts. Here we have a complete world
philosophy and a life policy deduced from it. When pain, loss, and
ill were experienced and the question was provoked, Who did this
to us, the world philosophy furnished the answer. When the painful
experience forced the question, Why are the ghosts angry and what
must we do to appease them, the 'right' answer was the one which
fitted into the philosophy of ghost fear. All acts were therefore con-
strained and trained into the forms of the world philosophy by ghost
fear, ancestral authority, taboos, and habit. The habits and customs
created a practical philosophy of welfare, and they confirmed and
developed the religious theories of goblinism" [Ibid., pp. 28-30].
DEFINITION OF THE MORES
When the elements of truth and right are developed into doctrines
of welfare, the folkways are raised to another plane. They then be-
come capable of producing inferences, developing into new forms,
and extending their constructive influence over men and society.
FOLKWAYS 59
Then they are called the mores. The mores are the folkways, includ-
ing the philosophical and ethical generalizations as to societal welfare
which are suggested by them, and inherent in them, as they evolve.
'They are the ways of doing things which are current in a society to
satisfy human needs and desires, together with the faiths, notions,
codes, and standards of well living which inhere in those ways, having
a genetic connection with them. By virtue of the latter element the
mores are traits in the specific character (ethos) of a society or a
period. They pervade and control the ways of thinking in all the
exigencies of life, returning from the world of abstractions to the
world of action, to give guidance and to win revivification" [Ibid.,
P- 59].
UNCONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF MORES
"A society is never conscious of its mores until it comes in contact
with some other society which has different mores, or until, in higher
civilization, it gets information by literature. The latter operation,
however, affects only the literary classes, not the masses, and society
never consciously sets about the task of making mores. In the early
stages mores are elastic and plastic; later they become rigid and fixed.
They seem to grow up, gain strength, become corrupt, decline, and
die, as if they were organisms. The phases seem to follow each other
by an inherent necessity, and as if independent of the reason and
will of the men affected, but the changes are always produced by a
strain towards better adjustment of the mores to conditions and in-
terests of the society, or of the controlling elements in it. A society
does not record its mores in its annals, because they are to it un-
noticed and unconscious" [Ibid., p. 78].
TABOOS
"The mores necessarily consist, in a large part, of taboos, which
indicate the things which must not be done. In part these are dic-
tated by mystic dread of ghosts who might be offended by certain
acts, but they also include such acts as have been found by experience
to produce unwelcome results, especially in the food quest, in war,
in health, or in increase or decrease of population. These tarpos
always contain a greater element of philosophy than the positive
rules, because the taboos contain reference to a reason, as, for in-
6o WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
stance, that the act would displease the ghosts. The primitive taboos
correspond to the fact that the life of man is environed by perils.
His food quest must be limited by shunning poisonous plants. His
appetite must be restrained from excess. His physical strength and
health must be guarded from dangers. The taboos carry on the
accumulated wisdom of generations, which has almost always been
purchased by pain, loss, disease, and death. Other taboos contain
inhibitions of what will be injurious to the group. The laws about
the sexes, about property, about war, and about ghosts, have this
character. They always include some social philosophy. They are both
mystic and utilitarian, or compounded of the two" [Ibid., pp. 30-31].
SOCIAL CONTROL BY THE MORES
According to Sumner, we are born into our mores and adopt them
unconsciously. Each one is subjected to the influence of the mores
of his time and place, and formed by them, before he is capable of
reasoning about them. They coerce and restrict the newborn genera-
tion. "They do not stimulate to thought, but the contrary. The think-
ing is already done and is embodied in the mores. They never contain
any provision for their own amendment. They are not questions, but
answers, to the problem of life" [Ibid., p. 79].
"The most important fact about the mores is their dominion over
the individual. Arising he knows not whence or how, they meet his
opening mind in earliest childhood, give him his outfit of ideas,
faiths, and tastes, and lead him into prescribed mental processes.
They bring to him codes of action, standards, and rules of ethics.
They have a model of the man-as-he-should-be to which they mold
him, in spite of himself and without his knowledge. If he submits
and consents, he is taken up and may attain great social success. If
he resists and dissents, he is thrown out and may be trodden under
foot. The mores are therefore an engine of social selection. Their
coercion of the individual is the mode in which they operate the
selection, and the details of the process deserve study. Some folkways
exercise an unknown and unintelligent selection. Infanticide does
this. Slavery always exerts a very powerful selection, both physical and
social" [Ibid. y pp. 173-74; see also Chap. VI, Slavery, and Chap. VII,
Abortion, Infanticide, Killing the Old].
Thus folkways and mores operate as an agency of informal social
FOLKWAYS 6l
control, regulating the actions or behavior of individuals and en-
forcing conformity to the social norms or values.
FASHION
Sumner discerned a number of mass phenomena which are on a
lower grade than the mores, lacking the elements of truth and right
with respect to welfare, but which also illustrate the dominance of
the group over the individual. These are fashion, poses, fads, and
affectations. Fashion controls many things besides dress. It governs
the forms of utensils and weapons, the mode of dressing the hair and
deforming the body; it rules in architecture, painting and sculpture,
literature, and methods of education; there are fashions of standing,
walking, sitting; fashions in shaking hands, dancing, eating and drink-
ing, showing respect, visiting, foods and hours of meals; there are
also fashions in trading, banking, political devices, traveling, book
making, shows and amusements, gardens and games, in language, in
faiths and ideals, and in a host of other things. Fashions may be
harmful as well as beneficial. They are arbitrary, cannot be put to
any test, and have no sanction except that everybody submits to
them. There is no arguing with the fashion [Ibid., pp. 57— 5 8 > l8 4~
201].
Other devices of a social psychological nature which impose on
the individual a coercion to conform and make of the mores an
engine of social selection include suggestion and its instrumentalities,
symbols, pictures, watchwords, catchwords, epithets, rhetorical
phrases, pathos ("the glamour of sentiment which grows up around
the pet notion of an age and people, and which protects it from
criticism"), distinction, heroes, scapegoats, caricature, ideals [Ibid.,
Chap. V, Societal Selection].
RITUAL
"The process by which mores are developed and established is
ritual. Ritual is so foreign to our mores that we do not recognize its
power. In primitive society it is the prevailing method of activity, and
primitive religion is entirely a matter of ritual. Ritual is the perfect
form of drill and of the regulated habit which comes from drill. Acts
which are ordained by authority and are repeated mechanically with-
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
out intelligence run into ritual. If infants and children are subjected
to ritual they never escape from its effects through life. Galton* says
that he was, in early youth, in contact with the Mohammedan ritual
idea that the left hand is less worthy than the right, and that he
never overcame it. We see the effect of ritual in breeding, courtesy,
politeness, and all forms of prescribed behavior. Etiquette is sociai
ritual. Ritual is not easy compliance with usage; it is strict compliance
with detailed and punctilious rule. It admits of no exception or devia-
tion. The stricter the discipline, the greater the power of ritual over
action and character. In the training of animals and the education of
children it is the perfection, inevitableness, invariableness, and re-
lentlessness of routine which tells. They should never experience any
exception or irregularity. Ritual is connected with words, gestures,
symbols, and signs. Associations result, and, upon a repetition of the
signal, the act is repeated, whether the will assents or not. Association
and habit account for the phenomena. Ritual gains further strength
when it is rhythmical, and is connected with music, verse, or other
rhythmical arts. Acts are ritually repeated at the recurrence of the
rhythmical points. The alternation of night and day produces rhythms
of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest, for great numbers at the
same time, in their struggle for existence. The seasons also produce
rhythms in work. Ritual may embody an idea of utility, expedience,
or welfare, but it always tends to become perfunctory, and the idea
is only subconscious. There is ritual in primitive therapeutics, and it
was not eliminated until very recent times. The patient was directed
not only to apply remedies, but also to perform rites. The rites intro-
duced mystic elements. This illustrates the connection of ritual with
notions of magical effects produced by rites. All ritual is ceremonious
and solemn. It tends to become sacred, or to make sacred the subject-
matter with which it is connected. Therefore, in primitive society
it is by ritual that sentiments of awe, deference to authority, submis-
sion to tradition, and disciplinary cooperation are inculcated. Ritual
operates a constant suggestion, and the suggestion is at once put in
operation in acts. Ritual, therefore, suggests sentiments, but it never
inculcates doctrines. Ritual is strongest when it is most perfunctory
and excites no thought. By familiarity with ritual any doctrinal refer-
ence which it once had is lost by familiarity, but the habits persist
Primitive religion is ritualistic, not because religion makes ritual, but
* Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London I M Dent &
Co., 1908), p. 216.
FOLKWAYS 63
because ritual makes religion. Ritual is something to be done, not
something to be thought or felt. Men can always perform the pre-
scribed act, although they cannot always think or feel prescribed
thoughts or emotions. The acts may bring up again, by association,
states of the mind and sentiments which have been connected with
them, especially in childhood, when the fantasy was easily affected
by rites, music, singing, dramas, etc. No creed, no moral code, and
no scientific demonstration can ever win the same hold upon men
and women as habits of action, with associated sentiments and states
of mind, drilled in from childhood" [Ibid., pp. 60-61].
THE RITUAL OF THE MORES
"The mores are social ritual in which we all participate uncon-
sciously. The current habits as to hours of labor, meal hours, family
life, the social intercourse of the sexes, propriety, amusements, travel,
holidays, education, the use of periodicals and libraries, and innumer-
able other details of life fall under this ritual. Each does as everybody
does. For the great mass of mankind as to all things, and for all of
us for a great many things, the rule to do as all do suffices. We are
led by suggestion and association to believe that there must be
wisdom and utility in what all do. The great mass of the folkways
give us discipline and the support of routine and habit. If we had to
form judgments as to all these cases before we could act in them,
and were forced always to act rationally, the burden would be un-
endurable. Beneficent use and wont save us this trouble" [Ibid., p. 62].
STATUS
The coercive and inhibitive force with which the mores grasp the
members of a society is further illustrated in the case of social status.
The folkways and mores create status.
"Membership in the group, kin, family, neighborhood, rank, or
class are cases of status. The rights and duties of every man and
woman were defined by status. No one could choose whether he
would enter into the status or not. For instance, at puberty every one
was married. What marriage meant, and what a husband or wife was
(the rights and duties of each), were fixed by status. No one could
alter the customary relations. Status, as distinguished from institu-
tions and contract, is a direct product of the mores. Each case of
*4 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
status is a nucleus of leading interest with the folkways which cluster
around it. Status is determined by birth. Therefore it is a help and
a hindrance, but it is not liberty. In modern times status has become
unpopular and our mores have grown into the forms of contract under
liberty. The conception of status has been lost by the masses in
modern civilized states. Nevertheless we live under status which has
been defined and guaranteed by law and institutions, and it would
be a great gain to recognize and appreciate the element of status
which historically underlies the positive institutions and which is still
subject to the action of the mores. Marriage (matrimony or wedlock)
is a status. It is really controlled by the mores. The law defines it and
gives sanctions to it, but the law always expresses the mores. A man
and a woman make a contract to enter into it. The mode of entering
into it (wedding) is fixed by custom. The law only ratifies it. No
man and woman can by contract make wedlock different for them-
selves from the status defined by law, so far as social rights and duties
are concerned. The same conception of marriage as a status in the
mores is injured by the intervention of the ecclesiastical and civil
formalities connected with it. An individual is born into a kin group,
a tribe, a nation, or a state, and he has a status accordingly which
determines rights and duties for him. Civil liberty must be defined
in accordance with this fact; not outside of it, or according to vague
metaphysical abstractions above it. The body of the folkways con-
stitutes a societal environment. Every one born into it must enter
into relations of give and take with it. He is subjected to influences
from it, and it is one of the life conditions under which he must work
out his career of self-realization. Whatever liberty may be taken to
mean, it is certain that liberty never can mean emancipation from
the influence of the societal environment, or of the mores into which
one was born" [Ibid., pp. 67-68].
THE MORES OF SUBGROUPS
"Each class or group in a society has its own mores. This is true of
ranks, professions, industrial classes, religious and philosophical sects,
and all other subdivisions of society. Individuals are in two or more
of these groups at the same time, so that there is compromise and
neutralization. Other mores are common to the whole society. Mores
are also transmitted from one class to another. . . . There are cases
FOLKWAYS 65
in which the individual finds himself in involuntary antagonism to
the mores of the society, or of some subgroup to which he belongs.
If a man passes from one class to another, his acts show the contrast
between the mores in which he was bred and those in which he finds
himself. The satirists have made fun of the parvenu for centuries.
His mistakes and misfortunes reveal the nature of the mores, their
power over the individual, their pertinacity against later influences,
the confusion in character produced by changing them, and the grip
of habit which appears both in the persistence of old mores and the
weakness of new ones. Every emigrant is forced to change his mores.
He loses the sustaining help of use and wont. He has to acquire a
new outfit of it. The traveler also experiences the change from life in
one set of mores to life in another. The experience gives him the best
power to criticize his native mores from a standpoint outside of
them" [Ibid., pp. 39, 107-08].
SOCIAL CLASS AND THE MORES
Starting with the given facts of social differentiation and human
inequality — "that all men should be alike or equal, by any standard
whatever, is contrary to all the facts of human nature and all the con-
ditions of human life" [Ibid., p. 43] — and following Galton* and
Ammon,t Sumner held that if the members of a society were rated
and scaled by the criterion of societal value, the results would fall
under a curve of normal distribution, with most people in the middle
and fewer people at each end. Under societal value he considered in-
tellectual, moral, physical, and economic elements, and he thought
that the highest societal value went with a harmonious combination,
although it may be of lower grades. At the top of the scale one finds
a small number of men of genius and of talent. Such individuals who
have achieved superior status Sumner termed the "classes" or the
"historical or selected classes," somewhat in the sense of the elite.
At the bottom, representing negative societal value, are the dependent,
defective, and delinquent classes, also relatively few in number, who
constitute a burden to society. In an intermediate position are the
"masses," the modal class, who represent the average or norm. There
♦Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1870).
t O. Ammon, Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre natiirlichen Grundlagen, Jena,
1896.
66 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
is a current of movement up the scale, especially in new countries
and in those with universal education, and also a countercurrent
of degenerate and unfortunate individuals [Ibid., pp. 39-45].
In connection with the mores, the "masses" are of very great im-
portance. To Sumner, the "masses" are not large classes at the base
of a social pyramid; they are the core of society. They are conserva-
tive. They accept life as they find it, and live by tradition and habit.
"The masses are the real bearers of the mores of the society. They
carry tradition. The folkways are their ways. They accept influence
or leadership, and they imitate, but they do so as they see fit, being
controlled by their notions and tastes previously acquired. They may
accept standards of character and action from the classes, or from
foreigners, or from literature, or from a new religion, but whatever
they take up they assimilate and make it a part of their own mores,
which they then transmit by tradition, defend in its integrity, and
refuse to discard again" [Ibid. y p. 46].
While it is the "masses" who carry forward the traditional mores,
it is the "classes" who produce variation and contribute innovations.
They are the leaders of culture, the thinkers.
"The historical or selected classes are those which, in history, have
controlled the activities and policy of generations. They have been
differentiated at one time by one standard, at another time by
another. The position which they held by inheritance from early so-
ciety has given them prestige and authority. Merit and societal value,
according to the standards of their time, have entered into their
status only slightly and incidentally. Those classes have had their
own mores. They had the power to regulate their lives to some extent
according to their own choice, a power which modern civilized men
eagerly desire and strive for primarily by the acquisition of wealth.
The historical classes have, therefore, selected purposes, and have
invented ways of fulfilling them. Their ways have been imitated by
the masses. The classes have led the way in luxury, frivolity, and vice,
and also in refinement, culture, and the art of living. They have in-
troduced variation" [Ibid., p. 45].
The mores of any society, at a period, may be characterized by the
promptness or reluctance of the "masses" to imitate the ways of the
"classes." "It is a question of the first importance for the historian
whether the mores of the historical classes of which he finds evidence
in documentary remains penetrated the masses or not. . . . The writ-
FOLKWAYS 67
ings of the literary class may not represent the faiths, notions, tastes,
standards, etc., of the masses at all" [Ibid., p. 46].
MORES AND MORALS (CULTURAL RELATIVISM)
Morals, wrote Sumner, mean what belongs or appertains to the
mores, and they vary from time to time and from place to place; that
is, questions of right and wrong are relative to the particular culture
in which the behavior occurs. This arises from the fact that ethical
codes or standards of good and right are incorporated in the mores
themselves.
"The ethnographers write of a tribe that the 'morality' in it, espe-
cially of the women, is low or high, etc. This is the technical use of
morality, — as a thing pertaining to the sex relation only or especially,
and the ethnographers make their propositions by applying our stand-
ards of sex behavior, and our form of the sex taboo, to judge the folk-
ways of all people. All that they can properly say is that they find a
great range and variety of usages, ideas, standards, and ideals, which
differ greatly from ours. . . . When, therefore, the ethnographers
apply condemnatory or depreciatory adjectives to the people whom
they study, they beg the most important question which we want to
investigate; that is, What are the standards, codes, and ideas of chas-
tity, decency, propriety, modesty, etc., and whence do they arise? The
ethnographical facts contain the answer to this question, but in order
to reach it we want a colorless report of the facts. We shall find proof
that 'immoral' never means anything but contrary to the mores of the
time and place. Therefore the mores and the morality may move
together, and there is no permanent or universal standard by which
right and truth in regard to these matters can be established and dif-
ferent folkways compared and criticised. Only experience produces
judgments of the expediency of some usages. For instance, ancient
peoples thought pederasty was harmless and trivial. It has been well
proved to be corrupting both to individual and social vigor, and
harmful to interests, both individual and collective. Cannibalism,
polygamy, incest, harlotry, and other primitive customs have been
discarded by a very wide and, in the case of some of them, unani-
mous judgment that they are harmful" [Ibid., pp. 417-18].
The mores have their own justification. That is, the "goodness" or
"badness" of mores consists entirely in their adjustment to the life
conditions and the interests of the time and place. "It is most im-
68 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
portant to notice that, for the people of a time and place, their own
mores are always good, or rather that for them there can be no ques-
tion of the goodness or badness of their mores. The reason is because
the standards of good and right are in the mores. If the life conditions
change, the traditional folkways may produce pain and loss, or fail
to produce the same good as formerly. Then the loss of comfort and
ease brings doubt into the judgment of welfare (causing doubt of
the pleasure of the gods, or of war power, or of health), and thus
disturbs the unconscious philosophy of the mores. Then a later time
will pass judgment on the mores. Another society may also pass
judgment on the mores. In our literary and historical study of the
mores we want to get from them their educational value, which con-
sists in the stimulus or warning as to what is, in its effects, societally
good or bad. This may lead us to reject or neglect a phenomenon like
infanticide, slavery, or witchcraft, as an old 'abuse' and 'evil/ or to
pass by the crusades as a folly which cannot recur. Such a course
would be a great error. Everything in the mores of a time and place
must be regarded as justified with regard to that time and place.
'Good' mores are those which are well adapted to the situation.
'Bad' mores are those which are not so adapted" [Ibid., p. 58].
The "morals" of an age are never anything but the consonance
between what is done and what the mores of the age require. The
whole revolves on itself, in the relation of the specific to the general,
within the horizon formed by the mores. Thus a given age may
approve of a practice which a later age condemns.
"For every one the mores give the notion of what ought to be.
This includes the notion of what ought to be done, for all should
cooperate to bring to pass, in the order of life, what ought to be. All
notions of propriety, decency, chastity, politeness, order, duty, right,
rights, discipline, respect, reverence, cooperation, and fellowship, espe-
cially all things in regard to which good and ill depend entirely on
the point at which the line is drawn, are in the mores. The mores
can make things seem right and good to one group or one age which
to another seem antagonistic to every instinct of human nature. The
thirteenth century bred in every heart such a sentiment in regard to
heretics that inquisitors had no more misgivings in their proceedings
than men would have now if they should attempt to exterminate
rattlesnakes. The sixteenth century gave to all such notions about
witches that witch persecutors thought they were waging war on
enemies of God and man. Of course the inquisitors and witch perse-
FOLKWAYS 69
cutors constantly developed the notions of heretics and witches. They
exaggerated the notions and then gave them back again to the mores,
in their expanded form, to inflame the hearts of men with terror and
hate and to become, in the next stage, so much more fantastic and
ferocious motives. Such is the reaction between the mores and the
acts of the living generation" [Ibid., p. 231].
Among other illustrations cited to demonstrate that "the mores can
make anything right and prevent condemnation of anything," are the
following practices that have prevailed at one time or another: abor-
tion, infanticide, killing the old, sacral harlotry, child sacrifice, public
punishments for crime, cruel treatment of prisoners, bundling, night
wooing, public lupanars, gladiatorial contests, various popular exhibi-
tions and vicious amusements [Ibid., Chaps. VII, XV, XVI, XVII].
"At every turn we find new evidence that the mores can make any-
thing right. What they do is that they cover a usage in dress, lan-
guage, behavior, manners, etc., with the mantle of current custom,
and give it regulation and limits within which it becomes unques-
tionable. The limit is generally a limit of toleration. Literature, pic-
tures, exhibitions, celebrations, and festivals are controlled by some
undefined, and probably undefinable, standard of decency and pro-
priety, which sets a limit of toleration on the appeals to fun, sen-
suality, and various prejudices. In regard to all social customs, the
mores sanction them by defining them and giving them form" [Ibid.,
p. 521].
CONVENTIONALIZATION
Related to this power of the mores to define the limits which make
right and wrong is the process of conventionalization. Conventional-
ization consists in ignoring the violation of current standards of pro-
priety and breaches of the ordinary taboo. It always includes strict
specification and limits of time, place, and occasion beyond which the
same behavior would be disapproved. It accounts for many incon-
sistencies in the mores. The conventionalizations which persist are
the resultant of experiments and experience as to the devices by which
to soften and smooth the details of life.
"If traditional folkways are subjected to rational or ethical exam-
ination they are no longer naive and unconscious. It may then be
found that they are gross, absurd, or inexpedient. They may still be
preserved by conventionalization. Conventionalization creates a set of
7° WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
conditions under which a thing may be tolerated which would other-
wise be disapproved and tabooed. The special conditions may be
created in fact, or they may be only a fiction which all agree to respect
and to treat as true. When children, in play, 'make believe 7 that some-
thing exists, or exists in a certain way, they employ conventionaliza-
tion. Special conditions are created in fact when some fact is regarded
as making the usual taboo inoperative. Such is the case with all
archaic usages which are perpetuated on account of their antiquity,
although they are not accordant with modern standards. The lan-
guage of Shakespeare and the Bible contains words which are now
tabooed. In this case, as in very many others, the conventionalization
consists in ignoring the violation of current standards of propriety.
Natural functions and toilet operations are put under conventional-
ization, even in low civilization. The conventionalization consists in
ignoring breaches of the ordinary taboo. On account of accidents
which may occur, wellbred people are always ready to apply conven-
tionalization to mishaps of speech, dress, manner, etc. In fairy stories,
fables, romances, and dramas all are expected to comply with certain
conventional understandings without which the entertainment is im-
possible; for instance, when beasts are supposed to speak. In the
mythologies this kind of conventionalization was essential. One of us,
in studying mythologies, has to acquire a knowledge of the conven-
tional assumptions with which the people who believed in them ap-
proached them. Modern Hindoos conventionalize the stories of their
mythology. What the gods are said to have done is put under other
standards than those now applied to men. Everything in the mythol-
ogy is on a plane by itself. It follows that none of the rational or
ethical judgments are formed about the acts of the gods which would
be formed about similar acts of men, and the corruption of morals
which would be expected as a consequence of the stories and dramas
is prevented by the conventionalization. There is no deduction from
what gods do to what men may do. The Greeks of the fifth century
b.c. rationalized on their mythology and thereby destroyed it. The
mediaeval church claimed to be under a conventionalization which
would prevent judgment on the church and ecclesiastics according to
current standards. Very many people heeded this conventionalization,
so that they were not scandalized by vice and crime in the church.
'This intervention of conventionalization to remove cases from
the usual domain of the mores into a special field, where they can
be protected and tolerated by codes and standards modified in their
FOLKWAYS 71
favor, is of very great importance. It accounts for many inconsistencies
in the mores. In this way there may be nakedness without indecency,
and tales of adultery without lewdness. We observe a conventionali-
zation in regard to the Bible, especially in regard to some of the Old
Testament stories. The theater presents numerous cases of conven-
tionalization. The asides, entrances and exits, and stage artifices, re-
quire that the spectators shall concede their assent to conventional-
ities. The dresses of the stage would not be tolerated elsewhere. It is
by conventionalization that the literature and pictorial representations
of science avoid collision with the mores of propriety, decency, etc.
In all artistic work there is more or less conventionalization. Uncivi-
lized people, and to some extent uneducated people amongst our-
selves, cannot tell what a picture represents or means because they are
not used to the conventionalities of pictorial art.
"The ancient Saturnalia and the carnival have been special times of
license at which the ordinary social restrictions have been relaxed for
a time by conventionalization. Our own Fourth of July is a day of
noise, risk, and annoyance, on which things are allowed which would
not be allowed at any other time. We consent to it because 'it is
Fourth of July/ The history of wedding ceremonies presents very
many instances of conventionalization. Jests and buffoonery have
been tolerated for the occasion. They became such an annoyance that
people revolted against them, and invented means to escape them.
Dress used in bathing, sport, the drama, or work is protected by con-
ventionalization. The occasion calls for a variation from current usage,
and the conventionalization, while granting toleration, defines it also,
and makes a new law for the exceptional case. It is like taboo, and is,
in fact, the form of taboo in high civilization. Like taboo, it has two
aspects — it is either destructive or protective. The conventionalization
bars out what might be offensive (i.e. when a thing may be done
only under the conditions set by conventionalization), or it secures
toleration for what would otherwise be forbidden. Respect, reverence,
sacredness, and holiness, which are taboos in low civilization, become
conventionalities in high civilization" [Ibid., pp. 68-70].
MODIFICATIONS OF THE THEORY
OF EXPEDIENCY AND WELFARE
The main theory has been presented that folkways and mores are
expedient devices, developed in experience under life conditions, to
72 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
satisfy interests and secure welfare. However, this has not been uni-
versally the case. There are various modifications of this theory.
Folkways due to false inference. Some folkways have been formed
by accident, that is, by irrational and incongruous action, based on
pseudo-knowledge, of which the following are examples.
"In Molembo a pestilence broke out soon after a Portuguese had
died there. After that the natives took all possible measures not to
allow any white man to die in their country. On the Nicobar islands
some natives who had just begun to make pottery died. The art was
given up and never again attempted. . . . Soon after the Yakuts
saw a camel for the first time smallpox broke out amongst them. They
thought the camel to be the agent of the disease. A woman amongst
the same people contracted an endogamous marriage. She soon after-
wards became blind. This was thought to be on account of the vio-
lation of ancient customs. A very great number of such cases could
be collected. In fact they represent the current mode of reasoning of
nature people. It is their custom to reason that, if one thing follows
another, it is due to it. A great number of customs are traceable to
the notion of the evil eye, many more to ritual notions of undean-
ness. No scientific investigation could discover the origin of the folk-
ways mentioned, if the origin had not chanced to become known to
civilized men. We must believe that the known cases illustrate the
irrational and incongruous origin of many folkways. In civilized his-
tory also we know that customs have owed their origin to 'historical
accident' — the vanity of a princess, the deformity of a king, the whim
of a democracy, the love intrigue of a statesman or prelate" [Ibid., pp.
24-25].
Harmful folkways. "There are folkways which are positively harm-
ful. Very often these are just the ones for which a definite reason
can be given. The destruction of a man's goods at his death is a
direct deduction from other-worldliness; the dead man is supposed to
want in the other world just what he wanted here. The destruction
of a man's goods at his death was a great waste of capital, and it must
have had a disastrous effect on the interests of the living, and must
have very seriously hindered the development of civilization. With
this custom we must class all the expenditure of labor and capital on
graves, temples, pyramids, rites, sacrifices, and support of priests, so
far as these were supposed to benefit the dead. The faith in goblinism
produced other-worldly interests which overruled ordinary worldly
interests. Foods have often been forbidden which were plentiful, the
FOLKWAYS 73
prohibition of which injuriously lessened the food supply. There is a
tribe of Bushmen who will eat no goat's flesh, although goats are the
most numerous domestic animals in the district. Where totemism
exists it is regularly accompanied by a taboo on eating the totem
animal. Whatever may be the real principle in totemism, it overrules
the interest in an abundant food supply" [Ibid., p. 26].
The imaginative element. The practical and direct element in the
folkways seems to be due to common sense, natural reason, intuition,
or some other original mental endowment. It seems rational or ra-
tionalistic and utilitarian. But in addition, errors have crept into the
mental process, leading men to turn away from welfare and reality.
This factor Sumner called "the imaginative element."
"The correct apprehension of facts and events by the mind, and
the correct inferences as to the relations between them, constitute
knowledge, and it is chiefly by knowledge that men have become
better able to live well on earth. Therefore the alternation between
experience or observation and the intellectual processes by which
the sense, sequence, interdependence, and rational consequences of
facts are ascertained, is undoubtedly the most important process for
winning increased power to live well. Yet we find that this process
has been liable to most pernicious errors. The imagination has inter-
fered with the reason and furnished objects of pursuit to men, which
have wasted and dissipated their energies. Especially the alternations
of observation and deduction have been traversed by vanity and super-
stition which have introduced delusions. As a consequence, men have
turned their backs on welfare and reality, in order to pursue beauty,
glory, poetry, and dithyrambic rhetoric, pleasure, fame, adventure,
and phantasms. Every group, in every age, has had its 'ideals' for
which it has striven, as if men had blown bubbles into the air, and
then, entranced by their beautiful colors, had leaped to catch them.
In the very processes of analysis and deduction the most pernicious
errors find entrance. We note our experience in every action or event.
We study the significance from experience. We deduce a conviction
as to what we may best do when the case arises again. Undoubtedly
this is just what we ought to do in order to live well. The process
presents us a constant reiteration of the sequence— act, thought, act.
The error is made if we allow suggestions of vanity, superstition,
speculation, or imagination to become confused with the second
stage and to enter into our conviction of what it is best to do in such
a case. This is what was done when goblinism was taken as the ex-
74 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
planation of experience and the rule of right living, and it is what
has been done over and over again ever since. Speculative and tran-
scendental notions have furnished the world philosophy, and the
rules of hfe policy and duty have been deduced from this and intro-
duced at the second stage of the process,— act, thought, act. All the
errors and fallacies of the mental process enter into the mores of the
age. The logic of one age is not that of another. It is one of the chief
and useful purposes of a study of the mores to learn to discern in
them the operation of traditional error, prevailing dogmas, logical
fallacy delusion, and current false estimates of goods worth striving
for [Ibid., pp. 32-33]. 5
Revolt against expediency. Closely related to errors of judgment
is the interference of dogmas, especially the philosophy of renuncia-
tion. J
"We have seen that the mores are the results of the efforts of men
to find out how to live under the conditions of human life so as to
satisfy interests and secure welfare. The efforts have been only very
imperfectly successful. The task, in fact, never can be finished, for
the conditions change and the problem contains different elements
from time to time. Moreover, dogmas interfere. They dictate 'duty'
and 'right' by authority and as virtue, quite independently of any
verification by experience and expediency. All the primitive taboos
express the convictions of men that there are things which must not
be done, or must not be done beyond some limited degree, if the
men would live well. Such convictions came either from experience
or from dogma. The former class of cases were those things which
were connected with food and the sex relation. The latter class of
cases were those things which were connected with the doctrine of
ghosts. There are also a great many primitive customs for coercing or
conciliating superior powers,— either men or spirits,— which consist
in renunciation, self-torture, obscenity, bloodshedding, filthiness, and
the performance of repugnant acts or even suicide. These customs all
imply that the superior powers are indifferent, or angry and malevo-
lent, or justly displeased, and that the pain of men pleases, or ap-
peases and conciliates, or coerces them, or wins their attention.
"Thus we meet with a fundamental philosophy of life in which it
is not the satisfaction of need, appetites, and desires, but the opposite
theory which is thought to lead to welfare. Renounce what you want-
do what you do not want to do; pursue what is repugnant; in short'
invert the relations of pleasure and pain, and act by your will against
FOLKWAYS
their sanctions, so as to seek pain and flee pleasure. A doctrine of due
measure and limit upon the rational satisfaction of needs and desires
is turned into an absolute rule of well-being. Within narrower limits
the same philosophy inculcates acts of labor, pain, and renunciation,
which produce no results in the satisfaction of wants but are regarded
as beneficial or meritorious in themselves, as a kind of gymnastic in
self-control and self-denial. It is not to be denied that such a gym-
nastic has value in education, especially in the midst of luxury and
self-indulgence, if it is controlled by common sense and limited within
reason. Nearly all men, however, are sure to meet with as much neces-
sity for self-control and self-denial as is necessary to their training,
without arbitrarily subjecting themselves to artificial discipline of that
kind" [Ibid., pp. 606-07].
Degenerate and aberrant mores. There is the possibility of per-
versity and aberration in the mores, which may be illustrated by the
custom of child marriage. After reviewing the cases in ethnography
and history, Sumner concluded: "Child marriage is due, then, to the
predominance of worldly considerations in marriage, especially when
the interests considered are those of the parents, not of the children;
also to abuse of parental authority through vanity and self-will; also
to superstitious notions about the other world and the interests of
the dead there; also to attempts, in the interest of the children, to
avoid the evil consequences of other bad social arrangements" [Ibid.,
p. 382].
Mores may be degenerate and evil, and may characterize a period
of decline. "The historians have familiarized us with the notion of
corrupt or degenerate mores. Such periods as the later Roman em-
pire, the Byzantine empire, the Merovingian kingdom, and the Ren-
aissance offer us examples of evil mores. We need to give more
exactitude to this idea. Bad mores are those which are not well fitted
to the conditions and needs of the society at the time. . . . When
the mores go wrong, it is, above all, on account of error in the
attempt to employ the philosophical and ethical generalizations in
order to impose upon mores and institutions a movement toward
selected and 'ideal' results which the ruling powers of the society
have determined to aim at. Then the energy of the society may be
diverted from its interests. Such a drift of the mores is exactly analo-
gous to a vice of an individual, i.e., energy is expended on acts which
are contrary to welfare. The result is a confusion of all the functions
of the society, and a falseness in all its mores. Any of the aberrations
76 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
which have been mentioned will produce evil mores, that is, mores
which are not adapted to welfare, so that a group may fall into vicious
mores just as an individual falls into vicious habits. . . .
"The notion that mores grow either better or worse by virtue of
some inherent tendency is to be rejected. Goodness or badness of the
mores is always relative only. Their purpose is to serve needs and their
quality is to be defined by the degree to which they do it. We have
noticed that there is in them a strain towards consistency, due to the
fact that they are more efficient when consistent. They are consistent
also in aberration and error when they fall under the dominion of
any one of the false tendencies above described. Hence we may have
the phenomena of degenerate mores characterizing a period; being a
case of change in the mores not due to any external and determinable
cause, and analogous either to vice or disease" [Ibid., pp. 99-100, 102].
Force in the folkways and mores. Another modification of the
theory of the folkways and mores as expedient devices resulting from
the efforts of men to meet the exigencies of life is provided by the
fact that there is always a large element of force in them.
"The organization of society under chiefs and medicine men
greatly increased the power of the society to serve its own interests.
The same is true of higher political organizations. . . . However,
chiefs, kings, priests, warriors, statesmen, and other functionaries have
put their own interests in the place of group interests, and have used
the authority they possessed to force the societal organization to work
and fight for their interests. The force is that of the society itself. It
is directed by the ruling class or persons. The force enters into the
mores and becomes a component in them. Despotism is in the mores
of negro tribes, and of all Mohammedan peoples. There is an element
of force in all forms of property, marriage, and religion. Slavery, how-
ever, is the grandest case of force in the mores, employed to make
some serve the interests of others, in the societal organization. The
historical classes, having selected the group purposes and decided
the group policy, use the force of the society itself to coerce all to
acquiesce and to work and fight in the determined way without regard
to their individual interests. This they do by means of discipline and
ritual. In different kinds of mores the force is screened by different
devices. It is always present, and brutal, cruel force has entered largely
into the development of all our mores, even those which we think
most noble and excellent" [Ibid., pp. 64-65].
FOLKWAYS
INERTIA AND RIGIDITY OF THE MORES
77
As we have noted, the mores never contain any provision for their
own amendment. They are not questions, but answers, to the prob-
lem of life. They present themselves as final and unchangeable, be-
cause they present answers which are offered as "the truth." They
resist change, but as we have already seen and shall soon see again,
they nevertheless do vary and they do change.
The persistency of the mores is often shown in survivals — "sense
less ceremonies whose meaning is forgotten, jests, play, parody, and
caricature, or stereotyped words and phrases, or even in cakes of a
prescribed form or prescribed foods at certain festivals" [Ibid., p. 82].
The persistency of old mores, after conditions to which they were
once adjusted have changed, may produce crises which in higher civili-
zation are solved by revolution and reform. "In revolutions the mores
are broken up. Such was the case in the sixteenth century, in the
French Revolution of 1789, and in minor revolutions. A period fol-
lows the outburst of a revolution in which there are no mores. The
old are broken up; the new are not formed. The social ritual is inter-
rupted. The old taboos are suspended. New taboos cannot be enacted
or promulgated. They require time to become established and known.
The masses in a revolution are uncertain what they ought to do. In
France, under the old regime, the social ritual was very complete and
thoroughly established. In the revolution, the destruction of this ritual
produced social anarchy. In the best case every revolution must be
attended by this temporary chaos of the mores. It was produced in
the American colonies. Revolutionary leaders expect to carry the
people over to new mores by the might of two or three dogmas of
political or social philosophy. The history of every such attempt shows
that dogmas do not make mores. Every revolution suffers a collapse
at the point where reconstruction should begin. Then the old ruling
classes resume control, and by the use of force set the society in its
old grooves again" [Ibid., p. 86].
Out of the very persistency of the mores arise the phenomena of
dissent from them and of retreat and isolation in order to make new
mores. "Since it appears that the old mores are mischievous if they
last beyond the duration of the conditions and needs to which they
were adapted, and that constant, gradual, smooth, and easy readjust-
7° WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
ment is the course of things which is conducive to healthful life, it
follows that free and rational criticism of traditional mores is essen-
tial to societal welfare. ... It is by the dissent and free judgment of
the best reason and conscience that the mores win flexibility and
automatic readjustment. Dissent is always unpopular in the group.
Groups form standards of orthodoxy as to the principles' which each
member must profess and the ritual which each must practice. Dis-
sent seems to imply a claim of superiority. It evokes hatred and per-
secution. Dissenters are rebels, traitors, and heretics. We see this in
all kinds of subgroups. Noble and patrician classes, merchants, arti-
sans, religious and philosophical sects, political parties, academies and
learned societies, punish by social penalties dissent from, or disobe-
dience to, their code of group conduct. The modern trades union, in
its treatment of a 'scab/ only presents another example. The group
also, by a majority, adopts a programme of policy and then demands
of each member that he shall work and make sacrifices for what has
been resolved upon for the group interest. He who refuses is a rene-
gade or apostate with respect to the group doctrines and interests.
He who adopts the mores of another group is a still more heinous
criminal. The mediaeval definition of a heretic was one who varied in
life and conversation, dress, speech, or manner (that is, the social
ritual) from the ordinary members of the Christian community. The
first meaning of 'Catholic' in the fourth century was a summary of
the features which were common to all Christians in social and eccle-
siastical behavior; those were Catholic who conformed to the mores
which were characteristic of Christians. If a heretic was better than
the Catholics, they hated him more. That never excused him before
the church authorities. They wanted loyalty to the ecclesiastical cor-
poration. Persecution of a dissenter is always popular in the group
which he has abandoned. Toleration of dissent is no sentiment of
the masses. . . .
"In the stage of half-civilization and above there have been many
cases of sects which have 'withdrawn from the world' and lived an
isolated life. They were dissenters from the world philosophy or the
life policy current in the society to which they belonged. The real
issue was that they were at war with its mores. In that war they could
not prevail so as to change the mores. They could not even realize
their own plan of life in the midst of uncongenial mores. The Eng-
lish Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to trans-
FOLKWAYS 79
form the mores of their age. Many of them emigrated to uninhabited
territory in order to make a society in which their ideal mores should
be realized. Very many sects and parties emigrated to North America
in the seventeenth century with the same purpose. The Quakers went
to the greatest extreme in adopting dress, language, manners, etc.,
which should be different from the current usages. In all this they
were multiplying ritual means of isolation and of cultivation of their
chosen ways of life. They were not strenuous about theological dog-
mas. Their leading notions were really about the mores and bore on
social policy. In the Netherlands, in 1657, they appeared as a militant
sect of revolutionary communists and levelers. In New England they
courted persecution. They wanted to cultivate states of mind and
traits of social character which they had selected as good, and their
ritual was devised to that end (humility, simplicity, peacefulness,
friendliness, truth). They are now being overpowered and absorbed
by the mores of the society which surrounds them. The same is true
of Shakers, Moravians, and other sects of dissenters from the mores
of the time and place" [Ibid., pp. 95-97].
VARIABILITY AND CHANGEABILITY OF THE MORES
"No less remarkable than the persistency of the mores is their
changeableness and variation. There is here an interesting parallel to
heredity and variation in the organic world, even though the parallel
has no significance. Variation in the mores is due to the fact that
children do not perpetuate the mores just as they received them. The
father dies, and the son whom he has educated, even if he continues
the ritual and repeats the formulae, does not think and feel the
same ideas and sentiments as his father. The observance of Sunday;
the mode of treating parents, children, servants, and wives or hus-
bands; holidays; amusements; arts of luxury; marriage and divorce;
wine drinking, — are matters in regard to which it is easy to note
changes in the mores from generation to generation, in our own
times. Even in Asia, when a long period of time is taken into account,
changes in the mores are perceptible. The mores change because con-
ditions and interests change. It is found that dogmas and maxims
which have been current do not verify; that established taboos are
useless or mischievous restraints; that usages which are suitable for a
village or a colony are not suitable for a great city or state; that many
SO WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
things are fitting when the community is rich which were not so
when it was poor; that new inventions have made new ways of living
more economical and healthful. It is necessary to prosperity that the
mores should have a due degree of firmness, but also that they should
be sufficiently elastic and flexible to conform to changes in interests
and life conditions" [Ibid., p. 84].
"In further development of the same interpretation of the phe-
nomena we find that changes in history are primarily due to changes
in life conditions. Then the folkways change. Then new philosophies
and ethical rules are invented to try to justify the new ways. The
whole vast body of modern mores has thus been developed out of
the philosophy and ethics of the Middle Ages. So the mores which
have been developed to suit the system of great secular states, world
commerce, credit institutions, contract wages and rent, emigration to
outlying continents, etc., have become the norm for the whole body
of usages, manners, ideas, faiths, customs, and institutions which
embrace the whole life of a society and characterize an historical
epoch. Thus India, Chaldea, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Mid-
dle Ages, Modern Times, are cases in which the integration of the
mores upon different life conditions produced societal states of com-
plete and distinct individuality (ethos). Within any such societal
status the great reason for any phenomenon is that it conforms to
the mores of the time and place. Historians have always recognized
incidentally the operation of such a determining force. What is now
maintained is that it is not incidental or subordinate. It is supreme
and controlling. Therefore the scientific discussion of a usage, cus-
tom, or institution consists in tracing its relation to the mores, and
the discussion of societal crises and changes consists in showing their
connection with changes in the life conditions, or with the readjust-
ment of the mores to changes in those conditions" [Ibid., p. 36].
THE MORES AND INSTITUTIONS
Sumner was one of the first to advance a theory of social institu-
tions, indicating the manner in which they are produced out of mores.
To him also is to be credited one of the clearest of modern theories
in this field. In what has become a famous definition he stated: "An
institution consists of a concept (idea, notion, doctrine, interest) and
a structure. The structure is a framework, or apparatus, or perhaps
FOLKWAYS 8l
only a number of functionaries set to cooperate in prescribed ways at
a certain conjuncture. The structure holds the concept and furnishes
instrumentalities for bringing it into the world of facts and action in
a way to serve the interests of men in society" [Ibid., pp. 53-54]. In
this functional and behavioristic conception, every institution re-
quires a system of acts and behavior, "in which custom produces con-
tinuity, coherence, and consistency, so that the word 'structure' may
properly be applied to the fabric of relations and prescribed positions
with which societal functions are permanently connected" [Ibid., p.
35]. Institutions and, as we shall later see, laws constitute the most
highly developed and positive form of group pressure to conform.
Sumner noted an important distinction among institutions: "In-
stitutions are either crescive or enacted. They are crescive when they
take shape in the mores, growing by the instinctive efforts by which
the mores are produced. Then the efforts, through long use, become
definite and specific. Property, marriage, and religion are the most
primary institutions. They began in folkways. They became customs.
They developed into mores by the addition of some philosophy of
welfare, however crude. Then they were made more definite and
specific as regards the rules, the prescribed acts, and the apparatus to
be employed. This produced a structure and the institution was com-
plete.
"Enacted institutions are products of rational invention and inten-
tion. They belong to high civilization. Banks are institutions of credit
founded on usages which can be traced back to barbarism. There
came a time when, guided by rational reflection on experience, men
systematized and regulated the usages which had become current, and
thus created positive institutions of credit, defined by law and sanc-
tioned by the force of the state. Pure enacted institutions which are
strong and prosperous are hard to find. It is too difficult to invent
and create an institution, for a purpose, out of nothing. The electoral
college in the constitution of the United States is an example. In
that case the democratic mores of the people have seized upon the
device and made of it something quite different from what the in-
ventors planned. All institutions have come out of mores, although
the rational element in them is sometimes so large that their origin
in the mores is not to be ascertained except by an historical investi-
gation (legislatures, courts, juries, joint stock companies, the stock
exchange). Property, marriage, and religion are still almost entirely in
the mores" [Ibid., p. 54].
82 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
RELIGION AND THE MORES
"Religion was originally a matter of the mores. It became a societal
institution and a function of the state. It has now to a great extent
been put back into the mores. Since laws with penalties to enforce
religious creeds or practices have gone out of use, any one may think
as he pleases about religion. Therefore it is not now 'good form' to
attack religion" [Ibid., p. 76].
Religion, Sumner maintained, not only comes out of the mores, it
is controlled by them. Religion, however, sums up the most general
and philosophic elements in the mores and inculcates them as re-
ligious dogmas. It also forms precepts upon them. Changes in re-
ligion are produced by changes in the mores. The new religious ideas
are then brought back to the mores as controlling dogmas.
"Religion never has been an independent force acting from outside
creatively to mold the mores or the ideas of men. Evidently such an
idea is the extreme form of the world philosophy in which another
(spiritual) world is conceived of as impinging upon this one from
'above/ to give it laws and guidance. The mores grow out of the life
as a whole. They change with the life conditions, density of popu-
lation, and life experience. Then they become strange or hostile to
traditional religion. In our own experience our mores have reached
views about ritual practices, polygamy, slavery, celibacy, etc., which
are strange or hostile to those in the Bible. Since the sixteenth cen-
tury we have reconstructed our religion to fit our modern ideas and
mores. Every religious reform in history has come about in this way.
All religious doctrines and ritual acts are held immutable by strong
interests and notions of religious duty. Therefore they fall out of
consistency with the mores, which are in constant change, being
acted on by all the observation or experience of life. Sacral harlotry
is a case, the ethical horror of which is very great and very obvious
to us, of old religious ideas and customs preserved by the religion into
times of greatly changed moral (i.e., of the mores) and social codes"
[Ibid., pp. 510, 540-41 quoted; see also "Religion and the Mores,"
Essays oi William Graham Sumner, I, 55-72].
SEX MORES AND THE FAMILY INSTITUTION
Sumner held that marriage, under any of its forms (polygamy,
polyandry, monogamy, etc.), is only a crystallization of a set of sex
FOLKWAYS 83
mores into an imperfect institution. "In civilized society this cluster
of mores, constituting a relationship by which needs are satisfied and
sentiments are cherished, is given a positive form by legislation, and
the rights and duties which grow out of the relationship get positive
definition and adequate guarantees. The case is, therefore, a very
favorable one for studying the operation of the mores in the making
of institutions, or preparing them for the final work of the lawmaker"
[Ibid., pp. 395-96].
"Although we speak of marriage as an institution, it is only an
imperfect one. It has no structure. The family is the institution, and
it was antecedent to marriage. Marriage has always been an elastic
and variable usage, as it now is. Each pair, or other marital combina-
tion, has always chosen its own 'ways' of living within the limits set
by the mores. In fact the use of language reflects the vagueness of
marriage, for we use the word 'marriage' for wedding, nuptials, or
matrimony (wedlock). Only the latter could be an institution" [Ibid.,
pp. 348-49].
The process by which marriage and the family developed out of the
mores was delineated by Sumner as follows:
Meaning oi sex mores. "The sex mores are one of the greatest and
most important divisions of the mores. They cover the relations of
men and women to each other before marriage and in marriage, with
all the rights and duties of married and unmarried respectively to the
rest of the society. The mores determine what marriage shall be, who
may enter into it, in what way they may enter into it, divorce, and
all details of proper conduct in the family relation. In regard to all
these matters it is evident that custom governs and prescribes. When
positive institutions and laws are made they always take up, ordain,
and regulate what the mores have long previously made facts in the
social order. In the administration of law also, especially by juries,
domestic relations are controlled by the mores. The decisions ren-
dered by judges utter in dogmatic or sententious form the current
notions of truth and right about those relations. Our terms 'en-
dogamy/ 'mother family/ 'polyandry/ etc., are only descriptive terms
for a summary of the folkways which have been established in dif-
ferent groups and which are capable of classification" [Ibid., pp.
342-43].
"The division of the human race into two sexes is the most im-
portant of all anthropological facts. The sexes differ so much in struc-
ture and function, and consequently in traits of feeling and character,
84 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
that their interests are antagonistic. At the same time they are, in
regard to reproduction, complementary. There is nothing in the sex
relation, or in procreation, to bring about any continuing relation
between a man and a woman. It is the care and education of children
which first calls for such a continuing relation. The continuing rela-
tion is not therefore 'in nature/ It is institutional and conventional.
A man and a woman were brought together, probably against their
will, by a higher interest in the struggle for existence. The woman
with a child needed the union more, and probably she was more
unwilling to enter it. A woman with a child entered into an arrange-
ment with a man, whether the father or not was immaterial, by which
they carried on the struggle for existence together. The arrangement
must have afforded advantages to both. It was produced by an agree-
ment. The family institution resulted and became customary by imi-
tation. Marriage was the form of agreement between the man and
the woman by which they entered into the family institution. In the
most primitive form of life known to us (Australians and Bushmen)
the man roams abroad in search of meat food. His wife or wives stay
by the fire at a trysting place, care for the children, and collect plant
food. Thus the combination comes under the form of antagonistic
cooperation. It presents us the germ of the industrial organization. It
is a product of the folkways, being the resultant custom which arises,
in time, out of the ways of satisfying interests which separate individ-
uals, or pairs, invent and try. It follows that marriage in all its forms
is in the mores of the time and place" [Ibid., p. 345].
Definition ot marriage. "The definition of marriage consists in
stating what, at any time and place, the mores have imposed as reg-
ulations on the relations of a man and woman who are cooperatively
carrying on the struggle for existence and the reproduction of the
species. The regulations are always a conventionalization which sets
the terms, modes, and conditions under which a pair may cohabit.
It is, therefore, impossible to formulate a definition of marriage which
will cover all forms of it throughout the history of civilization" [Ibid.,
p. 348].
Wedlock. "Wedlock is a mode of associated life. It is as variable
as circumstances, interests, and character make it within the condi-
tions. No rules or laws control it. They only affect the condition
against which the individuals react. No laws can do more than
specify ways of entering into wedlock, and the rights and duties of
the parties in wedlock to each other, which the society will enforce.
FOLKWAYS 85
These, however, are but indifferent externals. All the intimate daily
play of interests, emotions, character, taste, etc., are beyond the reach
of the bystanders, and that play is what makes wedlock what it is for
every pair. Nevertheless the relations of the parties are always deeply
controlled by the current opinions in the society, the prevalent ethical
standards, the approval or condemnation passed by the bystanders on
cases between husbands and wives, and by the precepts and traditions
of the old. Thus the mores hold control over individual taste and
caprice, and individual experience reacts against the control. All the
problems of marriage are in the intimate relations. When they affect
large numbers they are brought under the solution of the mores.
Therefore the history of marriage is to be interpreted by the mores,
and its philosophy must be sought in the fact that it is an ever-moving
product of the mores" [Ibid., p. 349].
Pair marriage. That marriage is "an ever-moving product of the
mores" is further indicated by the marital form common in modern
civilized societies which Sumner termed "pair marriage." "Polyandry
passed over into polygamy when sufficient property was at command.
There was a neutral middle point where one man had one wife. It
follows that monogamy is not a specific term. It might be monogamy
if one man had one wife but also concubines and slaves, or he might
have but one wife in fact, although free to have more if he chose.
The term 'pair marriage* is needed as a technical term for the form
of marriage which is as exclusive and permanent for the man as for
the woman, which one enters on the same plane of free agreement as
the other, and in which all the rights and duties are mutual. In such
a union there may be a complete fusion of two lives and interests.
In no other form of union is such a fusion possible. This pair mar-
riage is the ideal which guides the marital usages of our time and
civilization, gives them their spirit and sense, and furnishes standards
for all our discussions, although it is far from being universally real-
ized. The ideal is made an object of 'pathos' in our popular literature.
Whence did it come? In truth, we can hardly learn. It existed, by
necessity of poverty and humble social status, in the classes amongst
whom Christianity took root. It found expression in the canon law.
It resisted, in the lower classes, the attempt of the church to suppress
it in order to aggrandize the corporation. It resisted, in the same
classes, the corruption of the Renaissance. It has risen with those
classes to wealth and civil power. In modern times 'moral' has been
used technically for what conforms to the code of pair marriage.
86 WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
"Pair marriage has excluded every other form of sex relation. To
modern people it is hard to understand how different forms of sex
relation could exist side by side and all be right. The explanation is
in the mores. A concubine may be a woman who has a defined and
legally guaranteed relation to one man, if the mores have so deter-
mined. Her circumstances have not opened to her the first rank, that
of a wife, but she has another which is recognized in the society as
honorable. The same may be said of a slave woman, or of a mor-
ganatic wife. Amongst the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans of the em-
pire concubines were a recognized class. A concubine was not a
woman who had cast off her own honor until after the thirteenth
century, and although her position became doubtful, it was not dis-
reputable for two or three centuries more. Morganatic marriages for
princes have continued down to our own time. Whatever is defined
and provided for in the mores as a way of solving the problem of life
interests is never wrong. Hence the cases of sacral harlotry, of tem-
porary marriage (as in China, Korea, Japan, and ancient Arabia), of
royal concubines (since the king was forced to accept a status wife
of prescribed rank, etc.), and all the other peculiar arrangements
which have existed in history are accounted for.
"Pair marriage, however, has swept all other forms away. It is the
system of the urban-middle-capitalist class. It has gained strength in
all the new countries where all men and women were equal within a
small margin and the women bore their share of the struggle for
existence. The environment, in the new countries, favored the mores
of the class from which the emigrants came. In the old countries the
mores of the middle class have come into conflict with the mores of
peasants and nobles. The former have steadily won. The movement
has been the same everywhere, although the dates of the steps in it
have been different. As to women, the countries which are at the
rear of the modern movement keep the old mores; those which are at
the head of it have emancipated women most, and have swept away
from their legislation all toleration for anything but pair marriage.
Vice, of course, still affects facts, and the growth of wealth and luxu-
rious habits seems to be developing a tendency to take up again some
old customs which bear an aristocratic color. It must be expected that
when the economic facts which now favor the lower middle classes
pass away and new conditions arise the marriage mores will change
again. Democracy and pair marriage are now produced by the con-
ditions. Both are contingent and transitory. In aristocratic society a
FOLKWAYS 87
man's family arrangements are his own prerogative. When life be-
comes harder it will become aristocratic, and concubinage may be
expected to arise again" [Ibid., pp. 374-76].
Pair marriage and divorce. "With the rise of pair marriage came
divorce for the woman, upon due reason, as much as for the man.
Hence freer divorce goes with pair marriage. Such must inevitably be
the case, if it be admitted that any due reason for divorce ever can
exist. The more poetical and elevated the ideas are which are clus-
tered around marriage, the more probable it is that experience will
produce disappointment. If one spouse enters wedlock with the belief
that the other is the most superlative man or woman living, the cases
must be very few in which disappointment and disillusion will not
result. Moreover, pair marriage, by its exclusiveness, risks the happi-
ness of the parties on a very narrow and specific condition of life.
The coercion of this arrangement for many persons must become
intolerable. . . .
"No society ever has existed or ever can exist in which no divorce
is allowed. In all stages of the father family it has been possible for a
man to turn his wife out of doors, and for a wife to run away from
her husband. They divorce themselves when they have determined
that they want to do so. It would be an easy solution of marriage
problems to assert that the society will use its force to compel all
spouses who disagree, or for whom the marriage relation has become
impossible through the course of events, nevertheless to continue to
live in wedlock. Such a rule would produce endless misery, shame,
and sin. There are reasons for divorce. Adultery is recognized as such
a reason in the New Testament. It is a rational reason, especially
under pair marriage. There are other rational reasons. . . . The mores
decide at last what causes shall be sufficient. . . . When the law of
the state or of ecclesiastical bodies goes with the mores it prevails;
when it departs from the mores it fails. The mores are also sure to
act in regard to a matter which presents itself in a large class of cases,
and which calls for social and ethical judgments. At last, compre-
hensive popular judgments will be formed and they will get into
legislation. They will adjust interests so that people can pursue self-
realization with success and satisfaction, under social judgments as to
the rules necessary to preserve the institutions of wedlock and the
family. The pursuit of happiness, either in the acquisition of property
or in the enjoyment of family life, is only possible in submission to
laws which define social order, rights, and duties, and against which
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
the individual must react at every point. It is the mores which con-
stantly revise and readjust the laws of social order, and so define the
social conditions within which self-realization must go on" [Ibid., pp.
379-82].
THE MORES AND LAW
"Acts of legislation come out of the mores. In low civilization all
societal regulations are customs and taboos, the origin of which is
unknown. Positive laws are impossible until the stage of verification,
reflection, and criticism is reached. Until that point is reached there
is only customary law, or common law. The customary law may be
codified and systematized with respect to some philosophical prin-
ciples, and yet remain customary. The codes of Manu and Justinian
are examples. Enactment is not possible until reverence for ancestors
has been so much weakened that it is no longer thought wrong to
interfere with traditional customs by positive enactment. Even then
there is reluctance to make enactments, and there is a stage of tran-
sition during which traditional customs are extended by interpreta-
tion to cover new cases and to prevent evils. Legislation, however, has
to seek standing ground on the existing mores, and it soon becomes
apparent that legislation, to be strong, must be consistent with the
mores.
"Things which have been in the mores are put under police regu-
lation and later under positive law. It is sometimes said that 'public
opinion' must ratify and approve police regulations, but this state-
ment rests an an imperfect analysis. The regulations must conform
to the mores, so that the public will not think them too lax or too
strict. The mores of our urban and rural populations are not the
same; consequently legislation about intoxicants which is made by
one of these sections of the population does not succeed when ap-
plied to the other. The regulation of drinking places, gambling places,
and disorderly houses has passed through the above-mentioned stages.
It is always a question of expediency whether to leave a subject under
the mores, or to make a police regulation for it, or to put it into the
criminal law. Betting, horse racing, dangerous sports, electric cars,
and vehicles are cases now of things which seem to be passing under
positive enactment and out of the unformulated control of the mores.
When an enactment is made there is a sacrifice of the elasticity and
automatic self-adaptation of custom, but an enactment is specific and
FOLKWAYS 89
is provided with sanctions. Enactments come into use when conscious
purposes are formed, and it is believed that specific devices can be
framed by which to realize such purposes in the society. Then also
prohibitions take the place of taboos, and punishments are planned
to be deterrent rather then revengeful. The mores of different socie-
ties, or of different ages, are characterized by greater or less readiness
and confidence in regard to the use of positive enactments for the
realization of societal purposes" [Ibid., pp. 55-56].
HOW LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS DIFFER FROM MORES
"When folkways have become institutions or laws they have
changed their character and are to be distinguished from the mores.
The element of sentiment and faith inheres in the mores. Laws and
institutions have a rational and practical character, and are more
mechanical and utilitarian. The great difference is that institutions
and laws have a positive character, while mores are unformulated and
undefined. There is a philosophy implicit in the folkways; when it
is made explicit it becomes technical philosophy. Objectively re-
garded, the mores are the customs which actually conduce to welfare
under existing life conditions. Acts under the laws and institutions
are conscious and voluntary; under the folkways they are always un-
conscious and involuntary, so that they have the character of natural
necessity. Educated reflection and skepticism can disturb this spon-
taneous relation. The laws, being positive prescriptions, supersede the
mores so far as they are adopted. It follows that the mores come into
operation where laws and tribunals fail. The mores cover the great
field of common life where there are no laws or police regulations.
They cover an immense and undefined domain, and they break the
way in new domains, not yet controlled at all. The mores, therefore,
build up new laws and police regulations in time" [Ibid., pp. 56-57].
THE POSSIBILITY OF MODIFYING THE MORES
"The combination in the mores of persistency and variability de-
termines the extent to which it is possible to modify them by arbi-
trary action. It is not possible to change them, by any artifice or de-
vice, to a great extent, or suddenly, or in any essential element; it is
possible to modify them by slow and long-continued effort if the
ritual is changed by minute variations" [Ibid., p. 87].
9° WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
After reviewing various cases of attempted reform among historical
peoples [Ibid., pp. 87-94], Sumner answered as follows the question
he posed: What changes are possible? "All these cases go to show
that changes which run with the mores are easily brought about, but
that changes which are opposed to the mores require long and patient
effort, if they are possible at all. The ruling clique can use force to
warp the mores towards some result which they have selected, espe-
cially if they bring their effort to bear on the ritual, not on the
dogmas, and if they are contented to go slowly. The church has won
great results in this way, and by so doing has created a belief that
religion, or ideas, or institutions, make mores. The leading classes,
no matter by what standard they are selected, can lead by example,
which always affects ritual. An aristocracy acts in this way. It suggests
standards of elegance, refinement, and nobility; and the usages of
good manners, from generation to generation, are such as have spread
from the aristocracy to other classes. Such influences are unspoken,
unconscious, unintentional. If we admit that it is possible and right
for some to undertake to mold the mores of others, of set purpose,
we see that the limits within which any such effort can succeed are
very narrow, and the methods by which it can operate are strictly
defined. The favorite methods of our time are legislation and preach-
ing. These methods fail because they do not affect ritual, and because
they always aim at great results in a short time. Above all, we can
judge of the amount of serious attention which is due to plans for
'reorganizing society/ to get rid of alleged errors and inconveniences
in it. We might as well plan to reorganize our globe by redistributing
the elements in it" [Ibid., pp. 94-95].
THE ART OF SOCIETAL ADMINISTRATION
Finally, Sumner pointed out how an understanding of the mores
can serve scientifically to promote social welfare through "the art of
societal administration." "It is not to be inferred that reform and
correction are hopeless. Inasmuch as the mores are a phenomenon
of the society and not of the state, and inasmuch as the machinery
of administration belongs to the state and not to the society, the
administration of the mores presents peculiar difficulties. Strictly
speaking, there is no administration of the mores, or it is left to
voluntary organs acting by moral suasion. The state administration
FOLKWAYS Q!
fails if it tries to deal with the mores, because it goes out of its
province. The voluntary organs which try to administer the mores
(literature, moral teachers, schools, churches, etc.) have no set
method and no persistent effort. They very often make great errors
in their methods. In regard to divorce, for instance, it is idle to set up
stringent rules in an ecclesiastical body, and to try to establish them
by extravagant and false interpretation of the Bible, hoping in that
way to lead opinion; but the observation and consideration of cases
which occur affect opinion and form convictions. The statesman and
social philosopher can act with such influences, sum up the forces
which make them, and greatly help the result. The inference is that
intelligent art can be introduced here as elsewhere, but that it is
necessary to understand the mores and to be able to discern the
elements in them, just as it is always necessary for good art to under-
stand the facts of nature with which it will have to deal. It belongs
to the work of publicists and statesmen to gauge the forces in the
mores and to perceive their tendencies. The great men of a great
epoch are those who have understood new currents in the mores.
The great reformers of the sixteenth century, the great leaders of
modern revolutions, were, as we can easily see, produced out of a
protest or revulsion which had long been forming under and within
the existing system. The leaders are such because they voice the con-
victions which have become established and because they propose
measures which will realize interests of which the society has become
conscious. . . .
"Great crises come when great new forces are at work changing
fundamental conditions, while powerful institutions and traditions
still hold old systems intact. The fifteenth century was such a period.
It is in such crises that great men find their opportunity. The man
and the age react on each other. The measures of policy which are
adopted and upon which energy is expended become components in
the evolution. The evolution, although it has the character of a
nature process, always must issue by and through men whose passions,
follies, and wills are a part of it but are also always dominated by it.
The interaction defies our analysis, but it does not discourage our
reason and conscience from their play on the situation, if we are
content to know that their function must be humble. Stoll boldly
declares that if one of us had been a judge in the times of the witch
trials he would have reasoned as the witch judges did, and would
„- WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER
have tortured like them.* If that is so, then it behooves us by educa-
tion and will, with intelligent purpose, to criticise and judge even the
most established ways of our time, and to put courage and labor into
resistance to the current mores where we judge them wrong. It would
be a mighty achievement of the science of society if it could lead up
to an art of societal administration which should be intelligent,
effective, and scientific" [Ibid., pp. 117-18].
* O. Stoll, Suggestion und Hypnotismus in der Volkerpsychologie, Leipzig, 1904,
p. 248.
Major Contributors to Social Science Series
Emile Durkheim
Vilfredo Pareto
William Graham Sumner
Thorstein Veblei
Lester Frank Ward
Max Weber
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