In Sumner's essays of the late 1880s and early 1890s, this change brought another important if subtle shift in emphasis. As he turned attention to monopoly and Marxism, he escalated his assault on metaphysics, redefining abstract conceptions in terms of hard, irrefutable, material facts. A term such as "proletariat," thus reduced, had virtually no meaning: the real social contest was between the "House of Have and the House of Want." "Monopoly" referred to the natural monopoly inherent in the technology of railway and telegraph, and was in no way a product of "capitalist society." "Capital" was not, as Marx maintained, a product of an exploitative system but was rather the banked reserves of past effort.
A measure of this change, "The Absurd Effort to Make Over the World," (1894) differed from Social Classes in tone and argument. Unlike his earlier appeals to logic or the "laws of nature," he now answered social reformers with an "appeal to the facts," historical facts in particular."[All] the allegations of general mischief. social corruption, wrong, and evil in our society must be referred back to those who make them for particulars and specifications," he wrote. "As they are offered to us we cannot allow them to stand, because we discern in them faulty observation of facts, or incorrect interpretation of facts, or a construction of facts according to some philosophy, or misunderstanding of phenomena and their relations, or incorrect inferences, or crooked deductions".
But Sumner also tacitly admitted that in his own way he himself had been guilty of "the vain fancy that we can make or guide the movement." Although in later years he took up his pen to oppose free silver, to condemn American imperialism, and to attack the socialist Upton Sinclair in Collier's in 1904, he increasingly avoided public controversy. In this sense, "The Absurd Effort" was Sumner's own valedictory after one decade as educational reformer and "scholar in politics," and a second as social theorist trying to figure out what a science of society should look like.
ANTI-IMPERIALIST TO SOCIOLOGIST
In 1890 Sumner fell victim to what was termed a "nervous illness." His personal problems and poor health could not take a punishing work schedule that had resulted in sixty articles and two books in the previous three years. In December he set sail for an extended stay in Europe, financed in part by forty-two loyal supporters, among them Henry Holt, Chauncey Depew, and William C. Whitney.
Although Sumner resumed his duties at Yale in the fall of 1892, the collapse took a permanent toll on his energies and output. Between 1876 and 1890, he had published some 108 articles and seven books. In the five years following his breakdown, he wrote "only" four articles and two books. Although in 1896 he added another dozen articles and a book, he averaged but two articles a year during the rest of his career, and left uncompleted his projected "science of society," save for the substantial fragment that appeared as Folkways (1906). Although ill health does not alone explain the tone and mood of his later work, he judged the world from a bed of pain.
Personal disillusionment, as in the late seventies, had important implications for Sumner's intellectual development. The growing gap between American ideals and current realities pushed him toward both a thoroughgoing relativism and a reification of national folly son to be termed "folkways" and "mores." The United States historically had one set of principles: in 1898, embarking on a war with Spain, it found some of these inconvenient and dropped them. "There are no dogmatic propositions of political philosophy which are universally and always true," he wrote with new-found resignation. The Spanish-American war also dramatized the difference between "purposes" and "consequences," a distinction that led directly to the behavioristic orientation of Folkways.
The blustering Theodore Roosevelt, and the "fads" and "delusions" of the progressive era, completed this descent into political cynicism. With T.R. at the helm, he feared that America was entering its dangerous "glory days." But to Sumner the alternative of Bryan seemed even worse. "We shall have to vote for Teddy in 1908 in order to ward off Bryan and Hades," Sumner commented in 1906, but in so doing, would be "disgraced forever." Although Sumner in fact supported his former student William Howard Taft in 1908, more than a decade of Bryanism left its mark as Sumner judged his proposals to be not merely passing folly, but significant indicators of changes in the national "mores," a term he first adopted in 1899 when he began to work seriously on his proposed science of society.
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In Folkways, Sumner moulded his disgust at the course of American politics and society into one of the five or six most important books in sociology published in the United States in the years before the First World War. On the surface, its thesis was beguilingly straightforward. Humanity is driven by four basic instincts of hunger, love, vanity, and fear. In all societies, individuals attempt to satisfy these drives as best they can. Through trial and error, one method of satisfying demand becomes customary for all or a significant part of a society. These methods Sumner termed "folkways." Initially experimental, folkways gain a moral sanction through a process of comparison and reflection. The mores are folkways grown moral and reflective. "Good" and "bad" have no meaning outside of the mores. Since those mores survive that command the support of the most powerful groups, "nothing but might has ever made right."
Sumner then complicated things by adding that the mores are sometimes mischievous and even wrong. Accidents, irrationality, and "pseudo-knowledge" sometimes enter into their formation. Some folkways are "positively harmful." The results were things he increasingly disliked: "advertisers who exaggerate," "the ways of journalism," "electioneering devices," "oratorical and dithyrambic extravagances in politics." Although this catalogue of contemporary horrors were "not properly part of the mores," they were "symptoms of them."
The problem was that the judgment of mores as "bad" and "good" seemed to imply an external standard that, by Sumner's own accounting, existed only within the mores. This standard, however, was not a patchwork of youthful assumptions smuggled in through a backdoor (as some of his critics later maintained), but rather the scientific outlook itself, an outlook which an elite (the "classes") introduced into the mores in the modern democratic period. This "matter-of-factness" (as Sumner's former student Veblen termed it) allowed the social scientist, by examining the mores historically, to determine which had proved conducive to societal survival. The mores, that is, contained a self-correcting element.
Science thus provided an escape from the dreary logic of might-makes-right, anathema to a middle class threatened by socialism on the one hand, and plutocracy on the other. The key was the difference between a posterior and an anterior view of things. On the former "Nothing but might has ever made right, and. . .nothing but might makes right now." But on the anterior view the case was different. "If we are about to take some action and are debating the right of it, the might that can be brought to support the view of it has nothing to do with the right of it." Science, applied to the study of history (the sociologists' laboratory) could provide this anterior view, could, that is, demonstrate the superiority of one set of values over others, specifically the "virtue policy" over the "success policy."
Science was both relative and absolute, Sumner continued, restating a lifelong distinction between science as speculation and as method. As "ism", science was subject to "fashion" no less than were other human endeavors. Even "evolutionism," although "now accepted as a final fact," might well turn out to be "only a fashion." But science, defined as apprehension of facts-as-they-are, was not relative or ephemeral. It was the scientific outlook in this narrow sense that was gradually entering the mores of the "classes."
Working to these conclusions, Sumner early in the new century attempted finally to comes to grips with Darwin, ironically two decades after the furor of the eighties. His guide was his disciple Albert G.Keller, himself then immersed in the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man for a course on human evolution. While the younger man lectured, Sumner posed various questions. Did the mores evolve? Could they be arranged "in a logical scale of advance" to support a theory of progress? Were they subject to natural selection? Could they be analyzed statistically? In a series of unpublished essays, his answer in each case was no. In the end, Sumner's eleventh-hour brush with Darwinian evolution merely confirmed his lifelong Baconianism, now almost caricatured in his celebration of "facts." "The Scientific Attitude of Mind," he told a meeting of Sigma Xi in 1905, produced a "knowledge of reality" that was neither a philosophy nor a mere consensus of trained observers. His "thirst" for this reality amounted to a passion.
But did the incorporation of the scientific outlook within the mores provide a basis for conscious social policy directed by a scientific elite? Sumner sometimes seemed to imply as much: "the historical classes have...selected purposes, and have increased ways of fulfilling them." Whether for good or ill, they introduced "variation" that produced change. In a most un-Sumnerian statement he saw the goal of the "science of society" to be the development of "an art of societal administration" that was "intelligent, effective, and scientific." In the manuscript version of one of his final essays, he insisted that the "masses" acknowledge "the authority of the specialist and expert."
But in a more fundamental sense, his narrowly Baconian definition of the mores as "facts" distanced his proposals from those of progressives (such as fellow sociologist Lester Ward) who called for "sociocracy" and "creative intelligence." Although not "natural laws" in the older sense, the mores as "facts" were just as inexorable in operation. In their ubiquitous inevitability, they ruled out most social engineering almost as surely as did the "laws of physics" to which Sumner had appealed in the 1880s. But only almost. Although Folkways resounded with warnings against precipitous reform, Sumner only intended to insist that proposed changes conform to the mores. Although the mores of the "classes" (including the scientific outlook) were historically less basic than those of the "masses," this latest "variation" promised a better if fragile future.
There was, of course, a trick in Sumner's hardnosed empiricism. The mores, insofar as they embrace beliefs as well as behavior, are not "facts" in quite the same sense as are tables and chairs. As one critic later asked: "who ever saw a tradition?" Rather, the notion of the mores represented a new way of conceptualizing social reality. The term was an imaginative construct no less than "Gemeinschaft" or "primary group." Mores were "facts," not literally but by analogy: they had the "authority of facts."
If old fashioned in one sense, Sumner's Baconian view of science disposed him to see something that escaped many reform-minded contemporaries, namely that social institutions and customs, although initially instrumental, assume a coercive character that transcends mere utility, coercive in the sense that they are as difficult to deny as the "facts" of the natural world-- --a view similar to one the being developed by the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim. Like natural "facts," Sumner explained toward the end of his life, the mores are "very difficult to discuss" and may be judged only in the light of history, and then only "within narrow limits." This coercive power did not rule out prudent change; but it explained why, as he earlier put it in one of his more quotable lines, "it is the greatest folly. . .to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world."
PROPHET AND LEGACY
During his final decade, Sumner's professional and personal woes did not abate. The election of Arthur T. Hadley as Yale's president in 1899 brought concessions to the old anti-scientific Yale College tradition and a new emphasis on publication over teaching, both disturbing to Sumner. His feelings toward Hadley were "deep and powerful," Keller later confided, "and profane." Although Sumner gradually recovered from his nervous exhaustion, continuing debility forced him to abandon his "Science of Society" project. A stroke in late 1907 crippled his right arm for several months. One bright spot came with his election two years later as president of the recently founded American Sociological Society. But this honor finally proved his undoing when he suffered a final stroke after dragging himself to New York through a snowstorm to deliver the presidential address at the annual meeting in December. After lingering for several months, he died on April 10, 1910.
Increasingly during these final years, Sumner assumed the mantle of prophet in jeremiads worthy of the American Puritans. Already evident in his warnings against imperialism and war, and in the posthumously published "Bequests of the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth" (1900), this prophetic tone suffused the final portions of Folkways, where he excoriated plutocracy and socialism alike. Preaching a "cult of success," plutocracy brought a "deep depreciation of all social interests," he wrote, while the socialists' demand for "equality" posed an equal threat to national survival.
In "Bequests" Sumner also returned to the issue of "tradition" and "progress," and the related problem of cultural relativism, first developing the distinction between the thinking of the "masses" and "the classes" that reappeared in Folkways. Current clamor for "rights" and "power to the people" rested on a "popularity theory of truth, wisdom and right." To this he now opposed the "expert theory." "'Authority' is out of date, but everyone must know that competent authority (on everything by political and social questions) is what we have to live by," he continued. But should an exception be made here? Although Sumner muffled his answer in a series of rhetorical questions, he made it clear that he had little sympathy for the "man-on-the curbstone" who "resents expert advice." In the process he also revealed his own frustrations."The doctrine seems to be that if a man who was once humble and ignorant uses all the means mortals have to find out something, the result is that he knows less than his humble and ignorant comrades who never made any such attempt."
In "Mores of the Present and Future" (1909) this pessimism shaded into cynicism and near-despair. The eighteenth century "bequeathed to the nineteenth a great mass of abstract notions about rights and about the ultimate notions of political philosophy," he wrote, many of which were later enshrined in laws and constitutions. "Rights, justice, liberty, and equality are the watchwords instead of church, faith, heaven, and hell." But these slogans, and the mores associated with them, were possible only because humanity was currently in an "exceptional period" during which "global underpopulation" and "increasing control of natural forces" temporarily eased the "struggle for existence" against nature. Echoing the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, but on a world-wide scale, he warned that the inevitable return of "overpopulation and harder conditions" threatened an end to democracy. "The groups and parties will form and war will occur between then. Great dogmas will be put forth at all stages of these movements and appropriate watchwords will never be wanting."
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Although the terms "folkways," "mores," "in-group" and "out-group" soon made their way into the literature, Folkways was initially less than a success in the limited arena where professional reputations are measured. The early reviewers faulted its methodology no less than its political implications. As one Chicago sociologist remarked: ethnological data "seem at times to overweigh the book by their sheer bulk and multiplicity." Although at least one reviewer saw an affinity between Sumner's mores and Durkheim's "social facts," he made the point only to damn both as "objectivists." When a later generation became interested in the notion that social usages had the coercive power of "facts," they turned to the Rules of Sociological Method, not to Folkways.
As the social sciences became increasingly specialized, Sumner seemed to represent an older, more amateurish age. Albion Small of Chicago later confessed that he never thought of Sumner as a sociologist until, quite to his surprise, Sumner was elected president of the A.S.S. To others, his writings seemed closer to anthropology or philosophical history, while his apparent lack of "methodology" compounded the problem. "The Method--if it can be called a method," commented the urban sociologist Robert Park, consisted essentially of collecting facts which he barely analyzed.
Others faulted Folkways for its assumptions no less than its methodology. Although postulating possible differences between perceptions of right and good by the masses and the elite, the sociologist Edward Ross suggested, Sumner failed to explore the difference between the two, leaving open the possibility that the "mores are never right" because they are necessarily adaptations to past conditions. Althogh this charge erroneously equated Sumner with the most extreme of cultural relativists, its very existence suggested that his resolution of the problem was less than successful.
Problems in Sumner's formulation explain some of this criticism and even neglect, but intellectual merit was only part of the story. Another was Yale itself. Since the university still considered undergraduate education as important as graduate or professional training, Sumner left no "school" or even disciples, save for the all-too-faithful Keller, whose curmudgeon demeanor and rigid adherence to "Sumnerology" proved a barrier to cross-fertilization with theories at Chicago, Columbia, and elsewhere. Sumner himself trained only six doctoral students: Kate Halliday Claghorn (1896); James E. Cutler (1903); Henry Pratt Fairchild (1909); Arthur James Todd (1911); Frederick E. Lumley (1912); and Charles W. Coulter (1914). All occupied positions at academic institutions of the second rank, and at least four were primarily concerned with social work. Although Fairchild published a text on General Sociology (1934), he was better known for The Melting Pot Mistake (1926) and polemical pieces supporting eugenics, birth control, and immigration restriction. Lumley's The Means of Social Control (1925) was closest to the Folkways tradition, but owed equally much to Park and Burgess, and to Ross, and in any case made no claim to originality.
The fact that the best known of Sumner's students and disciples repudiated his politics further diluted any legacy he might have claimed. An avowed socialist, and vigorous critic of big business, Fairchild proposed governmental action on a scale that would have made Sumner wince, a factor that probably contributed to his dismissal at Yale in 1918 ("his continuance here would seriously hamper a development laid down by Sumner, followed by me, and approved by the faculty," Keller wrote circumspectly to a friend). During his tenure at Minnesota, Arthur J. Todd also offended local conservatives, while in The Means of Social Control Lumley offered instruction to any who "find it necessary or desirable to take a hand in the work of control." Among the most prominent of non-Yale disciples, Luther Bernard of Chicago (Ph.D. 1911) drew on Folkways for a dissertation advocating an "objective standard for social control." But Bernard's maverick behavior within the profession, and espousal of a curious brand of populist authoritarianism , did little to foster any recognizable "Sumner tradition."
In the interwar years, Sumner's work was also was caught in a political crossfire between proponents and opponents of the progressive-New Deal tradition. Carrying their earlier battles beyond the grave, the socialist Upton Sinclair launched a scurrilous attack in The Goose Step (1923), labelling Sumner a "prime minister of . . .plutocratic education" who took "ghoulish delight" in "glorifying commercialism". In Man's Rough Road (1932), Keller retaliated with an anti-New Deal rendition of The Science of Society (1927), his ponderous four-volume revision of Sumner's unpublished magnum opus. Responding in kind, liberals and socialists of various stripes launched the campaign that made Sumner a symbol of every imaginable excess of 19th century capitalism. Although Keller was not without blame (since in addition to his own propagandizing, his renditions of his mentor's work often distorted the original, notably in his insistence that the mores developed by a process of "social selection"), he was frankly appalled. "Some persons hopelessly allergic to 'isms' and 'ismics' have been ushered into the wrong pew," he wrote in a 1944 review of Richard Hofstadter's portrait of Sumner's "social Darwinism." But the label stuck.
In the post World War II era, economists joined the attack, now supported by the work of John Maynard Keynes and his disciples. Sumner's insistence that any government intervention would weaken the joint struggle for existence, these critics argued, was premised on the dubious assumption of full employment and an ignorance of the importance of consumer demand in mature industrial societies. Static and sort-run, his analysis showed little understanding of the workings of impure or imperfect competition that allows less than optimum allocation of resources under laissez faire.
Meanwhile Sumner left a sociological legacy of sorts in a growing interest in behavioristic and "objectivist" approaches as case studies, statistical analyses, urban ecology, and other empirical work supplanted the arm-chair theorizing, as it was now labelled, of prewar sociology. As Robert Park himself put it: "The effect of his researches was to lay a foundation for more realistic, more objective, and more systematic studies in the field of human nature and society than had existed up to that time." In their doctoral theses, a younger generation of objectivists seconded the point, among them William F. Ogburn of Chicago and F. Stuart Chapin of Minnesota, both leaders in efforts to make sociology more behavioristic in the interwar years. For these younger sociologists and their followers, social activities previously studied for their contributions to human happiness and social well-being became the impersonal data of science.
But this objectivist legacy was no less ironic than portraits of his social Darwinism. For Sumner, a "scientific attitude" offered an absolute standard to judge "errors" in the mores. Ogburn and his disciples, in contrast, translated objectivity into a creed of the service intellectual, more interested in the how than the why of social policy. At the same time, as agents of the emerging welfare state, they fostered a social engineering often longer on unintended consequences than positive results. College students compounded the irony by turning to Folkways in support of a now-fashionable cultural relativism that held no traditions or institutions better than others. Both interpretations would have made Sumner shudder. A moralist to the end, he prescribed in the act of describing. In treating mores as fact, he pictured an objective reality against which all plans for social reconstruction must be judged. Objectivity, in a word, did not mean ethical neutrality, social engineering, or unthinking relativism.
In portraits of Sumner's "social Darwinism" irony joined outright distortion. For one thing, most such accounts vastly exaggerated his influence. Far from being the Gilded Age's most influential theorist, Sumner watched as most in his generation, wherever positioned on the political spectrum, largely ignored his message, whether his call for discipline and self-denial, his denunciation of luxury and the excesses of consumerism, or his specific proposals for free trade and a government free of the influence of special interests. Just as Herbert Spencer finally felt that it was "Spencer against all of England," so Sumner might well have concluded that his alleged "influence" existed primarily in the minds of those whose own interests require ogres.
Charges of "social Darwinism" also caricature the substance of Sumner's thought. Although he defended private property and individual enterprise, he did not celebrate a struggle for existence or believe that Darwinism (or any other -ism) justified the dog-eat-dog struggle of modern America. Monumental struggles lay in the future, he warned in one of his last essays. But he abhorred the prospect. If he never successfully resolved the issues of tradition and progress, morality and science, the creative tension between them enabled him to see the complexity of society and the intractability of custom and tradition more clearly that his more sanguine contemporaries. The naturalism of his later thought expressed a growing pessimism over human willingness (although not ability) to use social science responsibly to reshape the mores.
On the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Sumner's birth, the successes and accomplishments of American capitalism and form of government stand in spectacular contrast to the collapse of the state socialism he so vigorously opposed. But it is as a critic of American society rather than an apologist for it that he most commands our attention. As contending factions contnue to clamor in the political marketplace, "watchwords," as he predicted, are not wanting, from "deregulation," "balanced budget" and "standards" on one side, to "tax fairness," "social justice," and "diversity" on the other. As the first two translate into political scandal and skyrocketing deficits, plutocracy again appears to threaten the republic. At the other extreme, "tax fairness" cloaks an age-old impulse to "soak the rich," while the relativism implicit in calls for "diversity" seems to some critics to herald a "closing of the American mind."
Although Sumner offers limited guidance on the specifics of current policy, his bold address of underlying issues provides a model of the hard-headed analysis too often missing in these debates, one major reason for renewed interest in his work during the past two decades (see bibliography). It was Sumner's virtue, as the historian Bruce Curtis has put it, "to peer into mysteries where there were no eternal verities" and to celebrate the "moral absolutes of honesty, work, responsibility, and moral courage." To contemporary philosophers of science, his naively inductive view of science may appear hopelessly old-fashioned, just as developments in the economic and political realm have outrun some (if not all) of his specific proposals. But behind his defense of the "scientific attitude" and his polemics lay a regard for the truth and a disdain of sham and hypocrisy that are ever in short supply. For this reason alone, he deserves another hearing.
Robert C. Bannister
Swarthmore College
November 1990