Concept
William Graham Sumner
Overview
William Graham Sumner (October 30, 1840 – April 12, 1910) was an American Episcopal priest, social scientist, and neoclassical liberal. He taught social sciences at Yale University, where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology and became one of the most influential teachers at any major school.
Sumner wrote extensively on the social sciences, penning numerous books and essays on ethics, American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. He supported laissez-faire economics, free markets, and the gold standard, in addition to coining the term "ethnocentrism" to identify the roots of imperialism, which he strongly opposed. As a spokesman against elitism, he was in favor of the "forgotten man" of the middle class—a term he coined. He had a prolonged influence on American conservatism.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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Yet those who know the habits of the continent of Europe are aware how apparently small a motive often outweighs the desire of money getting, even in the operations which have money getting for their direct object. The more highly the science of ethology is cultivated, and the better the diversities of individual and national character are understood, the smaller, probably, will the number of propositions become…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what William Graham Sumner is.
Positivists would be the last to deny that education ought to be regularly organized. Only they assert, first, that as long as the spiritual interregnum lasts, no organization is possible; and secondly, that whenever the acceptance of a new synthesis makes it possible, it will be effected by the spiritual power to which that synthesis gives rise. In the meantime no general system of State education should be…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
The author is tied to William Graham Sumner in the knowledge graph.
The right of private judgment, which our ancestors wrung from the church, remains to be claimed from this dictator of our habits. Or, as before said, to free us from these idolatries and superstitious conformities, there has still to come a protestanism in social usages. Parallel, therefore, as is the change to be wrought out, it seems not improbable that it may be wrought out in an analogous way. That influence…
Herbert Spencer, Essays on education and kindred subjects
The author is tied to William Graham Sumner in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed William Graham Sumner
Related ideas
- Free market
- Grover Cleveland
- Auguste Comte
- Elitism
- Imperialism
- Laissez-faire
- University of Göttingen
- Sociology
- Max Weber
- Philippines
- Herbert Spencer
- Socialism
- University of Oxford
- Natural rights and legal rights
- World War II
- Yale University
- Émile Durkheim
- Anti-imperialism
- Social Darwinism
- Free trade
- Classical liberalism
- American Civil War
- Ethnocentrism
- Henry Thomas Buckle
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.