FORGOTTEN?

The Forgotten Man (William Graham Sumner 1840-1910)

The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: 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 particular trouble; they do not understand that all the parts of society hold together, and that forces which are set in action act and react throughout 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, forgetting 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.

The friends of humanity start out with certain benevolent feelings toward "the poor," "the weak," "the laborers," and others of whom they make pets. They generalize these classes, and render them impersonal, and so constitute the classes into social pets. They turn to other classes and appeal to sympathy and generosity, and to all the other noble sentiments of the human heart. Action in the line proposed consists in a transfer of capital from the better off to the worse off. Capital, however, as we have seen, is the force by which civilization is maintained and carried on. The same piece of capital cannot be used in two ways. Every bit of capital, therefore, which is given to a shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but if it was put into reproductive use, it would have to be granted in wages to an efficient and productive laborer. Hence the real sufferer by that kind of benevolence which consists in an expenditure of capital to protect the good-for-nothing is the industrious laborer. The latter, however, is never thought of in this connection. It is assumed that he is provided for and out of the account. Such a notion only shows how little true notions of political economy have as yet become popularized. There is an almost invincible prejudice that a man who gives a dollar to a beggar is generous and kind-hearted, but that a man who refuses the beggar and puts the dollar in a savings bank is stingy and mean. The former is putting capital where it is very sure to be wasted, and where it will be a kind of seed for a long succession of future dollars, which must be wasted to ward off a greater strain on the sympathies than would have been occasioned by a refusal in the first place. Inasmuch as the dollar might have been turned into capital and given to a laborer who, while earning it, would have reproduced it, it must be regarded as taken from the latter. When a millionaire gives a dollar to a beggar the gain of utility to the beggar is enormous, and the loss of utility to the millionaire is insignificant. Generally the discussion is allowed to rest there. But if the millionaire makes capital of the dollar, it must go upon the labor market, as a demand for productive services. Hence there is another party in interest - the person who supplies productive services. There always are two parties. The second one is always the Forgotten Man, and any one who wants to truly understand the matter in question must go and search for the Forgotten Man. He will be found to be worthy, industrious, independent, and self-supporting. He is not, technically, "poor" or "weak"; he minds his own business, and makes no complaint. Consequently the philanthropists never think of him, and trample on him.

One walks into the local library, scans the book sale shelf and sees the "Liberty Fund" imprint on one spine: . As this publisher seems almost incapable of bringing out an uninteresting book, one thumbs through the text: On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner. Who?

Sumner, William Graham (InfoPlease)

Sumner, William Graham, 1840–1910, American sociologist and political economist, b. Paterson, N.J., grad. Yale, 1863, and studied in Germany, in Switzerland, and at Oxford. He was ordained an Episcopal minister and from 1872 was professor of political and social science at Yale. In economics he advocated a policy of extreme laissez-faire, strongly opposing any government measures that he thought interfered with the natural economics of trade. As a sociologist he did valuable work in charting the evolution of human customs--folkways and mores. He concluded that the power of these forces, developed in the course of human evolution, rendered useless any attempts at social reform. He also originated the concept of ethnocentrism, a term now commonly used, to designate attitudes of superiority about one's own group in comparison with others. His major work was Folkways (1907).

A trailblazer in: American economics, a free marketeer and free trader; Social Darwinism; sociology; anti-Imperialism; academic reform; etc.? This is a guy you want to know more about, no?

So one buys the book for a dollar and heads for the Internet. Turns out there's more than a little by and about him available. Here's some of the book's introduction, by Robert C. Bannister, which, happily, is on-line:

Many critics quoted a few phrases concerning "fittest" and "unfittest" as the sum of his social thought. Focusing on his views of government and the economy, most failed to place his work within the broader context of the effort of several generations of American intellectuals to ground morals and public policy in science rather than Protestant Christianity. A member of the "generation of 1840" who initiated this change, Sumner shared in this enterprise with the sociologist Lester Ward and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., among others, even though he did not share their politics. As these intellectuals debated the meaning of science, the charge of misapplied Darwinism (including the epithet "social Darwinist"), as I have argued in Social Darwinism: Science and Myth (1979), was essentially a battle strategy, more caricature than accurate characterization. Critics also assumed that Sumner's ideas remained unchanged throughout his career. Quotations from lectures of the 1870s or from Folkways became interchangeable evidence of a monolithic ideology.

Whatever the reasons, the resulting image of Sumner seriously misrepresents him. Although he launched his career in a decade with more than its share of corruption and fraud--the scandals of the Grant presidency and New York's Tweed Ring, the financial buccaneering of Jay Gould, the "corrupt bargain" that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in 1876--he was no less a critic of these developments than were the self-styled "reformers" whose proposals, in his view, only compounded the problems. During the 1880s and 1890s, he continued to defend free markets, individual enterprise, and the accumulation of capital. But he was acutely aware of mounting problems, from the rise of plutocracy (defined broadly as the influence of wealth on politics) to the excesses of consumerism and of democracy. The United States was entering its "glory days," he lamented shortly before his death, referring to the "corruption and extravagance which ultimately have ruined all the republics of the past." In sounding these warnings, he seemed to his admirers to be the epitome of the "old Roman," a defender of the republican tradition of the Founders, not the business "hireling" or the spirit of individualism past.

Sumner's "conservatism" was accordingly complex. As he moved from clergyman to sociologist, he struggled to reconcile two contradictory impulses: a desire for organic community, historical continuity, and traditional values as antidote to unfettered individualism and materialistic progress; and a commitment to individual freedom that fueled this progress. Complicating this dilemma was the specter of cultural relativism wherein all truth appeared relative to conditions. In freeing the individual from past custom and tradition, cultural relativism appeared to rule out any common standard for individual behavior or public policy. In his early sermons, Sumner confronted these issues in repeated attempts to balance "tradition" and "progress." In Folkways, he discussed them in terms of the relation between the "mores" and "science," the former the encoded customs and traditions that shape all human activity, the latter the objective attitude that allows limited escape from them.

In this quest, Sumner's conception of science was crucial. Since the 18th century, science had been seen as a means of freeing humanity from the burdens of the past, while providing for one or another type of social engineering. Inspired by Darwin, many of Sumner's contemporaries found in evolution the basis for an instrumental view of reason that justified governmental activism and a relativism that rejected established institutions and beliefs. Sumner, in contrast, distinguished the "methods" of science from its "speculations," viewing the former in terms of the narrowly inductive procedures of what American intellectuals of his generation termed "Baconian" science (dubiously claiming lineage from the celebrated 17th century English scientist Francis Bacon). Science, so viewed, was not some "ism," but a matter-of-factness that stressed classification over hypothesis. The property of a relatively small minority ("the classes"), the scientific attitude, as Sumner's biographer Donald Bellomy has put it, allowed "a critical, scientific, and modernized elite [to] modify and correct traditional attitudes."

Although on the surface Sumner shared his generation's faith in science, he thus diverged from a majority of his fellow social scientists in rejecting the notion that science taught a conception of truth as merely a consensus of trained observers. Sumner's "expert" was not a credentialled member of a social scientific community that drew up social blueprints to meet changing conditions--the model that was increasingly in American sociology in the decades after Sumner's death. Rather, he was the tough-minded individual who viewed current mores objectively in the light of history. In grasping the essence behind appearance, science provided an absolute standard for individual behavior and social policy, and hence an escape from a debilitating relativism and moral anarchy.

Sumner defended private property, individual enterprise, and laissez faire. But he was not therefore an uncritical "apologist" for American business. Rather he joined a tradition of American thinkers who championed republicanism against democracy, hard work and self-denial over material luxury, and public good over individual gratification. Unlike the Founding fathers, Sumner grounded his conservatism, not in the classical Republicanism of Greece or Rome, but in scientific method and an ethos of professionalism that sought in discipline, denial, and detachment the equivalents, as it were, of public virtue. Although some contradictions remained, he thus took more seriously than many of his contemporaries the problems of change and tradition, cultural relativism and common standards, that continue to dominate our discourse more than a century later.

The great conservative struggle is over how to balance the good of personal liberty against the evil of extreme individualism. The quest of modernist conservatism is to find a grounding for absolutes in science rather than God. Here's a guy who was chin-deep in both struggles over a hundred years ago. Assuming that this has all piqued your interest too, see below for more.

MORE:
-INTRODUCTION: On Liberty, Society and Politics (Robert C. Bannister)
-LECTURE: The Conquest of the United States by Spain (William Graham Sumner, Lecture delievered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale University, Jan. 16, 1899, and published in the Yale Law Journal, Jan. 1899)
The Forgotten Man (William Graham Sumner 1840-1910)
-ESSAY: The Challenge of Facts (William Graham Sumner)
-ESSAY: Monetary Development (William Graham Sumner, September 1875, Harper's)
-ESSAY: Politics in America, 1776 - 1876 (William
Graham Sumner, January 1876, North American Review)
-ESSAY: What Our Boys are Reading (William Graham Sumner, March 1878, Scribner's)
-ESSAY: Socialism (William Graham Sumner, October 1878, Scribner's)
-ESSAY: The National Bank Circulation (William
Graham Sumner, December 1878, Scribner's)
-ESSAY: Sociology (William Graham Sumner, 1881, Princeton Review)
-EXCERPT: from What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other: ON A NEW
PHILOSOPHY: THAT POVERTY IS THE BEST POLICY (William Graham Sumner)
-EXCERPT: from What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (William Graham Sumner)
-EXCERPT: from What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other: Social Obligations in the Industrial Age (William Graham Sumner)
-EXCERPT: from What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other: THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO BE RICH; NAY, EVEN, THAT IT IS NOT WICKED TO BE RICHER THAN ONE’S NEIGHBOR (William Graham Sumner)
-EXCERPT: from The absurd effort to make the world over (William
Graham Sumner, March 1894)
-EXCERPT: William Graham Sumner on Reform
-EXCERPT: from On Empire and the Philippines (William Graham Sumner, 1898)
-TESTIMONY: Yale Professor William Graham Sumner Prescribes Laissez-Faire for Depression Woes (On August 22, 1878, Yale faculty member William Graham Sumner testified before a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives charged with investigating the Causes of the General Depression in Labor and Business)
William G. Sumner, President 1908-1909 (American Sociological Society )
-William Graham Sumner, 1840-1910 (History of Economic Thought)
-William Graham Sumner (Robert Bannister, Swarthmore College)
-BIO: Sumner, William Graham (American History 102)
-BIO: William Graham Sumner (Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, 1887-1889)
-LECTURE: William Graham Sumner-- Social Darwinism and neo-liberalism in defense of laissez-faire capitalism (U.S. Political Thought: Lecture 12, November 9, 1995, Joseph Boland)
-"SOCIAL NORMS": William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)
-ESSAY: Freedom Is Honesty, and Honesty Is Freedom (James Leroy Wilson, 6/20/03, LewRockwell.com)
-ESSAY: Market Extremists Amok: And how best to dethrone them (Kevin Phillips, July 15, 2002, American Prospect)
-ARCHIVES: "william graham sumner" (Find Articles)
-REVIEW: of History of American Currency (North American Review, 1874) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 2, 2003 12:38 AM