Folkways by William Graham Sumner

First published: 1907

Type of work: Political, sociological, and anthropological theory

Critical Evaluation:

Folkways, written by a professor of political and social science at Yale University, was one of the powerfully influential books on American thought during the first decade of the twentieth century. The book was an effort to soften the impact of and to justify the implications of Darwinian laissez faire philosophy. As such it was essentially conservative and ran against the growing tide of social and political agitation thrusting toward reform. Because it seemed to be so widely and deeply based on comparative anthropology and sociology, it appeared irrefutable. Consequently its prestige was immense.

Although apparently clear-headed and based on reality, the book often hides its head in mysticism. Pushing the theory that the community cannot bear any responsibility for the acts or welfare of individuals—that in the world of nature red in tooth and fang each individual must shift for himself or founder—Sumner insists that the origins of the community mind or soul or being, whichever one may call it, are shrouded in inpenetrable mystery. These origins he calls folkways as a variant of mores.

He assumes that primitive man’s first purpose in life is to live. The petty and individual acts of each person flow together eventually into patterns that then themselves exert controlling influence upon subsequent acts of various individuals in a group. These folkways, or mores, grow unconsciously, and because they are not purposeful and knowledgeable creations of man, they are largely unalterable. Only the upper layers are subject to change, and change comes slowly. Primitive societies are so constituted as to discourage innovation, variation, and development. In such societies prestige and political control rest with the elders who, having learned customs from their elders, in their turn enforce conformity and throttle liberty of action.

This suppression of change is commendable because the system works. The gradual development of improved folkways results from individual struggle for existence in the Darwinian sense, and the most effective struggle is that of “antagonistic cooperation,” in which competition and combination alternate for a slow thrust forward. Failure to recognize this fact leads to various “socialistic fallacies.”

Sumner’s conservative philosophy is made clear. The folkways that have existed and worked are their own rationale and justification. They are “right” and they are “true.” Because they are both correct and valid they are not subject to examination and verification. Individual “rights” are those rules imposed upon members of the “in-group” to make the society viable and peaceful. Therefore Sumner concludes, in a philosophy running counter to one of the great American political tenents, there is no such thing as “natural” or “God-given” or “absolute” rights.

Folkways exist on two levels, like two ocean currents running in the same direction but at different velocities. The lower consists of the masses of people. They are the real bearers of folkways. The people are suggestible, easily influenced and controlled by the mores. They never change their customs. The classes are the upper and faster current. It is they who produce variations and account for whatever progress is made in the folkways. It is a fallacy to conclude that there is any mystical or occult wisdom residing in either class. The masses are not wise merely because they are the majority. Both classes must co-operate for their mutual good. But neither has a superior right to control society.

But inequality is both natural and beneficial. Masses of equal men can never progress beyond the stage of savagery. Sumner disagrees completely with the eighteenth century belief in the Noble Savage and the bliss of the state of Nature. On the contrary, men in a natural state would be equal, static in their society, and would ultimately be enslaved. Masses of men if they are not to be scattered and made weak and finally destroyed must be allowed opportunities to achieve their societal coherence by means of organization, leadership, and discipline.

All civilized societies have at least three levels. At the lowest is a dead weight of ignorance, disease, poverty, and crime. Above it is the “middle section,” which interacts with the political institutions of a democracy such as the church, the press and public libraries, and reacts to them. This section of people partially controls the folkways because leaders in a democracy must cater to these people’s tastes. This section would in fact rule the society if it were organized independently, but it never is. Education of the masses contains an error in thinking. The process of education is long and involved. It is not democratic because it assumes lack of equality between teacher and persons taught. Therefore it works out only in the extension of popular interests and the establishment of popular prejudices.

Folkways are practically unchangeable by revolution. Forms of government may change on the top. A monarchy can be changed into a republic, but not the folk mind and practices. Levels of society are turned upside down and permanently altered. The folk return eventually to their ways. The folk recognize that some people must be aristocrats, a ruling class or classes. These aristocrats are those in any society that are distinguished. Their lives, habits, and leadership give direction to all movements and progression. The folk, recognizing this fact, repudiate the old eighteenth century notions of their perfectibility and laugh at the philosophers who preached such nonsense. These people recognize that they are incapable of thinking, that it is only the elite in any group who think and account for any progress made.

One example of progress is the institution of slavery. It was begun by leaders when they recognized that it was more humanitarian to enslave their war victims than to kill them. Slavery was good, for it taught steady labor to the slave, relieved the owner of hard work, and brought the slave into the “in-group” for which he worked. Slavery also demonstrated the human characteristic of the strong desiring to dominate the weak. Slavery in primitive societies was the one way in which the Darwinian thesis of the survival of the fittest was effected.

Though physical bondage may be eliminated, “slavery,” at least as a point of reference never can be. There are certain burdens of life from which man can never free himself. Political institutions may control, direct, and redistribute these burdens, but bondage to the human conditions of life can never be abolished.

Thus it is with life in general. Various forces work to control and direct our ways of life, moving glacier-like and slowly, altering imperceptibly or not at all. All are controlled by the sheer weight of the mass on which the surface rests. It is perhaps unfair to say that life is the best that could be, but it must be said that whatever ways of life we have are the only ones that exist.

It is perhaps easy to see why Sumner’s Folkways had a great impact on the thinking of early twentieth century America. It is direct, honest, candid, and strengthened by an overwhelming display of facts. But the facts are often used as springboards to hasty and illogical conclusions. Often the conclusions are unwarrantable. Further there is a slyness, an insinuation about Sumner’s style of presentation. Often it is the reader who is invited to draw inferences that are only hinted at in the text. Finally, there was an articulation of social and political philosophy that was appealing to many Americans: that which rationalized and justified exploitation of the weak, that resisted the thrusts of social amelioration, that which gave cause for a re-echoing of the poet Alexander Pope that whatever is, is right.