“An Affair of History, Law, and Institutions”: William Graham Sumner’s Historical Method and the Responsibility of the Individual

Abstract

William Graham Sumner is popularly thought of as the Progressive Era’s strongest champion of the unencumbered individual, following Richard Hofstadter’s identification of Sumner as “one of America’s preeminent and influential social Darwinists.” Sumner scholars have increasingly pushed back against this characterization, pointing to the roles of cooperation and the “law of sympathy” within Sumner’s writings. However, the revision of Sumner has remained focused on the texts that Hofstadter identified as Sumner’s “political” writings. This article argues that such a focus would have confused Sumner, who saw the study of politics as intimately tied to the study of history. Reconstructing Sumner’s political thought by contextualizing his “political” writings in his understanding of historical development and his extended historical accounts, the article argues that Sumner understood civil liberty not as an abstract concept but as an empirical fact that emerged from the interplay of historical forces.