William Graham Sumner, Sociology/1881

(http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php
%3Ftitle=345&chapter=143545&layout=html&Itemid=27)
(Excerpts)
1. Sociology is the science of life in society. It investigates the forces which come into action
wherever a human society exists. It studies the structure and functions of the organs of
human society, and its aim is to find out the laws in subordination to which human society
takes its various forms and social institutions grow and change. Its practical utility consists
in deriving the rules of right social living from the facts and laws which prevail by nature in
the constitution and functions of society. It must, without doubt, come into collision with all
other theories of right living which are founded on authority, tradition, arbitrary invention,
or poetic imagination.
2. Life in society is the life of a human society on this earth. Its elementary conditions are set
by the nature of human beings and the nature of the earth. We have already become
familiar, in biology, with the transcendent importance of the fact that life on earth must be
maintained by a struggle against nature, and also by a competition with other forms of life.
In the latter fact biology and sociology touch. Sociology is a science which deals with one
range of phenomena produced by the struggle for existence, while biology deals with
another. The forces are the same, acting on different fields and under different conditions.
3. The increase of population goes on according to biological laws which are capable of
multiplying the species beyond any assignable limits, so that the number to be provided for
steadily advances and the status of ease and abundance gives way to a status of want and
constraint. ()On the side of the land also stands the law of the diminishing return as a
limitation. More labor gets more from the land, but not proportionately more. () The law
of population, therefore, combined with the law of the diminishing returns, constitutes the
great underlying condition of society. () The laws of population and the diminishing
return, in their combination, are the iron spur which has driven the race on to all which it
has ever achieved, and the fact that population ever advances, yet advances against a
barrier which resists more stubbornly at every step of advance, unless it is removed to a
new distance by some conquest of man over nature, is the guarantee that the task of
civilization will never be ended, but that the need for more energy, more intelligence, and
more virtue will never cease while the race lasts.
4. The law of the survival of the fittest was not made by man and cannot be abrogated by
man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest. If a man
comes forward with any grievance against the order of society so far as this is shaped by
human agency, he must have patient hearing and full redress; but if he addresses a
demand to society for relief from the hardships of life, he asks simply that somebody else
should get his living for him. In that ease he ought to be left to find out his error from hard
experience.
5. The only two things which really tell on the welfare of man on earth are hard work and selfdenial (in technical language, labor and capital), and these tell most when they are brought
to bear directly upon the effort to earn an honest living, to accumulate capital, and to bring
up a family of children to be industrious and self-denying in their turn.
6. The sociologist is often asked if he wants to kill off certain classes of troublesome and
burdensome persons. No such inference follows from any sound sociological doctrine, but it
is allowed to infer, as to a great many persons and classes, that it would have been better
for society, and would have involved no pain to them, if they had never been born.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Man with the Muck-Rake, 1906.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/teddyrooseveltmuckrake.htm

(Excerpts)
1. In Bunyans Pilgrims Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muckrake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand; who
was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard
the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor. In Pilgrims
Progress the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is
fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life
consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness
only on that which is vile and debasing.
2. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing.
There is filth on the floor and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are
times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be
performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or
writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an
incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. Any excess is almost sure to
invite a reaction; and, unfortunately, the reaction, instead of taking the form of punishment
of those guilty of the excess, is very apt to take the form either of punishment of the
unoffending or of giving immunity, and even strength, to offenders. The effort to make
financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in public
calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper,
magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same time act
as a profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them
from entering the public service at any price.
3. () my plea is, not for immunity to but for the most unsparing exposure of the politician
who betrays his trust, of the big business man who makes or spends his fortune in
illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt every such man out
of the position he has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but
remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and
untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself.
It is because I feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil
that I ask that the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution.
4. More important then aught else is the development of the broadest sympathy of man for
man. The welfare of the wage-worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil, upon these
depend the welfare of the entire country; their good is not to be sought in pulling down
others; but their good must be the prime object of all our statesmanship.
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House/1910
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/addams/hullhouse/hullhouse-06.html
Chapter VI: The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements"
(Excerpts)
The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial
problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that
these problems are not confined to any one portion of a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the
same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other; but it
assumes that this overaccumulation and destitution is most sorely felt in the things that pertain to
social and educational privileges. From its very nature it can stand for no political or social
propaganda. It must, in a sense, give the warm welcome of an inn to all such propaganda, if
perchance one of them be found an angel.

The only thing to be dreaded in the Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick
adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment may demand. () It must be
grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy
which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot
boy. It is always easy to make all philosophy point one particular moral and all history adorn one
particular tale; but I may be forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets forth
the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists have taught that without the advance
and improvement of the whole, no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or
material individual condition; and that the subjective necessity for Social Settlements is therefore
identical with that necessity, which urges us on toward social and individual salvation.

Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption

(The Theory of the Leisure Class/1899, New York: The Modern Library, 1931)
(Excerpts)
1. The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life
beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption
also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He
consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments,
apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. In the
process of gradual amelioration which takes place in the articles of his consumption, the
motive principle and proximate aim of innovation is no doubt the higher efficiency of the
improved and more elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being. But that does
not remain the sole purpose of their consumption. The canon of reputability is at hand and
seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard, fit to survive. Since the
consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific;
and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of
inferiority and demerit.
This growth of punctilious discrimination as to qualitative excellence in eating, drinking, etc.
presently affects not only the manner of life, but also the training and intellectual activity of the
gentleman of leisure. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male, -- the man of
strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his tastes,
for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and
the ignoble in consumable goods. He becomes a connoisseur in creditable viands of various
degrees of merit, in manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in
weapons, games, dancers, and the narcotics. This cultivation of aesthetic faculty requires time
and application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to
change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business of learning how to
live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way. Closely related to the requirement that the
gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there is the requirement that he
must know how to consume them in a seemly manner. His life of leisure must be conducted in
due form. Hence arise good manners in the way pointed out in an earlier chapter. High-bred
manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and
conspicuous consumption.
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of
leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently
put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore
brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and
entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naive ostentation,

but they required their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to
the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the substantial ground on which
these usages rest. Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted
to serve this end. The competitor with whom the entertainer wishes to institute a comparison is,
by this method, made to serve as a means to the end. He consumes vicariously for his host at the
same time that he is witness to the consumption of that excess of good things which his host is
unable to dispose of single-handed, and he is also made to witness his host's facility in etiquette.
William James What Pragmatism Means/1907
(American Intellectual Tradition, ed. David A. Hollinger, Charles Capper, Second edition, Vol. II,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 115 - 126)
(Excerpts)
1. The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that
otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?--fated or free?--material or
spiritual?--here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and
disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to
interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference
would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no
practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the
same thing, and all dispute is idle.
2. The term is derived from the same Greek word [pirho alpha gamma mu alpha], meaning
action, from which our words 'practice' and 'practical' come. It was first introduced into
philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled 'How to Make Our Ideas
Clear,' in the 'Popular Science Monthly' for January of that year.
3. Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude,
but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable
form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all
upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from
abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed
principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards
concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. ()At the
same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only.
4. if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your
quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the
stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more
work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be
CHANGED. THEORIES THUS BECOME INSTRUMENTS, NOT ANSWERS TO ENIGMAS, IN WHICH
WE CAN REST. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make
nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and
sets each one at work.
5. No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic
method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES,
'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS,
CONSEQUENCES, FACTS. IDEAS (WHICH THEMSELVES ARE BUT PARTS OF OUR EXPERIENCE)
BECOME TRUE JUST IN SO FAR AS THEY HELP US TO GET INTO SATISFACTORY RELATION
WITH OTHER PARTS OF OUR EXPERIENCE, to summarize them and get about among them
by conceptual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of particular

phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us
prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things
satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so
far forth, true INSTRUMENTALLY. This is the 'instrumental' view of truth.
6. Now pragmatism, devoted though she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as
ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing
of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually
carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our
experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. IF
THEOLOGICAL IDEAS PROVE TO HAVE A VALUE FOR CONCRETE LIFE, THEY WILL BE TRUE,
FOR PRAGMATISM, IN THE SENSE OF BEING GOOD FOR SO MUCH. FOR HOW MUCH MORE
THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR RELATIONS TO THE OTHER TRUTHS
THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED.
7. Truth is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from
good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE
GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS.
THE SOCIALIST PARTY PLATFORM of 1912
Indianapolis, Indiana, May 12, 1912
http://www.sagehistory.net/progressive/SocialistPlat1912.htm
1. Under this system the industrial equipment of the nation has passed into the absolute
control of a plutocracy which exacts an annual tribute of hundreds of millions of dollars
from the producers. Unafraid of any organized resistance, it stretches out its greedy hands
over the still undeveloped resources of the nation-the land, the mines, the forests and the
water powers of every State of the Union. In spite of the multiplication of laborsaving
machines and improved methods in industry which cheapen the cost of production, the
share of the producers grows ever less, and the prices of all the necessities of life steadily
increase. The boasted prosperity of this nation is for the owning class alone. To the rest it
means only greater hardship and misery. The high cost of living is felt in every home.
Millions of wage-workers have seen the purchasing power of their wages decrease until life
has become a desperate battle for mere existence.
2. Capitalist concentration is mercilessly crushing the class of small business men and driving
its members into the ranks of propertyless wage-workers. The overwhelming majority of
the people of America are being forced under a yoke of bondage by this soulless industrial
despotism. It is this capitalist system that is responsible for the increasing burden of
armaments, the poverty, slums, child labor, most of the insanity, crime and prostitution,
and much of the disease that afflicts mankind. Under this system the working class is
exposed to poisonous conditions, to frightful and needless perils to life and limb, is walled
around with court decisions, injunctions and unjust laws, and is preyed upon incessantly for
the benefit of the controlling oligarchy of wealth. Under it also, the children of the working
class are doomed to ignorance, drudging toil and darkened lives.
3. Society is divided into warring groups and classes, based upon material interests.
Fundamentally, this struggle is a conflict between the two main classes, one of which, the
capitalist class, owns the means of production, and the other, the working class, must use
these means of production, on terms dictated by the owners. The capitalist class, though
few in numbers, absolutely controls the government, legislative, executive and judicial. This
class owns the machinery of gathering and disseminating news through its organized press.
It subsidizes seats of learning-the colleges and schools-and even religious and moral
agencies. It has also the added prestige which established customs give to any order of
society, right or wrong. The working class, which includes all those who are forced to work
for a living whether by hand or brain, in shop, mine or on the soil, vastly outnumbers the

capitalist class. Lacking effective organization and class solidarity, this class is unable to
enforce its will. Given such a class solidarity and effective organization, the workers will
have the power to make all laws and control all industry in their own interest. All political
parties are the expression of economic class interests. All other parties than the Socialist
party represent one or another group of the ruling capitalist class. Their political conflicts
reflect merely superficial rivalries between competing capitalist groups. However they
result, these conflicts have no issue of real value to the workers. Whether the Democrats or
Republicans win politically, it is the capitalist class that is victorious economically. The
Socialist party is the political expression of the economic interests of the workers. Its
defeats have been their defeats and its victories their victories. It is a party founded on the
science and laws of social development. It proposes that, since all social necessities to-day
are socially produced, the means of their production and distribution shall be socially
owned and democratically controlled.