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William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)
Born in 1840 in Hartford, Connecticut, William Graham Sumner earned his undergraduate degree from Yale before undertaking graduate study at the Universities of Geneva, Gottingen, and Oxford. He became an Episcopal priest in New York City, but after a few years realized that he preferred teaching to the ministry. He returned to Yale as a professor in 1872 and taught there continuously until his retirement in 1909.
Sumner was a believer in the minimalist state advocated by British political philosopher Herbert Spencer. Sumner taught that the state should encourage hard work and self-reliance by allowing the free market to determine the allocation of resources. He was one of the leading defenders of laissez-faire, which was the belief that government should abstain from intrusive regulation of the economy in order to promote maximal freedom and the accumulation of private wealth.
What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)
In his most famous book, Sumner used the figure of the Forgotten Man to illustrate how government policies intended to benefit certain groups failed to take into account the harm they caused to others. Economic regulation and redistributive taxation harmed hard-working individuals by transferring their wealth to those whom government officials deemed more deserving. At a time of rapid economic expansion in the US, his attack on interventionist government gained many adherents, especially in the Republican Party. His arguments would be reprised in the 20th century by Ronald Reagan.
…As an abstraction, the State is to me only All-of-us. In practice—that is, when it exercises will or adopts a line of action—it is only a little group of men chosen in a very haphazard way by the majority of us to perform certain services for all of us. The majority do not go about their selection very rationally, and they are almost always disappointed by the results of their own operation. Hence “the State,” instead of offering resources of wisdom, right reason, and pure moral sense beyond what the average of us possess, generally offers much less of all those things. Furthermore, it often turns out in practice that “the State” is not even the known and accredited servants of the State, but, as has been well said, is only some obscure clerk, hidden in the recesses of a Government bureau, into whose power the chance has fallen for the moment to pull one of the stops which control the Government machine….
If anybody is to benefit from the actions of the state it must be Some-of-us. If, then, the question is raised, What ought the State to do for labor, for trade, for manufactures, for the poor, for the learned professions? etc., etc.—that is, for a class or an interest—it is really the question, What ought All-of-us to do for Some-of-us? But Some-of-us are included in All-of-us and, so far as they get the benefit of their own efforts, it is the same as if they worked for themselves, and they may be cancelled out of