Is it true that man shall ultimately obtain the dominion of the whole world except himself?
LESTER WARD
The founders of modern sociology, Comte and Spencer, were both inspired by a passion for setting the universe in order; both erected their sociological systems upon the monistic assumption that the laws of the universe at large are also applicable to human societies. One of the most impressive features of their work was the effort to arrange the subject matter of all the sciences natural and social, from astronomy to sociology, in a connected hierarchy, and to draw upon the rapidly developing physical and biological sciences for such social enlightenment as they might yield. In the spirit of this monism, Comte could speak of sociology as “Social Physics” and write, long before Darwin, of “the obvious necessity of founding sociology upon the whole of biology.”1 With the same assumptions, Walter Bagehot entitled an epochal essay in social theory Physics and Politics, and Herbert Spencer elaborated his analogy of the social organism, and filled his sociology with the differentiations, integrations, equilibrations, and other abstractions of his ponderous metaphysic. Spencer went so far as to deduce from the law of gravitation the intriguing sociological principle that “the attraction of cities is directly as the mass and inversely as the distance.”2
In a peculiarly contradictory relation to this monism stood Lester Frank Ward, author of the first comprehensive sociological treatise written in the United States. Like many other youths who came of age in the early 1860’s, Ward flavored his educational diet with liberal dashes of Spencer, and admired Spencer’s version of universal evolution. The monistic dogma seemed axiomatic to him. In his Dynamic Sociology he expressed the hope that “the universal science or true cosmology will constitute . . . [a] great advance upon the present heterogeneous state of science.”3 “I naturally consider everything in its relation to the Cosmos,” he wrote near the end of his career. And of his Pure Sociology he once declared: “It is more than sociology, it is cosmology.”4 The consummation of this monism in Ward’s method is readily appreciated by the reader of Dynamic Sociology, who must dig through some two hundred pages of physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, and embryology, before he strikes strictly sociological data.
While Ward formally accepted the Spencerian method, his social system, taking its shape from an entirely different pragmatic bias, was radically different in both structure and practical content. For Ward’s sociology was intrinsically dualistic. Of critical importance in everything Ward wrote was a sharp distinction between physical, or animal, purposeless evolution and mental, human evolution decisively modified by purposive action. By thus bifurcating the Spencerian system, Ward sundered social principles from simple and direct biological analogies. In his hands sociology became a special discipline dealing with a novel and unique level of organization. He was the first and the most formidable of a number of thinkers who attacked the unitary assumptions of social Darwinism and natural-law laissez-faire individualism. In time, Ward was eminently successful in impressing his criticisms upon American sociologists. In his sphere he served a function similar to that of instrumentalists in philosophy: he replaced an older passive determinism with a positive body of social theory adaptable to the uses of reform.
Like many other American reformers, Ward came from a frontier environment.5 He was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1841, the son of an itinerant mechanic and a clergyman’s daughter. Although Ward’s youth was one of poverty and hardship, he used the time left over from his jobs in mills, factories, and fields to study biology and physiology, learn French, German, and Latin, and finally to qualify as a secondary-school teacher. In 1865, after two years of Civil War service, during which he suffered severe wounds at Chancellorsville, Ward entered the government service as a clerk in the Treasury Department. At twenty-six he entered evening-session college and within five years had taken diplomas in arts, law, and medicine. Much of Ward’s education was self-acquired, all of it achieved through enormous sacrifice. He could never carry it lightly. Perhaps as a salve for his acute sensitivity about his humble origins, he developed a fondness for pompous Latin and Greek derivatives and sprinkled his sociology with terms like “synergy,” “social karyokinesis,” “tocogenesis,” “anthropoteleology,” and “collective telesis,” called male sexual selection “andreclexis” and romantic love “ampheclexis.” One of his courses at Brown University was modestly titled “A Survey of All Knowledge.”
For a few years of his early government service, Ward edited, and for the most part wrote, the greater part of a journal called The Iconoclast. A tiny bubble on the skeptical ferment of the 1870’s, full of the juvenile contentiousness of professional debunkers, it gives early evidence of Ward’s complete sympathy with newer currents of thought. Later Ward continued his scientific study and in time acquired a distinguished reputation as a botanist and paleobotanist, receiving in 1883 the post of chief paleontologist in the United States Geological Survey. The same year saw the appearance of his first book, the epoch-making Dynamic Sociology, which he had been working on for fourteen years. In 1906, after the central conceptions of his work had been repeated and expanded in other books—The Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893), Outlines of Sociology (1898), Pure Sociology (1903), and Applied Sociology (1906)—Ward was at last called to Brown University to occupy a chair in sociology.
When Ward’s Dynamic Sociology appeared, sociology was still in an early stage of development. While a few American universities were giving courses in a vaguely relevant subject, some using Spencer as a textbook, William Graham Sumner was probably the only teacher who used the term “sociology” to describe a college course.6 The materials of the subject were just emerging from courses in the “philosophy of history” and the “history of civilization.” In spite of the need for a systematic treatise, the ground was ill prepared for bold theoretical innovation from an obscure government functionary, especially when he ventured to challenge the dominant Spencerian doctrines. Much to Ward’s disappointment, his work was almost ignored at the start and took hold very slowly. Five years after its publication, Albion Small relates, Richard T. Ely was the only man on the otherwise alert Johns Hopkins faculty who knew it, and in 1893 Ward told him that barely five hundred copies had been sold.7 In 1897, however, Appleton brought out a second edition, and by the turn of the century Ward was widely recognized as a first-rate figure in sociology. At least two other pioneers of American social science, Albion W. Small and Edward A. Ross, were profoundly influenced by his work, and in 1906 he was elected first president of the American Sociological Society. However, while professional sociologists learned to look to him with respect, while Small believed he saved them years of fruitless work in the arid wastes of “misconstrued evolutionism,” Ward never attained a general public reputation comparable to that enjoyed by William Graham Sumner or other academic men of like stature.8
Ward developed his collectivism almost two decades too early to reach a fully receptive audience. Ten years before the passage of even such primitive and halting steps toward centralized control as the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Act, Ward was preaching a planned society. His skepticism also restricted his influence; Christian reformers who might otherwise have been attracted to his social theory found his naturalism objectionable, and a few sympathizers urged him to be more compromising in tone.9 Not until near the close of his career, moreover, did he hold a chair in a well-known university, and he missed the public and professional prestige that goes with a first-rate academic position. The cumbersome prose and barbarous terminology of his formal writings, particularly Dynamic Sociology, which runs to fourteen hundred difficult pages, also stood in the way of a wide public reputation. Ward did, however, place readable pieces in popular journals, the most notable being a well-received series in the Forum.10 Toward the end of his life, as the voices of dissent grew stronger, his thought filtered into the strategic places where the general reader was reached, and he exerted some influence upon the outlook of reform-minded groups; but partly because his proposal for a “sociocracy” never had organized adherents, his reputation faded quickly after his death in 1913. He was one of the ablest and most prescient thinkers in the history of the American mind, indeed in the history of international sociology. But it was his curious fate to be most pertinent as a thinker where he was most negative. His greatest accomplishment was as a critic of intellectual systems, once pervasive and powerful, which have long since crumbled and been forgotten. His trenchant assaults upon them, so important in his own day to the liberation of American thought, have been forgotten with them.
Ward had felt all too keenly the sting of his lower-class origin, and the aristocratic innuendoes of social Darwinism as it found expression in the 1870’s and 1880’s offended his democratic sensibilities. To the end of his life he remembered how, as a child in public school, he had felt keen satisfaction whenever the ragged boys of his own class were able to beat the sons of rich men in scholarship.11 If his childhood experiences had something to do with encouraging his faith in the latent intellectual capacities of the masses, Ward’s long experience in government agencies may have encouraged him to oppose the Spencerian distrust of government. As early as 1877, after a few years of service in the Bureau of Statistics, he wrote two articles for the Washington National Union in which he explored the possibilities of government statistics as a basis for legislation, arguing that if the laws of social events could be statistically formulated they could be used as data for “scientific lawmaking.”12
Within the next few years Ward’s political interests became increasingly urgent. He was already well along in the writing of Dynamic Sociology. In a paper read in 1881 before the Anthropological Society of Washington, he made a headlong assault upon the fundamental premises of the prevailing laissez-faire philosophy. Here he set forth in striking fashion the ideas to which he was to devote his later life. Pointing out that the prevailing trend toward government intervention in social affairs was utterly incompatible with existing social theory, Ward predicted, with no little prescience, that a crisis in social opinion would soon be precipitated.
The Cobden Club and other “Free Trade” societies are scattering tracts with a liberal hand, in the hope of stemming the tide. Victor Boehmert warns, Augustus Mongredien shouts, and Herbert Spencer thunders. What is the result? Germany answers by purchasing private railroads and enacting a high protective tariff. France answers by decreeing the construction of eleven thousand miles of Government railroad, and offering a bounty to French ship-owners. England answers by a compulsory education act, by Government purchase of the telegraph, and by a judicial decision laying claim to the telephone. America answers by an inter-state railroad bill, a national education bill, and a sweeping plebiscite in favor of protection to home manufacturers. The whole world has caught the contagion, and all nations are adopting measures of positive legislation.13
It was time, Ward continued, for scholars to stop decrying this irresistible trend toward legislative intervention and settle down to a serious study of what was going on. The natural-law and laissez-faire dogmas had been useful intellectual devices in the days when society was being freed from monarchical and oligarchical rule. It was natural enough to oppose governmental interference when government was in the hands of autocrats, but it is folly to cling to this opposition in an age of representative government when the popular will can be exerted through legislative action. The assumptions are obsolete. “There is no necessary harmony between natural law and human advantage” The laws of trade result in enormous inequalities in the distribution of wealth, which are founded in accidents of birth or strokes of low cunning rather than superior intelligence or industry.
Nor is natural law a barrier against monopolies. The classical theory says that competition keeps prices down, but often competition “multiplies the number of shops far beyond the necessity, each of which must profit by exchange, and in order to do this all must sell dearer than would otherwise be necessary.” This is particularly true of the distributive industries. In other lines competition breeds huge corporate organizations with dangerously broad powers. To break them up would be to destroy “the legitimate product of natural law,” the “integrated organisms of social evolution.” The only constructive alternative is government regulation in the interest of society at large.14 Historic attempts at government regulation or management have not been the disasters that individualists charge. Witness the telegraph in Great Britain and the railroad systems of Germany and Belgium. The sphere of social control has been gradually expanding in the history of civilization, but
. . . for more than a century the English school of negative economists has devoted itself to the task of checking this advance. The laissez faire school has entrenched itself behind the fortifications of science, and while declaring with truth that social phenomena are, like physical phenomena, uniform and governed by laws, they have accompanied this by the false declaration and non sequitur that neither physical nor social phenomena are capable of human control; the fact being that all the practical benefits of science are the result of man’s control of natural forces and phenomena which would otherwise have run to waste or operated as enemies to human progress. The opposing positive school of economists simply demands an opportunity to utilize the social forces for human advantage in precisely the same manner as the physical forces have been utilized. It is only through the artificial control of natural phenomena that science is made to minister to human needs; and if social laws are really analogous to physical laws, there is no reason why social science may not receive practical applications such as have been given to physical science.15
In an article on “The Scientific Basis of Positive Political Economy” (1881) Ward continued his assault upon natural law in social theory. By human standards, he asserted, nature itself is uneconomic. That its process proves “the least economic of all conceivable processes” is concealed only by the vastness of the scale on which nature operates and the absolute magnitude of its results. Some of the lower organisms give off as many as a billion ova: only a few develop into maturity, while the rest succumb in the resulting struggle for survival. The waste of reproductive powers is fantastic. Haphazard human strife, particularly in the form of industrial competition, is similarly wasteful. Here Ward distinguished between telic phenomena—those governed by human will and purpose—and genetic phenomena, the results of blind natural forces. In the face of the immense superiority of the telic over the genetic, the artificial over the natural, the persistent natural-law enthusiasm of laissez-faire theorists is like the nature-worship of Rousseauian romanticism, or, worse still, of primitive religion. The evolutionary view of nature as being in some way inherently beneficent is sheer mysticism.16 Man’s task is not to imitate the laws of nature, but to observe them, appropriate them, direct them.
Just as there are two kinds of dynamic processes, so are there two distinct kinds of economics—the animal economics of life and the human economics of mind. Animal economics, the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, results from the multiplication of organisms beyond the means of subsistence. Nature produces organisms in superabundance and relies upon the wind, water, birds, and animals to sow her seed. A rational being, on the other hand, prepares the ground, eliminates weeds, drills holes, and plants at proper intervals; this is the way of human economics. While environment transforms the animal, man transforms the environment.
Competition actually prevents the most fit from surviving. Rational economics not only saves resources but produces superior organisms. The best evidence for this is that whenever competition is wholly removed, as it is when man artificially cultivates a particular form of life, that form immediately makes great strides and soon outstrips those depending upon competition for their progress. Hence the superior quality of fruit trees, cereals, domestic cattle. Even in its most rational form, competition is prodigiously wasteful. Witness the social waste involved in advertising, a good example of “the modified form of animal cunning” which is the hallmark of business shrewdness. Finally, with the gusto of a debater making his clinching point, Ward argued that laissez faire actually destroys whatever value competition might have in human affairs; for since complete laissez faire allows combination and finally monopoly, free competition can be secure only through some measure of regulation.17
In his Dynamic Sociology, which was inspired by “a growing sense of the essential sterility of all that has thus far been done in the domain of social science,” and designed as a reply to those who “conclude that Nature’s ways should be man’s ways,”18 Ward massed all his arguments against natural law and expanded his plea for teleological progress. While he always scorned the name of reformer and insisted that he was a social scientist, Dynamic Sociology was essentially an argument for socially organized and guided reform—or, as Ward preferred to call it, “the improvement of society by cold calculation”—which, he believed, was destined to replace the hitherto automatic processes of social change.19 When Ward first began work on Dynamic Sociology, he planned to call it The Great Panacea.
Ward made one concession to biological theory: he agreed that man has been brought to his present stage of development by natural selection, of which his intellect is the supreme product; but man cannot consider himself finally superior to other animals until he supplants genetic with telic progress by applying his intellect to his own improvement.20 Social progress consists in an increase in the aggregate enjoyment throughout a society and a decrease in the aggregate suffering.
Thus far, social progress has in a certain awkward manner taken care of itself, but in the near future it will have to be cared for. To do this and maintain the dynamic condition against all the hostile forces which thicken with every new advance, is the real problem of Sociology considered as an applied science.21
In his second volume Ward stressed the importance of feeling in social dynamics. Feelings, he insisted, are the basic component of mind; the intellect has been evolved as a guide to the feelings. The social mind, a generalization or composite of individual minds, is made up of the social intellect and social feelings. The unrestrained working out of feelings results in conflict and destruction; but intellect can guide the feelings into constructive channels by setting down laws and ideals. Intellect, in its growth, finally becomes capable of formulating ideals for social as well as individual guidance.
Those actions which bring progress, which Ward called “dynamic actions,” can be performed only by creating a state of “dynamic opinion” in which the social intellect is equipped for its guiding function.22 If a whole society is to embark upon a dynamic action, its people must be prepared and equipped through the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge.
Intelligence, hitherto a growth, is destined to become a manufacture. The knowledge of experience is, so to speak, a genetic product; that of education is a teleological product. The origination and distribution of knowledge can no longer be left to chance and to nature. They are to be systematized and erected into true arts. Knowledge artificially acquired is still real knowledge, and the stock of all men must always consist chiefly of such knowledge. The artificial supply of knowledge is as much more copious than the natural as is the artificial supply of food more abundant than the natural supply.23
For Ward education was more than a device for social engineering; it was also a leveling instrument, a means of bringing opportunity to humble people and enabling them to use their talents.24 Greatly impressed from his childhood by the vast difference between the educated and uneducated, Ward was never able to believe that this chasm, which he himself had bridged, could be attributed to differences in native capacities. His passionate emphasis on education sprang from his own personal triumph.25
Because he believed in education as a long-term instrument for the improvement of mankind, Ward was reluctant to surrender the Lamarckian and Spencerian notion of the transmission of acquired characteristics. This idea, which Darwin had accepted, but had not at first made an integral part of his theory of evolution, Ward considered a necessary ingredient in his optimistic sociology. On a number of occasions he clashed with neo-Darwinians like Weismann. In a significant article published in the Forum in 1891 on “The Transmission of Culture,” he granted that acquired knowledge itself cannot be transmitted by heredity, but insisted that the capacity to acquire knowledge is another matter. Certain arts and talents which apparently run in family lines cannot be accounted for by the theory of natural selection because these talents have no value in the struggle for survival; natural selection has no explanation for the persistence of such talents from generation to generation. The persistence of talents can best be explained by assuming that part of what man gains by the exercise of mental faculties in a specific pursuit may be handed down to become part of the heritage of the race. If Weismann’s followers are right, and there is no such inheritance, then “education has no value for the future of mankind and its benefits are confined exclusively to the generation receiving it.” The facts of history and personal observation sustain the general popular belief in such use-inheritance, Ward concluded, and until the matter should be definitely decided by science, it would be well to “hug the delusion.”26
Ward is sometimes classified among the social Darwinists because his later theory was influenced by the conflict school of sociologists, represented most prominently by two continental writers, Ludwig Gumplowicz and Gustav Ratzenhofer. By 1903 Ward had become well acquainted with their works, and was so impressed by their interpretation of the origins of race struggle, which he called “the most important contribution thus far made to the science of sociology,”27 that he based a small part of his Pure Sociology upon it. There he attributed the origin of organized society to the conquest of one race by another. Caste systems had developed out of such conquest, and society had then passed successively through five stages: the mitigation of caste coupled with the survival of inequalities; the consolidation of relationships through the growth of law; the origin of the state; the gradual cementing of the groups into a homogeneous people; and, finally, the development of patriotism and the national form of social organization.28
Progress has frequently resulted from the forcible fusion of unlike elements. As much as one may deplore the horrors of war, it has been a necessary condition of race progress in the past, and the conquest of backward races is inevitable in the future.29 In advanced societies, rational and peaceful forms of social assimilation may supersede the genetic and violent method of the past. It is possible that a friendly pacific age is about to dawn—just as Spencer’s militant type of society gives way to the industrial—but it is doubtful that the world has yet reached the point at which war ceases. Whether the cessation of conflict would even be desirable was an open question to Ward.30
His adherence in these respects to the conflict school did not in the least alter the fundamental structure of Ward’s melioristic sociology. He saw no difficulty—although there were in fact grave difficulties—in reconciling the conflict theory with his collectivism; he even succeeded in converting Gumplowicz to his own cheerful point of view.31 The ideas of the conflict school found but a small and transient place in Ward’s work, and the theory of his later years is not otherwise markedly different from that of 1883. Throughout the greater part of all his writing, his aim was to destroy the tradition of biological sociology.
A persistent feature of Ward’s sociology was his running argument with the paralyzing optimism of the Spencerians and the equally paralyzing pessimism of the Malthusians. He regarded both the Malthus-Ricardo-Darwin lineage of pessimism and Spencerian optimism as upper-class apologies for social oppression and misery.32 Malthus’ theory, he objected, does not apply to genus homo. Malthus had uncovered a fundamental law of biology, said Ward, but in attaching it to mankind he had applied it to the one animal for which it had no validity. Darwin had had the genius to illuminate the processes of the whole organic world by applying Malthusianism fruitfully to animals and plants.
Notwithstanding the failure of Malthusianism at all points, the impression prevailed, and still prevails, that it is a fundamental law of society, and the current sociology is based upon it. . . . The fact is that man and society are not, except in a very limited sense, under the influence of the great dynamic laws that control the rest of the animal world. . . . If we call biologic processes natural, we must call social processes artificial. The fundamental principle of biology is natural selection, that of sociology is artificial selection. The survival of the fittest is simply the survival of the strong, which implies and would better be called the destruction of the weak. If nature progresses through the destruction of the weak, man progresses through the protection of the weak.33
Ward did not hesitate to cross swords with Spencer or Spencer’s American disciples, Sumner and Giddings. Probably the most unfavorable review received by Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other was written by Ward for the New York periodical Man. This book, said Ward, was the “final wail” of the laissez-faire writers. It would do more good than harm because it was so extreme as to be a caricature of individualism.
The whole book is based on the fundamental error that the favors of this world are distributed entirely according to merit. Poverty is only a proof of indolence and vice. Wealth simply shows the industry and virtue of the possessors. The very most is made of Malthusianism, and human activities are degraded to a complete level with those of animals. Those who have survived simply prove their fitness to survive; and the fact which all biologists understand, viz., that fitness to survive is something wholly distinct from real superiority, is, of course, ignored by the author because he is not a biologist, as all sociologists should be.34
In an extended polemic against “The Political Ethics of Herbert Spencer,”35 Ward skillfully selected passages from Spencer in which he relies upon the beneficence of traders to refrain from making merciless bargains and excess profits; passages in which he defends private control of sewage systems by suggesting that payments to sewage companies can be enforced by threats to turn off the drainage facilities of recalcitrant householders; passages in which he speaks of the unemployed as “good-for-nothings” and of a trade union as “a permanent body of tramps”; passages in which he expresses an aristocratic disdain for democratic processes; and similar individualistic extremisms. He went on to exploit the contradiction between Spencer’s individualism and his organismic view of society. If the state, the supreme organ of integration, is to have practically no function, Ward asked, what becomes of Spencer’s increasing integration as a criterion of progress? The logical outcome of the social organism is not extreme individualism but extreme centralization. “The strongest advocate of state control, the most extreme socialist, would shrink from the contemplation of any such absolutism as that exercised by the central ganglion of even the lowest of the recognized Metazoa.”36 The organismic analogy is sound only when it refers to the psychic aspects of society, and even on this level it logically implies an extension of social control, because a government is the servant of the popular will in the same way that the brain is a servant of the animal’s will.37
Still another foible of the Spencerians was their loaded definition of the term “natural,” which they rather inconsistently used not to describe whatever phenomena they might find but only those phenomena of which they could approve. In fact, however, the inertia of society and its failure to respond at once to the pressure of change “gives rise to social reformers who are legitimate and necessary, nay, natural products of every country and age, and the ignoring of this fact by conservative writers who lay so great stress on the word natural is one of the amusing absurdities of the present period.”38
Rejecting the premises of classical individualism, Ward was impelled to strike out on untried ideological lines, to develop an approach to social theory in terms of psychology and institutions rather than biology and individuals. Like most other professional biologists he was little impressed by the facile analogies between nature and society that pleased the apologists of the competitive order. Unable to find in society the crude processes he saw at work in nature, Ward evolved a twofold criticism of social Darwinism. He first debunked nature itself, displayed its wastefulness, and tore it from the high place it occupied in the popular mind. Then, by showing how the emerging human mind was able to mold the narrow genetic processes of nature into vastly different forms, Ward demolished the central feature of the monistic dogma—the continuity between process in nature and process in society.
Darwinism, with its emphasis upon gradual change over geological periods and its interpretation of change as a result of “accidental” variations, had appeared to banish teleology from the animal world, and thus, for those who worked in the shadow of the monistic dogma, banished it from the human world also. If there were no larger purpose, no cosmic guiding hand behind the emergence of higher species, if evolution was a planless outcome of random variations, purposefulness had no place in the universe, and societies must grow and change as aimlessly as the rest of life. To Ward, however, it seemed that the reaction from teleology had gone too far. If there is no cosmic purpose, there is at least human purpose, which has already given man a special place in nature and may yet, if he wills it, give organization and direction to his social life. Purposeful activity must henceforth be recognized as a proper function not only of the individual but of a whole society.
Always cosmopolitan in his interests, Ward was much concerned from the first to interpret to Americans the lessons of European thought and experience on the subject of state intervention. Apart from his own insight as a government employee, he was impressed by the extension of state activity abroad, particularly in government ownership or regulation of railroads as it could be observed in Germany, France, Belgium, and England.39 When he compared European methods with the American practice of private management, it was to the detriment of the latter.40 He was also influenced against laissez faire by the critical attitude of Comte, whom he greatly admired.41
This is not to say, of course, that Ward was merely another nationalist in economics. His advocacy of state management was prompted by a lower-class bias. He seems to have considered himself a lobbyist for the people in academic forums. His opposition to the biological argument for individualism stemmed from his democratic faith; his rejection of Sumner and Spencer was partly motivated by his sense of their aristocratic preferences. Like Veblen, Ward felt a certain personal alienation from the dominant characters and opinions of American intellectual life, which doubtless quickened his championship of the underdog. He once complained of the “capitalistic censorship” at the University of Chicago. And during the campaign of 1896 he wrote to E. A. Ross, who was suffering for supporting Bryan, “I would probably go further toward populism than you. No one is more anxious to throttle the money power,” adding only that he considered free silver a poor social remedy and that he had no desire to go through another monetary inflation like the one of his youth.42
Ward made a revealing statement of his social bias at an American Sociological Society meeting in 1906 during a discussion of “Social Darwinism.” A previous speaker had presented a social-Darwinist thesis advocating careful elimination of the unfit and dependent, chiefly by eugenic methods. In reply Ward branded the doctrine presented as “the most complete example of the oligocentric world-view which is coming to prevail in the higher classes of society and would center the entire attention of the whole world upon an almost infinitesimal fraction of the human race and ignore the rest.” He would not be contented, Ward continued, to work in so small a field as the education and preservation of a select few of the higher classes. “I want a field that shall be broad enough to embrace the whole human race, and I would take no interest in sociology if I did not regard it as constituting such a field.” For an indefinite period to come, society would be recruited from the base and would be compelled to assimilate a mass of crude material from the bottom. His opponents might conclude from this that “society is doomed to hopeless degeneracy.” Yet it is possible to take another view:
. . . the only consolation, the only hope, lies in the truth . . . that so far as the native capacity, the potential quality, the “promise and potency,” of a higher life are concerned, those swarming, spawning millions, the bottom layer of society, the proletariat, the working class, the “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” nay, even the denizens of the slums—that all these are by nature the peers of the boasted “aristocracy of brains” that now dominates society and looks down upon them, and the equals in all but privilege of the most enlightened teachers of eugenics.43
Although he was a forerunner of social planning, a champion of the masses, applauded and used by those socialists who read his works, Ward himself was no socialist. He was singularly uninterested in the Marxian tradition. He believed that he had a workable alternative to socialism and individualism which, borrowing from Comte, he called “sociocracy,” or the planned control of society by society as a whole. Under sociocracy, purposeful social activity, or “collective telesis,” could be harmonized with individual self-interest by means of “attractive legislation” designed to release the springs of human action for socially beneficial deeds by positive rather than negative and compulsory devices. Where individualism has created artificial inequalities, sociocracy would abolish them; and while socialism seeks to create artificial equalities, sociocracy would recognize inequalities that are natural. A sociocratic world would distribute its favors according to merit, as individualists demand, but by equalizing opportunity for all it would eliminate advantages now possessed by those with undeserved power, accidental position or wealth, or antisocial cunning.44
In his anticipation of social planning and his historical perspective on the limitations of laissez faire, as well as in his campaign against biological sociology, Ward did much to relieve American thinking from its uncritical preoccupation with the conservative uses of nineteenth-century science. In social psychology he helped his followers to arrive at a better understanding of the importance of feeling in human motivation. When he attempted to offer positive programs, he was vulnerable to criticism for his naïve faith in the possibilities of education for social reconstruction and for the vagueness of some of his reform proposals. Philosophically he was not the most consistent or the most sophisticated critic of monistic thinking. On the abstract level he left much to be done by the pragmatists. While Ward’s dualism of the genetic and the telic was in effect a departure from what William James called the “block-universe” of Spencer, the Spencerian virus remained in his blood. In the midst of his attack upon the sociological nature-worshipers he could lapse into their own language by characterizing large combinations as products of the natural order; and he once wrote that collective telesis alone could “place society once more in the free current of natural law.”45 If he recognized the breach in his system at all, he simply covered it by saying that telic behavior is a genetic product. For one who emphasized so constantly the unique and artificial character of social organization and social processes, it was an odd inconsistency to deck out his sociology with physics, chemistry, and biology, and to set it in the framework of a cosmological system.
However unfinished Ward’s critique was in a technical sense, it was nevertheless a bold pioneering stroke. He suffered much undeserved neglect partly for the very reason that he was so far in advance of the rest of his generation. “You were not only ahead of us in point of time,” Albion Small wrote to him in 1903,46 “but we all know that you are head, shoulders and hips above us in many respects scientifically. You are Gulliver among the Lilliputians.”