What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. This item is unavailable.What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

The title of this 1883 classic of laissez-faire economics and sociology is ironic: the social classes do not, the author concludes, owe each other anything. Demolishing the theory of group obligation and fully embracing the concepts of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism, Sumner rages against the notion that the educated and wealthy have any obligation to the poor and uneducated, declares that the men should simply pull themselves out of poverty, deems taxes an obscenity and universal suffrage "immoral and vicious," dismisses the idea of "natural rights," and decries anything other than "every man for himself." A stunning evocation of modern libertarianism taken to its logical extreme, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other presents a bleak vision of contemporary industrial society... one valuable for those on all sides of the issue to understand and appreciate. American academic and author WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER (1840-1910) was an influential professor of sociology and politics at Yale College and president of the American Sociological Association from 1908 to 1909. He wrote numerous and varied books including Andrew Jackson as a Public Man (1882) and Folkways (1906).

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) was an American academic and professor at Yale College. For many years he had a reputation as one of the most influential teachers there. He was a polymath with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. He is credited with introducing the term "ethnocentrism," a term intended to express his anti-imperialism, in his book Folkways (1906). Sumner was also the first to teach a course entitled "sociology" in the United States, before even Émile Durkheim had established the formal discipline in Europe.