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Primary source: William Graham Sumner, "The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over," essay, 1894.
Caption: William Graham Sumner was an American social scientist influenced by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. Sumner applied Darwin's evolutionary theory to human society.
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This fact and its significance has hardly been noticed at all; but the stage of the industrial organization existing at any time, and the rate of advance in its development, are the absolutely controlling social facts. Nine-tenths of the socialistic and semi-socialistic, and sentimental or ethical, suggestions by which we are overwhelmed come from failure to understand the phenomena of the industrial organization and its expansion. It controls us all because we are all in it. It creates the conditions of our existence, sets the limits of our social activity, regulates the bonds of our social relations, determines our conceptions of good and evil, suggests our life-philosophy, molds our inherited political institutions, and reforms the oldest and toughest customs, like marriage and property.
I repeat that the turmoil of heterogeneous and antagonistic social whims and speculations in which we live is due to the failure to understand what the industrial organization is and its all-pervading control over human life, while the traditions of our school of philosophy lead us always to approach the industrial organization, not from the side of objective study, but from that of philosophical doctrine. Hence it is that we find that the method of measuring what we see happening by what are called ethical standards, and of proposing to attack the phenomena by methods thence deduced, is so popular.
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William Graham Sumner, "The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over," in War and Other Essays (1911; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 197.
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