Talk:Lester Frank Ward
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[edit] POV tag
Ward himself wrote in 1907: "But the "struggle,"...is only a very small part of Darwinsm. In fact it may be said to form no part of it, since it was well understood long before Darwin was born. And yet, curiously enough, the so-called "social Darwinism" scarcely ever gets farther than this. I have never seen any distinctively Darwinian principle appealed to in the discusssions of "social Darwinism." It is therefore wholly inappropriate to characterize as social Darwinism the laissez-faire doctrine of political economists, even when it it attempted to support that doctrine by appeals to the laws of organic development. That the laissez-faire doctrine is false and not sustained by biological principles I freely admit and have abundantly shown, but the fallace involved is to be found in an entirely different department of scientific investigation." (Social and Biological Struggles, 1907) Intangible2.0 19:29, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
- I reinsterted the tag. The article is too much focused on Sumner and Spencer, even incorrectly so (probably relying too much on Hofstadter, who has been refuted, see Bannister or Smith for example). Intangible2.0 16:27, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
The article is focused in part on Spencer and Sumner because as the historian Henry Steele Commanger (Hofstadter has little to say about Ward) points out in his book The American Mind that much, if not the bulk, of Ward's writings were focused on refuting the work of Spencer and Sumner. Ward was deeply influenced by Spencer, as a reading of Dynamic Sociology will show (indeed much of volume 1 is a summery of Spencer's theories); he admired much of Spencer's work but felt that Spencer had lost his way when he tried to apply his ideas to the world of government and politics.
This article wasn't designed to provide a comprehensive review of Ward's work or world view but rather to encourage and assist research into Ward, who is often ignored in the teaching of the history of sociology, and as such I think it is important to inform readers of Ward's importance as a critic of lassiz faire and survival of the fittest policies which are still aggressively advocated by conservative economists, theoreticians and politicians, dispite having been decisively refuted by Ward over 100 years ago.
With all due respect, to remove the references to Spencer and Sumner would be to falsify the historical record and would be a POV violation. I provide links in the article to Wikipedia's Spencer and Sumner articles, which provide information and points of view much different than presented here. Let's let the reader decide what to believe and proceed on with his research.
If you would like to edit the article and remove things you consider offensive, prehaps we could proceed from there and achieve closure in this matter.
- Well, this positivism of sociology has been critized as well (I recall Hayek's Counter-Revolution of Science for example). So I am not sure how far this refutation of laissez-faire went; Spencer and Ward were probably both wrong in their arguments. Intangible2.0 18:30, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
