Lester F. Ward (June 18, 1841 – April 18, 1913) was an American botanist, paleontologist, and sociologist. He served as the first president of the American Sociological Association.
Lester Frank Ward was born in Joliet, Illinois, the youngest of 10 children born to Justus Ward and his wife Silence Rolph Ward. Justus Ward was of old New England colonial stock, but he wasn't rich and farmed to earn a living. Silence Ward was the daughter of a clergyman; she was a talented perfectionist, educated and fond of literature. When Lester Frank was one year of age the family moved closer to Chicago, to a place called Cass, now known as Downer's Grove, Illinois about twenty three miles from Lake Michigan. The family then moved to a homestead in nearby St. Charles, Illinois where his father built a saw mill business making railroad ties. Ward first attended a formal school in 1850 when he was nine years old. He was known as Frank Ward to his classmates and friends and showed a great enthusiasm for books and learning and he liberally supplemented his education with outside reading. 4 years after Ward started attending school, his parents, Lester Frank and one of his older bothers, Erastus, traveled to Iowa in a covered wagon for a new life on the frontier. Four years later, in 1858, Justus Ward unexpectedly died and the family returned to St. Charles, much to the dismay of Ward's mother who wanted the boys to stay in Iowa and continue their father's work. The two brothers lived together for a sort period of time in the old family homestead in St. Charles, doing farm work to earn a living, and encouraged each other to pursue an education and abandon their father's life of physical labor. Their estranged mother lived just down the street in the home of one of their sisters. In late 1858 the two brothers moved to Pennsylvania at the invitation of Lester Frank's oldest brother Cyrenus (9 years Lester Frank's senior) who was starting a business making wagon wheel hubs and needed workers. The brothers saw this as an opportunity to move closer to civilization and to eventually attend college. The business failed, however, and Lester Frank, who still didn't have the money to attend college, found a job teaching in a small country school; in the Summer months he worked as a farm laborer. He finally saved the money to attend college and enrolled in the Susquehanna Collegiate Institute in 1860. While he was at first self-conscious about his spotty formal education and self learning, he soon found that his knowledge compared favorably to his classmates, and he was rapidly promoted. It was here that he met Elizabeth "Lizzie" Carolyn Vought and fell deeply in love. (Their rather torrid love affair is documented in Ward's first journal: "Young Ward's Diary", which remains under copyright and in print.) He married Lizzie on Aug. 13, 1862 and almost immediately enlisted in the Union Army and was sent to the Civil War front where he was wounded three times. After the end of the war he successfully petitioned for work with the federal government in Washington, DC, where he and Lizzie then moved. Lizzie assisted him in editing a newsletter called "The Iconoclast", dedicated to free thinking. She gave birth to a son, but the child died when he was less than a year old. Then, in 1872, Lizzie became ill and died. These were hard times for Ward to live through.
After moving to Washington, Ward attended Columbian College, now the George Washington University, and graduating in 1869 with the degree of A.B.. In 1871 he received the degree of LL.B. (and was admitted to the Bar of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia), and that of A.M. in 1873. Ward never practiced law, however, and concentrated on his carrier in the federal government. Almost all of the basic research in such fields as geography, paleontology, archeology and anthropology were concentrated in Washington, DC. at this time in history, and a job as a federal government scientist was a prestigious and influential position. In 1883 he was made Geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. In 189S, he was made Paleontologist. He held this position until 1906, when he resigned to accept the chair of Sociology at Brown University. While he worked at the Geological Survey he became good friends with John Wesley Powell, the powerful and influential second director of the US Geological Survey (1881–1894) and the director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution.
By the early 1880s the new field of sociology had become dominated by ideologues of the left and right, both determined to claim "the science of society" as their own. The champion of the conservatives and businessmen was Herbert Spencer; he was opposed on the left by Karl Marx. Although Spencer and Marx disagreed about many things they were similar in that their systems were static: they both claimed to have divined the immutable stages of development that a society went through and they both taught that mankind was essentially helpless before the force of evolution.
With the publication of the two volume , 1200 page, Dynamic Sociology--Or Applied Social Science as Based Upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences(1883), Lester Ward hoped to restore the central importance of experimentation and the scientific method to the field of sociology. For Ward science wasn't cold or impersonal, it was human centered and results oriented. As he put it in the Preface to Dynamic Sociology: "The real object of science is to benefit man. A science which fails to do this, however agreeable its study, is lifeless. Sociology, which of all sciences should benefit man most, is in danger of falling into the class of polite amusements, or dead sciences. It is the object of this work to point out a method by which the breath of life may be breathed into its nostrils."
Ward theorized that poverty could be minimized or eliminated by the systematic intervention of society. Mankind wasn't helpless before the impersonal force of nature and evolution – through the power of Mind, man could take control of the situation and direct the evolution of human society. This theory is known as telesis. Also see: meliorism, sociocracy and public sociology. A sociology which intelligently and scientifically directed the social and economic development of society should institute a universal and comprehensive system of education, regulate competition, connect the people together on the basis of equal opportunities and cooperation, and promote the happiness and the freedom of everyone.
Ward is most often remembered for his relentless attack on Herbert Spencer and his theories of laissez-faire and survival of the fittest that totally dominated socio/economic thought in the United States after the Civil War. While Marx and communism/socialism didn't catch on in the United States during Ward's lifetime, Spencer became famous: he was the leading light for conservatives. Ward placed himself in direct opposition to Spencer and Spencer's American disciple, William Graham Sumner, who had become the most well known and widely read American sociologist by single-mindedly promoting the principles of laissez-faire. To quote the historian Henry Steele Commager: "Ward was the first major scholar to attack this whole system of negativist and absolutist sociology and he remains the ablest.... Before Ward could begin to formulate that science of society which he hoped would inaugurate an era of such progress as the world had not yet seen, he had to destroy the superstitions that still held domain over the mind of his generation. Of these, laissez-faire was the most stupefying, and it was on the doctrine of laissez-faire that he trained his heaviest guns. The work of demolition performed in Dynamic Sociology, Psychic Factors and Applied Sociology was thorough."
Ward was a strong advocate for equal rights for women and even theorized that women were naturally superior to men, much to the scorn of mainstream sociologists. In this regard, Ward presaged the rise of feminism, and especially the difference feminism of writers such as Harvard's Carol Gilligan, who have developed the claims of female superiority. Ward is now considered a feminist writer by historians such as Ann Taylor Allen. Ward's persuasion on the question of female intelligence as described by himself: "And now from the point of view of intellectual development itself we find her side by side, and shoulder to shoulder with him furnishing, from the very outset, far back in prehistoric, presocial, and even prehuman times, the necessary complement to his otherwise one-sided, headlong, and wayward career, without which he would soon have warped and distorted the race and rendered it incapable of the very progress which he claims exclusively to inspire. And herefore again, even in the realm of intellect, where he would fain reign supreme, she has proved herself fully his equal and is entitled to her share of whatever credit attaches to human progress hereby achieved."
Ward had a considerable influence on the United States' environmental policy in the late 19th and early 20th century. Ross listed Ward among the four "philosopher/scientists" that shaped American early environmental policies. (see: Ross, John R.; Man over Nature)
Ward's views on the question of race and the theory of white supremacy underwent considerable change throughout his life. Ward was a Republican Whig and supported the abolition of the American system of slavery. He enlisted in the Union army during the Civil war and was wounded three times. However, a close reading of "Dynamic Sociology" will uncover several statements that would be considered racist and ethnocentric by today's standards. There are references to the superiority of Western culture and the savagery of the American Indian and black races, made all the more jarring by the modern feel of much of the rest of the book. However, Ward lived in Washington D.C., then the center of anthropological research in the US; he was always up-to-date on the latest findings of science and in tune with the developing zeitgeist, and by the early twentieth century, perhaps influenced by W.E.B. Du Bois and the Franz Boas he began to focus more on the question of race. During this period his views on race were arguably more progressive and in tune with modern standards than any other white academic of the time, with, of course, the exception of Boas,who is sometimes credited with doing more than any other American in combating the theory of White supremacy.[1][2] Ward, given his age and reputation, could afford to take a somewhat radical stand on the politically explosive question of White supremacy, but Boas did not have those advantages. After Ward's death in 1913 and with the approach of World War I the German-born Boas came to be seen by some, including W.H. Holmes, the head of National Research Council (and who had worked with Ward for many years at the U.S. Geological Survey), as possibly being an agent of the German government determined to sow revolution in the US and among its troops. The NRC had been set up by the Wilson administration in 1916 in response to the increased need for scientific and technical services caused by World War I, and soon Boas's influence over the field of anthropology the US began to wane. By 1919 he was censured by the American Anthropological Association for his political activities, a censure which would not be lifted until 2005. (See also: Scientific racism, Master race, and Institutional racism) (the source for the information about Boas is Gossett, Thomas F.; Race: The History of an Idea in America)
Ward is often categorized as been a follower of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. However, as Ward's article "Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism" shows, Ward had a sophisticated understanding of this subject. While he clearly described himself as being a Neo-Lamarckian, he completely and enthusiastically accepted Darwin's findings and theories. On the other hand, he believed that, logically, there had to be a mechanism that would allow environmental factors to influence evolution faster than Darwin's rather slow evolutionary process. The modern theory of Epigenetics suggests that Ward was correct on this issue, although old-school Darwinians continue to ridicule Larmarkianism.[3]
While Durkheim is usually credited for updating Comte's positivism to modern scientific and sociological standards, Ward accomplished much the same thing 10 years earlier in the United States. However, Ward would be the last person to claim that his contributions were somehow unique or original to him. As Gillis J. Harp points out in "The Positivist Republic", Comte's positivism found a fertile ground in the democratic republic of the United States, and there soon developed among the pragmatic intellectual community in New York City, which featured such thinkers as William James and Charles Sanders Peirce and, on the other hand, among the federal government scientists in Washington D.C. (like Ward) a general consensus regarding positivism.
Despite Ward's impressive and ground breaking accomplishments he has been largely written out of the history of sociology. Why? Paradoxically the thing that made Ward most attractive in the 19th century, his criticism of lassiez-faire, made him seem dangerously radical to the ever-cautious academic community in early 20th century America. This perception was strengthened by the growing socialist movement in the US, led by Eugene V. Debs, the Marxist Russian Revolution, and the rise of Nazism in Europe. Ward was basically just replaced by Durkheim in the history books, which was easily accomplished because Durkheim's views were similar to Ward's but without the relentless criticism of lassiez-faire and without Ward's calls for a strong central government and "social engineering".[4] In 1937 Talcott Parsons, the Harvard sociologist and functionalist who almost single-handedly set American sociology's academic curriculum in the mid-20th century, wrote that "Spencer is dead", thereby dismissing not only Spencer but also Spencer's most powerful critic.
It would be interesting to know Ward's candid views on the controversial political subjects and the people of the time (and that he was interested in these topics can be seen in the rather odd introduction to the second edition of "Dynamic Sociology" were he talks at length about the situation in per-revolutionary Russia and jokes about Dynamic Sociology being mistranslated as "Dynamite Socialism"). However, all but the first of his voluminous journals were reportedly destroyed by his wife after his death. Ward's first journal, "Young Ward's diary: A human and eager record of the years between 1860 and 1870...", remains under copyright and one could always hope that more of his writings may reappear at some future date.
Ward had strong influence on a rising generation of progressive political leaders, such as Herbert Croly. In the book "Lester Ward and the Welfare State", Commager details Ward's influence and refers to him as the "father of the modern welfare state".
As a political approach, Ward's system became known as social liberalism, as distinguished from the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which featured such thinkers as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. While classical liberalism had sought prosperity and progress through laissez-fare, Ward's "American social liberalism" sought to enhance social progress through direct government intervention. Ward believed that in large, complex and rapidly growing societies human freedom could only be achieved with the assistance of a strong democratic government acting in the interest of the individual. The characteristic element of Ward's thinking was his faith that government, acting on the empirical and scientifically based findings of the science of sociology, could be harnessed to create a near Utopian social order.
Ward's thinking had a profound impact on the administrations of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt and on the modern Democratic Party. The "liberalism" of the Democrats today is not that of Smith and Mill, which stressed non-interference from the government in economic issues, but of Ward, which stressed the unique position of government to effect positive change. While Roosevelt's experiments in social engineering were popular and effective, the full effect of the forces Ward set in motion came to bear half a century after his death, in the Great Society programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam war.
Ward realized that the path to human progress was not easy or smooth. His hope was that the "science" of sociology, which was but in its infancy, would allow government officials to learn from their past mistakes.
Ward died in Washington, D.C.. He is buried in Watertown, New York.
Ward's view of sociology as a science potentially equal in quality to the physical sciences has been called into question. Sociology is a social science, but one of the weakest. The term "science" imputes a veracity to the study of sociology that this discipline simply does not have. Since its inception by people such as Ward and Max Weber[5], a social democrat lawyer and political activist, sociology has been a politically oriented study, aimed at the creation of a welfare state-type system. In the 20th century a new generation of conservative economists and conservative thinkers, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Robert Nozick expanded on the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, arguing that the decentralized market economy was superior to centralized government control, both practically and ethically. In 1971 David Halberstam's remarkable work, The Best and the Brightest[6] documented the perfidy of the elite bureaucrats of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, both heavily influenced by Ward, in promoting State welfare and the Vietnam War. H. R. McMaster's work, Dereliction of Duty,[7] goes even further in its critique. Milton Friedman's Nobel prize-winning work, Capitalism and Freedom[8], rose above the philosophic duel between Ward and Spencer over social Darwinism and made the case for the dependence of political freedom on economic freedom. It is at this point of intellectual history that Ward's Statist philosophy can be regarded as refuted, and his non sequitir of seeing in centralized State power the freedoms of the individual guaranteed, as fully exposed.
As far as Ward's relationship to Marx is concerned, Ward can rightly be called a soft Marxist, since he sought Marxian ends (universal, state-controlled education and social redress through an empowered government) through non-revolutionary means. Like Marx he supported a cradle-to-grave caretaker government, a system subsequently rejected by once Communist Russia, yet currently bankrupting Europe and the United States.
Ward was a highly influential intellectual figure, one whose thinking influenced both political parties in the sixties, but one whose views have subsequently proven false. The Reagan Revolution, while certainly not reverting to social Darwinism, grew out of the public realization of the failure of Ward's system. In this sense, both Ward and his social Darwinist antagonists were wrong. Democratic freedoms are completely contrary to the static, classist ideas of upper-class advocates such as William Graham Sumner[9], whose real impetus seems to have been to justify the robber barons, nor is Ward's paternalistic caretaker state even plausibly supportive of an active and participatory democracy.
"In many respects the botanist looks at the world from a point of view precisely the reverse of that of other people. Rich fields of corn are to him waste lands; cities are his abhorrence, and great open areas under high cultivation he calls 'poor country'; while on the other hand the impenetrable forest delights his gaze, the rocky cliff charms him, thin-soiled barrens, boggy fens, and unreclaimable swamps and morasses are for him the finest land in a State. He takes no delight in the 'march of civilization,' the ax and the plow are to him symbols of barbarism, and the reclaiming of waste lands and opening up of his favorite haunts to civilization he instinctively denounces as acts of vandalism." -- Lester Ward
"Every implement or utensil, every mechanical device...is a triumph of mind over the physical forces of nature in ceaseless and aimless competition. All human institutions—religion, government, law, marriage, custom—together with innumerable other modes of regulating social, industrial and commercial life are, broadly viewed, only so many ways of meeting and checkmating the principle of competition as it manifests itself in society." --Lester Ward
"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" --Lester Ward
"To overcome [the] manifold hindrances to human progress, to check this enormous waste of resources, to calm these rhythmic billows of hyper-action and reaction, to secure the rational adaptation of means to remote ends, to prevent the natural forces from clashing with the human feelings, to make the current of physical phenomena flow in the channels of human advantage - these are some of the tasks which belong to the great art which forms the final or active department of the science of society - this, in brief, is DYNAMIC SOCIOLOGY. “Voir pour prévoir";(1*) "prévoyance, d'où action,"(2*) i.e., predict in order to control, such is the logical history and process of all science; and, if sociology is a science, such must be its destiny and its legitimate function." --Lester Ward
"Again, society desires most the education of those most needing to be educated. From an economical point of view, an uneducated class is an expensive class. It is from it that most criminals, drones, and paupers come. From it—and this is still more important—no progressive actions ever flow. Therefore, society is most anxious that this class, which would never educate itself, should be educated...The secret of the superiority of state over private education lies in the fact that in the former the teacher is responsible to society ... [T]he result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils." --Lester Ward
"And now, mark : The charge of paternalism is chiefly made by the class that enjoys the largest share of government protection. Those who denounce state interference are the ones who most frequently and successfully invoke it. The cry of laissez faire mainly goes up from the ones who, if really "let alone," would instantly lose their wealth-absorbing power.... Nothing is more obvious to-day than the signal inability of capital and private enterprise to take care of themselves unaided by the state; and while they are incessantly denouncing "paternalism," by which they mean the claim of the defenceless laborer and artisan to a share in this lavish state protection, they are all the while besieging legislatures for relief from their own incompetency, and "pleading the baby act" through a trained body of lawyers and lobbyists. The dispensing of national pap to this class should rather be called "maternalism," to which a square, open, and dignified paternalism would be infinitely preferable." --Lester Ward
"When a well-clothed philosopher on a bitter winter’s night sits in a warm room well lighted for his purpose and writes on paper with pen and ink in the arbitrary characters of a highly developed language the statement that civilisation is the result of natural laws, and that man’s duty is to let nature alone so that untrammeled it may work out a higher civilisation, he simply ignores every circumstance of his existence and deliberately closes his eyes to every fact within the range of his faculties. If man had acted upon his theory there would have been no civilisation, and our philosopher would have remained a troglodyte." – --Lester Ward
"In perspicacity, intellectual acumen, and imagination, he [Lester Ward] was the equal of Henry Adams or Thorstein Velben or Louis Sullivan, but he was better rounded and more constructive than these major critics. In the rugged vigor of his mind, the richness of his learning, the originality of his insights, the breath of his conceptions, he takes place alongside William James, John Dewey and Oliver Wendell Holmes as one of the creative spirits of Twentieth-century America." – --Henry Steele Commager
Ward's major works can be found here: http://www.geocities.ws/ralf_schreyer/ward/lesterward.html and here: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Ward%2C%20Lester
The documentary Lester F. Ward: A Life's Journey (108 minutes) examines the life and ideas of Lester Ward.It begins with his childhood and follows him as a young man, a soldier in the Civil War, his work with John Wesley Powell as a paleontologist, and his extensive communications with a wide range of European sociologists. Described as "the American Aristotle" Ward was an "apostle of human progress" who vigorously advocated for public education and the rights of women and minorities. The noted feminist Charlotte Gilman described Ward as "one of the world's greatest men" and dedicated her book The Man-Made World to him. Nonetheless Ward vehemently opposed her support of the eugenics movement. As he put it, "People are equal in all except privilege." www.galelargey.com
| Preceded by — |
President of the American Sociological Association 1906–1907 |
Succeeded by William Graham Sumner |