William Graham Sumner (October 30, 1840 – April 12, 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 identify imperialists' chief means of justification, in his book Folkways (1906). Sumner is often seen as a proto-libertarian. He was also the first to teach a course entitled "Sociology". Sumner is a critic of natural rights, famously arguing

"the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence..."

—William Graham Sumner, "Earth-hunger, and other essays," p. 234.

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Sumner graduated from Yale College in 1863, where he had been a member of Skull and Bones. Later he was appointed to the newly created Chair of Political and Social Science at Yale. As a sociologist, his major accomplishments were developing the concepts of diffusion, folkways, and ethnocentrism. Sumner's work with folkways led him to conclude that attempts at government mandated reform were useless. He was a staunch advocate of laissez faire economics. Sumner was active in the intellectual promotion of free trade classical liberalism, and in his heyday and after there were Sumner Clubs here and there. He heavily criticized state socialism / state communism. One adversary he mentioned by name was Edward Bellamy, whose national variant of socialism was set forth in Looking Backward, published in 1888, and the sequel Equality.

Like many classical liberals at the time, including Edward Atkinson, Moorfield Storey, and Grover Cleveland, Sumner opposed the Spanish - American War and the subsequent U.S. effort to quell the insurgency in the Philippines. He was a vice president of the Anti - Imperialist League which had been formed after the war to oppose the annexation of territories. In his speech "The Conquest of the United States by Spain," he lambasted imperialism as a betrayal of the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American People and contrary to America's own founding as a state of equals, where justice and law "were to reign in the midst of simplicity." According to Sumner, imperialism would enthrone a new group of "plutocrats," or business people who depended on government subsidies and contracts.

In 1875, Sumner became the first to teach a course entitled "sociology" in the English speaking world, though this course focused on the thought of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, rather than the formal academic sociology that would be established 20 years later by Émile Durkheim in Europe. He was the second president of American Sociological Association serving from 1908 to 1909 and succeeding his long time ideological opponent Lester F. Ward.

During the late 1860s Sumner was an Episcopalian minister. In 1872, Sumner accepted to become the chair of Political Economy at Yale University. In 1880, Sumner was involved in one of the first cases of academic freedom. Sumner and the Yale president at the time, Noah Porter, did not agree on the use of Herbert Spencer's "Study of Sociology" as part of the curriculum. Spencer's application of Darwinist ideas to the realm of humans may have been slightly too controversial at this time of curriculum reform. On the other hand even if Spencer's ideas were not generally accepted, it is clear that his social Darwinist ideas influenced Sumner in his written works.

William Graham Sumner was influenced by many people and ideas such as Herbert Spencer and his social Darwinist ideologies. A lot of this Darwinist influence can be seen in his written works.

In 1881 Sumner wrote an essay entitled “Sociology”. In the essay Sumner focuses on the connection between sociology and biology. He explains that there are two sides to the struggle for survival of a human. The first being a “struggle for existence”, which is a relationship between man and nature. The second side would be the “competition for life” which can be identified as a relationship between man and man. The first being a biological relationship with nature and the second being a social link thus sociology. Man would struggle against nature to obtain essential needs such as food or water and in turn this would create the conflict between man and man in order to obtain needs from a limited supply. Sumner believed that man could not abolish the law of “survival of the fittest” we could only interfere with it and produce the “unfit”.

Another example of Darwinist influence in Sumner’s work was his analysis of warfare in one of his essays in the 1880s. Contrary to some beliefs, Sumner did not believe that warfare was a result of primitive societies; he suggested that “real warfare” came from more developed societies. It was believed that primitive cultures would have war as a “struggle for existence”, but Sumner believed that war in fact came from a “competition for life”. Although war was sometimes man against nature, fighting another tribe for their resources, it was more often a conflict between man and man. For example one man fighting against another man because of his ideologies. Sumner explained that the competition for life was the reason for war and that is why war has always existed and always will.

Sumner's most popular book is Folkways: A study of the sociological importance of usages, manners, customs, mores, and morals (1907). Starting with four theoretical chapters, it provides a frank, objective, and candid description of the nature of many of the more important customs and institutions in societies past and present around the world. The book promotes a sociological or relativistic approach to moral behavior, as expressed in his thesis that "the mores can make anything right and prevent condemnation of anything."

Graham argued that in his day, politics was being subverted by those proposing "measure of relief for the evils which have caught public attention." He wrote,

As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X.