The Forgotten Man and Other Essays

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918. First edition, first printing.

SCARCE FIRST PRINTING OF CONTROVERSIAL ESSAYS BY YALE'S FIRST PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, ADMIRED BY ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND ECONOMISTS OF THE DAY.

15x23 cm hardcover, red cloth binding, gilt title to spine, top edge gilt, bookplate of Charles Carpenter to front paste-down, contemporary signature of Daniel M. Henry to front paste-down, frontispiece portrait of author with tissue guard, 539 pp. Corners bumped, gilt spine dulled, light browning to pages, binding tight, very good in custom archival mylar cover.

WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER (1840 - 1910) held the first professorship in sociology 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. His essays were very widely read among intellectuals, and men of affairs. Among Sumner's students were the anthropologist Albert Galloway Keller, the economist Irving Fisher, and the champion of an anthropological approach to economics, Thorstein Bunde Veblen. 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 supposed "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 ideas influenced Sumner in his written works. Sumner 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... What I want to do is to look up C... I call him the forgotten man... He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, the social speculator, and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him."—Summer, p. 466 of The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (offered here).