Mises Search

William Graham Sumner is the “forgotten man” of American intellectual history and of the history of liberty. A thinker of extraordinary power, and a person who developed and integrated and thrilling view of the place of liberty in the development of society, he has too often dismissed or only superficially understood. It’s great that his

The author, William Graham Sumner, was the great sociologist of late 19th century America, but also a wise observer of economic conditions. In 1874, in the midst of another debate about the future of the American monetary system, he offered this sweeping history of the calamity of paper money in the United States from the Colonial Period to the

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) was a sociologist at Yale University, a historian of American banking, and great expositor of classical liberalism. Yes, this is the man often dismissed today as an outmoded “social Darwinist” — and this book shows why it is so important to the statists that his work is not given a fair hearing. What the Social

Sumner’s dominant interest in political economy, as revealed in his teaching and writing, issued in a doughty advocacy of “free trade and hard money,” and involved the relentless exposure of protectionism and of schemes of currency-debasement. On the “Forgotten Man”: He works, he votes, generally he prays — but he always pays — yes, above all, he