Lester Frank Ward - Criticism of Laissez-faire

Criticism of Laissez-faire

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."