William Graham Sumner

William Graham Sumner was an American sociologist and economist at Yale University who helped establish sociology as an academic discipline in the United States while becoming one of the country's most prominent proponents of social Darwinism and laissez-faire economic policy. In Folkways (1907) he coined the terms folkways and mores to describe the customary norms that regulate social behavior, and introduced the concept of ethnocentrism to describe the tendency of groups to view their own culture as superior and to judge other groups by its standards. His insistence that social evolution should proceed without government interference made him a leading and controversial voice against reform-minded sociology of his era.