Dr. Darren Staloff, William Graham Sumner

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Dr. Michael Sugrue earned his BA at the University of Chicago and PhD at Columbia University.

[@tylerbotzon7174]

The cadence and flow of both Dr. Staloff and Dr. Sugrue’s lectures are so world class. Something I want to continually strive towards.

[@nobodynowhere7163]

The best lecture yet, in my opinion: how accurate, how pertinent, and how needed it is in today’s world. Every single person of any age and status must listen to this lecture, several times!

[@TheWidgeon23]

Listening to some of Graham's ideas reminds me of many talks given by Milton Friedman; especially toward the end of this discussion. What a great lecture, thank you.

[@josephasghar]

As eloquent in speech as the best of anyone in writing. Remarkable.

[@lordcoreon]

Yay! More Prof. Staloff!

[@xxcrysad3000xx]

Now here's a lecture I didn't see coming!

[@spectralvalkyrie]

How did I come to such an inverted teaching of Social Darwinism out there? Thank you for this

[@cheri238]

Love Professor Darren Staloff. Thank you again .

[@username1235400]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for this channel.

[@LasArmas_]

Thank you

[@kaimarmalade9660]

I get the the, "Forgotten Man" dilemma when I'm tipping. I love leaving big tips. If restaurants kept their prices low I would be happy to subsidize your workers incomes by leaving lavish tips. When the food gets more expensive I'm expectedly and ironically less likely to be charitable in this regard which hurts me little, the establishment some, and your waiters exponentially. Zizek has been saying for some time, "the most discriminated against person in the world is the hard worker." I can't help but think my grandpa Clark would agree.

[@noodledoodle7031]

This helped with my hw 🕺

[@ruaaaceshin6755]

Dr. Darren Staloff has so many styles ha

[@krakenmcbubble6275]

Always 42-49 minutes well spent

[@JB-ru4fr]

8:11 I wonder what he said that was cut out.

[@texas77563]

Dr Sugrue can you describe Epicureanism for us? I wasnt able to search and find material by you on this. You have a way of making me understand things that others dont have.

[@alohaoliwa]

He touches on Epicurus very briefly and rather dismissively in the Marcus Aurelius lecture

[@pearz420]

pleasure good pain bad

[@erickomar3152]

Very cool! 😎

[@IvanTheHeathen]

I particularly appreciate this lecture from Professor Staloff. Those who don't outright ignore William Graham Sumner tend to lie about him, or at least to heavily and tendentiously misstate his views, so I praise Staloff for having the decency to pluck Sumner from his undeserved obscurity while basically remaining fair to him throughout - something that one almost never sees. However, I'd like to make two points, the first of which relates to the term "Social Darwinism." Frankly, I just don't think that this term is meaningful. I don't think that it refers to any clearly delineated set of ideas. As far as I can tell, the term was brought into common usage by Richard Hofstadter in the 1940s as a way of maligning thinkers with whom he (that is, Hofstadter) disagreed, one of whom was Sumner. Entire books have been written on the subject of Social Darwinism, and yet virtually nowhere is it even attempted to provide a concise and clear definition of what this term refers to. If anyone doubts me on this, consider Staloff's own attempt to provide a definition at the very end of this lecture. He says that Social Darwinist thought consists of three things: (1) "It rejects the classical traditional Christian idea of social organicism and hierarchy... Social Darwinism is all about the individual and the cultivation of individuality." (2) "Social Darwinism embodies the classically liberal critique of the state and power." (3) "[A] profoundly optimistic belief in the productive powers of mankind and their ability to constantly generate progress." Now, whatever "Social Darwinism" is, it cannot possibly consist of these three things. Why? Because by the above definition, for example, Benjamin Constant, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Adam Smith all count as "Social Darwinists." This is a tad odd, to put it mildly, because all three of those men died decades before _On the Origin of Species_ was ever published. If it is really possible for someone to be a "Social Darwinist" at a time long before anyone had ever heard of Darwin, one really has to wonder about the usefulness of the term. Furthermore, Staloff briefly mentions John Dewey as another example of an alleged "Social Darwinist." But John Dewey clearly doesn't satisfy criterion (2). Dewey was not a classical liberal. He was an archetypal Progressive who believed in an expansionist role for the state. I'd like to submit that if a classificatory scheme produces results like these, then it is a bad classificatory scheme and should be rejected in favor of a different one. As far as I've been able to discern, the closest thing to a definition of "Social Darwinism" is something like this: "the belief that success in the market economy is an indicator of one's fitness to survive in the struggle for existence, and therefore that charity - whether administered by the state or privately - is inadvisable, because it prevents 'unfit', unsuccessful individuals from dying off and therefore weakens the species as a whole." Now, a question: Has there been any major figure in the history of human thought who has held the above belief? From what I have seen, the answer is "no." Certainly, Herbert Spencer didn't believe anything like that. In his _Principles of Sociology,_ Spencer at one point pauses to note the slow, secular trend of increased charitable giving in England over the course of the 19th century. As industrialization made people wealthier, they had progressively more disposable income to devote to charity, and so, they proceeded to gradually donate more to those in need. One might expect Spencer to have deplored this trend, given that he was an alleged "Social Darwinist," but he didn't do so. In fact, he exulted in it. He declared it to be a glorious thing. And Sumner, for the record, also didn't hold the above belief. He firmly believed in the rightness of private charity, knowing that everyone, as a result of his own negligence or incompetence, can potentially fall on hard times at some point in his life (as Sumner put it, even a man who is hit by a falling tree is, if we're honest, at least partially at fault for what has happened to him, but it is no use to harangue him with a moralizing lecture while he is in need). And so, we come back to the basic point I want to make here: Richard Hofstadter believed in an expansionist role for the state. But in the 1940s, the ideas of men like Sumner still held purchase, however inchoately, in the minds of many Americans. Therefore, to achieve his political goals, Hofstadter had to discredit the ideas of people like Sumner, who did not believe in an expansionist state. That's where the term "Social Darwinism" comes in. It's not a meaningful designator. It doesn't help us to make sense of the history of ideas or to accurately classify thinkers. It's simply a rhetorical trick used in the context of a political/ideological struggle whose purpose was to create emotional associations in people's minds between, on the one hand, the belief that the state should be strictly limited, and, on the other hand, cruelty or lack of compassion for the poor. These are associations that still hold in many people's minds. The second point I want to make is about Staloff's surprise at around 30:00 at seeing Sumner express a class-based view of history that, as Staloff puts it, "sounds like Marx." This is only surprising because in our minds today, the view of history as class conflict is entirely associated with Marx. In the 19th century, it was not so. Indeed, Marx did not originate this concept. To his credit, Marx never even claimed to do so. It is only his epigones that have falsely attributed originality to him in this regard. Prior to Marx, the class-based view of history was associated with three French thinkers who have been almost completely forgotten to the world: Augustin Thierry, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, with the latter two deserving the lion's share of the credit for originality. Comte and Dunoyer's publication _Le Censeur Europeen_ was known, during the 1810s and 1820s, for presenting history as a conflict between net taxpayers and net tax consumers. The former, they believed, wanted to simply live and engage in peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, and the latter - via everything from warfare to the pursuit of government jobs - sought to exploit and dominate their fellow man, to live at the expense of others while contributing nothing to society. Comte and Dunoyer had a few precursors - notably, Benjamin Constant, Jean-Baptiste Say and the reactionary historian Francois Montolsier, who wrote about the rise of the bourgeoisie as a self-conscious class in opposition to the aristocracy (but deplored this development, while Comte and Dunoyer applauded it) - but they basically developed this view on their own. They also presented history as moving through a series of stages - from primitive savagery to nomadism; then to slavery as represented by the classical world; then to what they called "political privilege," meaning the guild and mercantilist systems that existed in the Middle Ages and the early modern period before the rise of capitalism; then to "place-seeking," meaning the scramble for government jobs that resulted after access to such positions had been democritized by the French Revolution; and finally, to "industrialism," by which they meant a future purely capitalist society in which the state either had a minimal role or disappeared entirely, in which all exchanges were voluntary and contractual, and in which there was no longer an organ of social exploitation. Marx simply took these ideas and changed the participants in the class conflict. Rather than net taxpayer vs net tax consumer, he reframed the conflict as capitalist vs. proletarian. Classical liberal or libertarian theories of class conflict and historical development actually pre-dated Marx by decades. Very few people know this, however, because Comte's and Dunoyer's work remains untranslated, and historians these days usually can't read in any foreign languages, and therefore imbibe a distorted view of the past. Anyway, I apologize for how long this is. Hopefully, someone reads it and finds it interesting.

[@erickomar3152]

Intelligent comment. On a different note, it's great to see someone else subscribed to NobodyTM and Dr. Revilo Oliver on KZbin! Kindred spirits. Have you read Sumner's masterwork _Folkways_

[@IvanTheHeathen]

@@erickomar3152 - I have not, but it’s funny you should mention that. I just so happened to get a copy of that book on the day when you left your comment. I’ve read _What the Social Classes Owe Each Other_ and _A History of American Currency,_ as well as the Sumner essay collection called _On Liberty, Society, and Politics,_ which includes his famous essay, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”

[@IvanTheHeathen]

@@erickomar3152 - And yeah, those are pretty obscure figures. It’s surprising to find someone here who knows who they are.

[@ChillsWithSloths]

This William Graham Sumner guy sounds very disagreeable but I'm appreciative of the overview of his stuff.

[@erickomar3152]

If you feel that way, then read Sumner's textbook *Folkways* which is a mature rendition of Sumner's sociological and ethical thought.

[@spectralvalkyrie]

36:29 🔥liberty

[@tinfoilhatscholar]

I wonder what Staloff thinks about Darwinism these days? My heroin Lynn Margulis said that Darwin was in fact a Lamarkian, and she made a very strong distinction with neo-darwinism. Its my understanding that neo-darwinism is essentially genetic determinism, and now today, we have many more fabulous ideas that leave those days behind, such as the work of Denis Noble. He refers to a third way in evolution, which i recommend researching a bit. Sheldrake also has excellent materials from the Whitehead school of thought, Mae-Wan Ho, James Shapiro etc... Is the social darwinism crowd of today the trust the science camp or the pro liberty group?

[@jimmyjimmy7240]

What is this word "soo-ee-generous"?

[@dr.michaelsugrue]

sui generis

[@jimmyjimmy7240]

@@dr.michaelsugrue thanks so much! This has become my new favorite channel. Appreciate everything.

[@christinemartin63]

I never heard of Sumner ... but he tells it like it is. (Of course, few want to hear this, but, nevertheless, it tracks with reality and how most people experience this life at this time in this Western society.) Yeah ... he told the truth ... and most thought it was hell. (Sorry, Harry).)

[@turkmusik]

He was not right about larger families and low wages, but with immigration unimpeded, it is fairly true.

[@ninstar8165]

Comment.

[@eckiuME23]

Hahaha yeah right

[@erikhesjedal3569]

The American worldview in a nutshell here, you really know how to justify capitalism. Absolutely no compassion for the nonproductive or meek. Welfare sounds like the new aristocracy.