Lester Frank Ward

Lester Frank Ward 1841-1913, American sociologist and paleontologist, b. Joliet, Ill. Largely self-educated, he eventually took degrees in medicine and law. He worked as a government geologist and paleontologist from 1881 to 1906, when he became professor of sociology at Brown. One of the first and most important of American sociologists, Ward developed a theory of planned progress called telesis, whereby man, through education and development of intellect, could direct social evolution. His theories and those of his contemporary, William Graham Sumner, represent two main trends in 19th-century American sociology. Among his important works are Dynamic Sociology (1883), Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893), Pure Sociology (1903), and Glimpses of the Cosmos (6 vol., 1913-18).

Bibliography: See S. Chugerman, Lester F. Ward, the American Aristotle (1939, repr. 1965).

Ward, Lester Frank (1841–1913), sociologist.The end of the Civil War found Ward, a sparsely educated but ambitious army veteran from rural Illinois, seeking a clerkship in Washington, D.C. He took night courses, earned a master's degree in science, and flourished as a paleobotanist in John Wesley Powell's U.S. Geological Survey. With the publication of Dynamic Sociology (1883), and later The Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893) and Applied Sociology (1906), he emerged as one of America's foremost critics of the laissez‐faire individualism of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Ward cautioned against applying scientific principles to politics. Rejecting the belief that any interference in the market economy jeopardized social progress by elevating the unfit, Ward stressed the power of human intellect as expressed through art, science, and institutions. Far from being helpless before immutable natural laws, human beings could master nature and achieve progress through the collective exercise of intelligence. Ward also criticized eugenics as scientifically flawed and antidemocratic. He envisioned a future “Sociocracy” in which social problems would be solved by a government of disinterested experts.

His faith in science, efficiency, democracy, and especially education as agents of social change appealed to Progressive Era activists seeking a scientific foundation for reform and to sociologists aspiring to social relevance. But when Brown University hired him in 1906, he was sixty‐five and in intellectual decline. A philosopher by temperament, Ward seemed out of step as sociology grew more technical and specialized. His work enjoyed a renaissance in the mid–twentieth century, however, among intellectuals seeking the philosophical roots of the welfare state.
See also Gilded Age; Social Darwinism; Welfare, Federal.

Bibliography

Henry Steele Commager , Lester Ward and the Welfare State, 1967.
Clifford H. Scott , Lester Frank Ward, 1976.

Andrew Chamberlin Rieser

Ward, Lester Frank (1841–1913), sociologist who, in addition to writing many works on the natural sciences, developed a theory that the human mind, when honestly and scientifically instructed, can take an active rather than a passive part in planning the process of human evolution, thus proceeding beyond the bounds of the ordinary evolutionary hypothesis. These ideas are developed in such books as Dynamic Sociology (1883), The Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893), and Pure Sociology (1903). His Glimpses of the Cosmos (6 vols., 1913–18) reprints many of his works in their biographical context, developing what he called his “mental autobiography.”