William Graham Sumner

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) was an American sociologist and economist, born in Paterson, New Jersey. After Yale and study in Geneva, Göttingen and Oxford he was ordained an Episcopal priest, but in 1872 he returned to Yale as professor of political and social science and taught there for the rest of his life. A fierce defender of free trade, hard money and laissez-faire, and an opponent of imperialism, he wrote What Social Classes Owe to Each Other and coined the phrase the forgotten man. Folkways, published in 1907, introduced the concept of ethnocentrism and founded the sociological study of custom.