Talk:Lester Frank Ward

Nope
As a professional sociologist, when I get a moment, I am coming in here and correcting all the conservative hack spin on Ward. Just know that that is going to happen. What a sorry mess this Wiki entry is. Junk. User:Blanche Poubelle

POV tag
Ward himself wrote in 1907: "But the "struggle,"...is only a very small part of Darwinsm. In fact it may be said to form no part of it, since it was well understood long before Darwin was born. And yet, curiously enough, the so-called "social Darwinism" scarcely ever gets farther than this.  I have never seen any distinctively Darwinian principle appealed to in the discusssions of "social Darwinism." It is therefore wholly inappropriate to characterize as social Darwinism the laissez-faire doctrine of political economists, even when it it attempted to support that doctrine by appeals to the laws of organic development.  That the laissez-faire doctrine is false and not sustained by biological principles I freely admit and have abundantly shown, but the fallace involved is to be found in an entirely different department of scientific investigation." (Social and Biological Struggles, 1907) Intangible2.0 19:29, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I reinsterted the tag. The article is too much focused on Sumner and Spencer, even incorrectly so (probably relying too much on Hofstadter, who has been refuted, see Bannister or Smith for example). Intangible2.0 16:27, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

The article is focused in part on Spencer and Sumner because as the historian Henry Steele Commanger (Hofstadter has little to say about Ward) points out in his book The American Mind that much, if not the bulk, of Ward's writings were focused on refuting the work of Spencer and Sumner. Ward was deeply influenced by Spencer, as a reading of Dynamic Sociology will show (indeed much of volume 1 is a summery of Spencer's theories); he admired much of Spencer's work but felt that Spencer had lost his way when he tried to apply his ideas to the world of government and politics.

This article wasn't designed to provide a comprehensive review of Ward's work or world view but rather to encourage and assist research into Ward, who is often ignored in the teaching of the history of sociology, and as such I think it is important to inform readers of Ward's importance as a critic of lassiz faire and survival of the fittest policies which are still aggressively advocated by conservative economists, theoreticians and politicians, dispite having been decisively refuted by Ward over 100 years ago.

With all due respect, to remove the references to Spencer and Sumner would be to falsify the historical record and would be a POV violation. I provide links in the article to Wikipedia's Spencer and Sumner articles, which provide information and points of view much different than presented here. Let's let the reader decide what to believe and proceed on with his research.

If you would like to edit the article and remove things you consider offensive, prehaps we could proceed from there and achieve closure in this matter.
 * Well, this positivism of sociology has been critized as well (I recall Hayek's Counter-Revolution of Science for example). So I am not sure how far this refutation of laissez-faire went; Spencer and Ward were probably both wrong in their arguments. Intangible2.0 18:30, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

The present article amounts to an apology for Ward, and treats his political influence in a laudatory and uncritical fashion. His profound influence on the Democratic Party, and his creation of "social liberalism" as distinguished from the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham is accurate. However, from any historical standpoint, Ward's views on the benevolence and efficiency of the state and especially State bureaucracies have been disproven by subsequent experience. His radically Statist views with respect to education would be taken as alarming by most American parents today. And the gradual decline of literacy under the increasingly Statist public school system confutes Ward's views. Of course, the country was young then, but it still is important to note that Ward's views of a permanent caretaker government run directly counter to the founding fathers' views of limited government. In fact, no constitutional founder would consider Ward's view of the State as a benevolent actor on behalf of individual rights as a serious philosophical proposition.

The political section also does not make any distinction between the way in which Ward's Statism influenced Woodrow Wilson, FDR and LBJ's Great Society (i.e., they accepted and implemented his views) and the way he influenced the Reagan Revolution. In fact, Ronald Reagan's presidency represents a push back to a more laissez-faire form of government, and less government intrusion into the economy, and thus a rejection of Ward.

In economics, the article is clearly biased against Rand and Greenspan, as Greenspan's "deregulation" had nothing to do with the housing markets' collapse. Instead, it was the interventionist policies of Jimmy Carter in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1978, and especially as it was enforced by Clinton's housing secretary, Andrew Cuomo, that created the bubble. Republican regulators under Bush tried to reverse these policies but were denounced openly as racists by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, both Democrats. And it was Democrat advisors to the current White House occupant who ran Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae at the time of their demise. The article is written deliberately to blame deregulation for the housing bubble, when the bubble was created by large-scale government subsidies of those who were incapable of affording a home, anyway. The article also neglects the facts that Reagan's transportation deregulation led to a resurgence of rail freight for the first time in decades, and that Clinton, in following Greenspan's lead, continued deregulation and thus enjoyed in the latter half of his term almost unprecedented growth.

The article as it stands is a deeply slanted apology for Ward, and provides neither an accurate nor encyclopedic treatmentDoktorschley (talk) 03:11, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Under Larmarkianism, or the misformed "Lamarkism",epigenetics has not proven Ward correct at all. Epigenetics is a highly controversial field, and its relationship to Darwinism is problematic. Again, the article here has a deep, unfounded slant toward Ward.Doktorschley (talk) 10:28, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Scientific Claims
Claims as to the degree that any academic discipline is or is not scientific are inexhaustably contestable and amount to opinion. Science as a method is applicable to any subject matter or discipline. Acceptance as an academic or scientific discipline results from a historical process, not from some essence of the subject matter. The debate as to the degree that a disipline is or is not science is a subject unto itself and is not attributable to any one theorist or practitioner. Does it then make any sense and is it expressing a neutral point of view to regurgitate general debates about how scientific a discipline is or is not on the page about a paricular practitioner? Ward may or may not be practicising science to this or that degree, so by all means point that out where it is the case. General debates though about sociology or philosophy of science belong on the pages of those general subjects.

External links modified
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Cleanup and rewrite needed
I'm going to make this my little project for the next week. This article is not in great shape at the moment. Primary problems are rambling, dense passages and vague unsourced claims. Additonally, this needs to be rewritten in a way that non-expert audiences might engage. Would appreciate some help.Boredintheevening (talk) 01:27, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I've done a rewrite of the page and introduce a bunch of new sources. I think I've addressed most of the tone issues. To continue to develop the page, I think we need to add in more coverage of his engagement with the social Darwinism debate, and to try to talk more about his engagement with the development of sociology as a discipline. These are both key areas for which he is more notable. I'm going to take a break and try and address these soon.Boredintheevening (talk) 16:35, 13 June 2024 (UTC)