Lester Frank Ward

Lester Ward and the Welfare State

Pure Sociology is a synthesis of Wards sociological thought; his next to last book. Lester F. Ward (1841-1913) 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. Ward was eulogized at his death as one of the last giants of nineteenth-century sociology, and many of his ideas - the primacy of artificial over natural forces in the development of human society, the psychological rather than the biological basis of human life, and the stress on process and function rather than on structure in the study of society - provided leads for the researchers in sociology who succeeded him. The emergence of the modern welfare state and the involvement of professional sociologists in the practical problems of politics, poverty, and race represent a kind of vindication of his work.

Pure Sociology

Collected papers

The Course of Biologic Evolution

Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism

Charles Abiathar White

Carl Barus

Bailey Willis

Joseph Silas Diller

Edmund G. Wagner

Warren Upham

Albert Charles Peale

(Preceding Papers on the Iron-carburets in Bulletin 14 and 27)

Physical Properties of the Iron-carburets, Third Paper

Or Applied Social Science, as Based Upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences

Lester Frank Ward

Books

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