Folkways
Folkways is Sumner’s 1906 study of how unreflective custom — folkways and mores — governs social life. Its most-cited passages distinguish the we-group (in-group) from the others-group (out-group) and name the resulting bias ethnocentrism: each group takes itself as the center of things and rates outsiders by reference to itself.
What the Book Argues
Sumner’s claim is that the bulk of social order is not designed but inherited: folkways are the habitual ways of doing things that arise in a group and harden, over time, into mores carrying moral authority. The passages this wiki draws on describe the social geometry that follows. A group’s members feel internal solidarity — a we-group — precisely by contrast with outsiders, and that contrast tends to breed loyalty and sacrifice inward while licensing suspicion or hostility outward. Sumner gives this disposition its name, ethnocentrism, and traces its expressions from small-group pride to patriotism and chauvinism. The point is sociological, not normative: the in-group/out-group reflex is presented as a recurring feature of human grouping, the raw material later refinements work on.
Why It Matters in This Wiki
Folkways supplies the demand-side half of the wiki’s account of why nationalism is easy: the tribal sentiment is already there, needing no teaching. It feeds Out-Group Tribalism and pairs with the state-making channel — how rulers refine that sentiment into national identity — documented through Tilly. Present here as a focused extract (the we-group/out-group/ethnocentrism sections), not the full 1906 volume.
See Also
- William Graham Sumner - the author
- Out-Group Tribalism - the concept node this work anchors
- Libertarianism and Human Nature: The Adoption Problem - newsroom thesis backlink