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improved the human condition from inferior savagery to superior forms of civilization (Persons,
1963). Rather, Sumner was an early advocate of adaptive cultural ecology and cultural
relativism. For Sumner, societies did not progressively get better; they only survived (Davie,
1963; Murdock, 1965; Persons, 1963). Sumner, therefore, opposed Marxian and other social
science schemes to improve the world, and was known in political science as a conservative
advocate of laissez faire policies (New Columbia University Encyclopedia, 1975). -
Near the close of his career as Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale, Sumner
began work on the monumental, 4-volume, Science of Society, which was completed
posthumously in 1927 by Keller and Davie (Lebar, 1970). Sumner et al., (1927) claimed, and
Simmons (1937) claimed to have substantiated, that private property is a component of society's
control of its members through systems of political dominance: :
Property, law, rights, government, classes, marriage, religion - are all born together and
linked together. (Sumner & Keller, 1927, vol. 1, p. 260)
Keller carried Sumner's vision of the science of society to numerous doctoral students,
including Davie, Ford, Moore, Murdock, Simmel, Whiting and others. Keller also organized the
Sumner Club at Yale, which was followed by the Institute of Human Relations and ultimately
today’s Human Relations Areas Files, Inc. (Lebar, 1970; Murdock, 1937).
Another important scholar to help make the transition from the nineteenth century
ethnographic surveys of property to contemporary cross-cultural research was the British
social philosopher and sociologist, Leonard Hobhouse (New Columbia University Encyclopedia,
1975). He, too, was a Darwinist, with particular interest in the evolution of human morals,
including property mores (Hobhouse, 1906, 1922). However, unlike Sumner, Hobhouse was a
liberal in company with the Fabian Socialists who sought to justify a redistribution of wealth and
power without recourse to the violence of communism. Hobhouse was particularly disturbed
by the selective use of ethnographic evidence by the French comparative sociologists and
devised, after the fashion of Tylor (1889), a comparative, quantificational study of property
practices among primitive peoples (Hobhouse, Wheeler & Ginsberg, 1915). Hobhouse (1906;
1922) argued that control was the essential feature of property. At the personal level, this meant
use and independence. At the interpersonal level, it meant power.
Now these two functions of property, the control of things which gives freedom and
security, and the control of persons through things, which gives power to the owner, are
very different. In some respects they are radically opposed, yet from the nature of the case
they are intertwined, and their relationship can be traced through the history of the
institution. (Hobhouse, 1922, pp. 10-11)