ABSTRACT
William Graham Sumner, who began his career as an Episcopal priest, represents in the history of sociology the transition from a theologically informed effort to make sense of human nature and human society to an empirically based understanding of human will and interaction. The crux of Sumner's analysis in Folkways is how the normative life constructs habit and deliberative assessment posing choices. Some of Sumner's most interesting observations about mores come in an essay, "The Mores of the Present and the Future," first published in 1909 in the Yale Review, a year before his death. The question that Sumner's sociological analysis poses in the case of the mores is how useful such analysis is to the present work of sociologists whose various commitments remain consistent with Sumner's to science, to profession, to politics, and to their respective priority in each individual.
