The Real William Graham Sumner | Mises Institute

Today neither Nock nor Sumner is particularly well known, and those who do know of Sumner (those who don’t confuse him with Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts) probably know him as a “social Darwinist.” And this is ironic, for he was not so known during his lifetime or for many years thereafter. Robert C. Bannister, the Swarthmore historian, edited a valuable collection of Sumner’s essays nearly two decades ago for Liberty Fund. This is how he describes the situation in his foreword to that volume: “Sumner’s ‘social Darwinism,'” he writes, “although rooted in controversies during his lifetime, received its most influential expression in Richard Hofstadter[‘s] Social Darwinism in American Thought,” which was first published in 1944.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that the entire concept of “social Darwinism” as we know it today was virtually invented by Richard Hofstadter. Eric Foner, in an introduction to a then new edition of Hofstadter’s book published in the early 1990s, declines to go quite that far. “Hofstadter did not invent the term Social Darwinism,” Foner writes, “which originated in Europe in the 1860s and crossed the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. But before he wrote, it was used only on rare occasions; he made it a standard shorthand for a complex of late-nineteenth-century ideas, a familiar part of the lexicon of social thought.” In the process, he not only portrayed William Graham Sumner as a “social Darwinist”; he also portrayed Herbert Spencer that way. In fact Richard Hofstadter seems to be the principal source of the widespread modern belief that both these men were “social Darwinists.”

via mises.org

As a general rule, you can just suppose every word you learned from progressive historians is wrong and more then half of it is the opposite of true.