“What do social classes owe to each other?” Two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation the sociologist William Graham Sumner, an influential, if somewhat eccentric, exponent of classical liberalism, undertook to answer what many saw as the central social question of the age. His answer sought to dispel “muddling and blundering” notions of paternalism, relics of the feudal past. “In our modern state,” he argued, “and in the United States more than anywhere else, the social structure is based on contract.”

For Sumner the virtues of contract were nothing less than freedom. A disciple of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, he recognized few absolutes other than the properties of the physical universe. Yet he placed contract at the center of his social cosmology, and he took it as an article of faith that the ascendance of contract would destroy bonds of personal dependence based on status, law, or custom. “A society based on contract,” he wrote, “is a society of free and independent men.” Sumner granted that the new order entailed losses, that there was “more poetry and romance” in “feudal ties.” But unlike some of his antimodernist contemporaries, he was not drawn to medieval idylls. The “sentimental relations which once united baron and retainer, master and servant,” were antithetical to a society founded on contract.