Folkways, an essay compiled by William Graham Sumner, is a closely examined analysis of the inner-workings of society and why it works the way that it does. This particular essay has influenced many other philosophers/sociologists by the way we view the process of understanding rules and regulations set by society. Not just specific individual cultures around the world over the span of the era that humans have inhabited the Earth, but how we all act together to form what we call a "society." And that, even though most ethnocentric individuals in their own societies deny, we all work remarkably similarly when it comes to forming our own respective groups and intertwine them into the massive web of individual relations with each other to form the societies that we live in everyday.
             This essay is basically a description of how these rituals in human nature first developed and evolved into the complex ways that we all (as contributors to our respective cultures) work together to keep these same basic rules true to all have the same basic powers to collectively and equally work together to form the hierarchy of rules or "morals" and all follow the same ones to keep peace among ourselves to keep everyone in order so that the essential needs can be met for everyone in that society. As William Graham Sumner states in his essay "the first task of life is to live...Need was the first experience and it was followed at once by a blundering effort to satisfy it...they controlled and aided the first efforts to satisfy [these] needs." This excerpt explains how he perceives how acts are needed to be done, and in order to have any sort of control on how it is done, then we all have to understand that these are the basic needs one as to have in order to satisfy these acts.
             He also spends most of his time explaining what happens when these basic acts are being done, and how that transforms into the "folkw...