Ward's classic Enlightenment approach has sometimes been labeled telesis (Also see: meliorism, sociocracy and public sociology). A Sociology which intelligently and scientifically directed the social and economic development of society should contribute knowledge to instituting a universal and comprehensive system of education, regulating competition, connecting the people on the basis of equal opportunities and cooperation, and promoting the happiness and the freedom of everyone. Criticism of laissez-faire Ward is most often remembered for his relentless attack on Herbert Spencer and Spencer's theories of laissez-faire and survival of the fittest that dominated inegalitarian socio-economic thought in the United States after the American Civil War over slavery. Spencer was a leading light for conservatives and for many elites who considered themselves to be progressive for their day, while the American ruling class rejected the historical-materialist emphasis on democratic human development furthered in Marxism and the related Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois. Ward placed himself in direct opposition to Spencer and Spencer's American disciple William Graham Sumner, who had become the most well known and widely read American Political Scientist by single-mindedly promoting the principles of laissez-faire. To quote the historian Henry Steele Commager: "Ward was the first major scholar to attack this whole system of negativist and absolutist sociology and he remains the ablest.... Before Ward could begin to formulate that science of society which he hoped would inaugurate an era of such progress as the world had not yet seen, he had to destroy the superstitions that still held domain over the mind of his generation. Of these, laissez-faire was the most stupefying, and it was on the doctrine of laissez-faire that he trained his heaviest guns. The work of demolition performed in Dynamic Sociology, Psychic Factors and Applied Sociology was thorough." Welfare state Ward was a strong supporter of the concept of the welfare state, or state aid for those in need of it. He fiercely criticized those who criticized such policies as paternalistic, writing that the primary critics of state aid for the indigent were the wealthy classes who themselves lobbied for government assistance for their failing enterprises: The charge of paternalism is chiefly made by the class that enjoys the largest share of government protection. Those who denounce it are those who most frequently and successfully invoke it. Nothing is more obvious today than the signal inability of capital and private enterprise to take care of themselves unaided