Powell, the powerful and influential second director of the US Geological Survey (1881–1894) and the director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. Brown University Chair of Sociology In 1892, he was named Paleontologist for the USGS, a position he held until 1906, when he resigned to accept the chair of Sociology at Brown University. Works and ideas In the early 1880s, Enlightenment, Counterenlightenment and Antienlightenment struggles continued over the extent of democratic versus elite institutions necessary and sufficient to advance justice and security. The British champion of the conservatives and businessmen was Herbert Spencer, innovating Social Darwinism to argue for social, economic, and political inequality. Spencer was opposed by the Historical materialism of Karl Marx. Ward worked for team democratic Enlightenment in the ongoing contest. He strategized to defuse mobilized conservative-liberal opposition to Marx in the United States while furthering democracy; so he deployed his scientific literacy to contribute an American version of historical-materialist Sociology. With the publication of the two-volume, 1,200-page, Dynamic Sociology: Or Applied Social Science as Based Upon Statistical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences (1883), Lester Ward hoped to bring scientific epistemology to the struggle for democracy in the United States. For Ward science wasn't cold or impersonal; it was human-centered and results-oriented. As he put it in the Preface to Dynamic Sociology, "The real object of science is to benefit man. A science which fails to do this, however agreeable its study, is lifeless. Sociology, which of all sciences should benefit man most, is in danger of falling into the class of polite amusements, or dead sciences. It is the object of this work to point out a method by which the breath of life may be breathed into its nostrils." Spencer's twist on Darwinism argued that inequality is inevitable and proper because Nature requires social, political, and economic inequality, inegalitarian institutions and dispositions. Against such antidemocratic efforts to naturalize inequality with the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Gilded Age, Ward argued that empirically and theoretically, poverty can be minimized or eliminated by systematic intervention. Historically and cross-culturally, humankind has not been helpless before "impersonal" forces of nature and evolution disconnected from human collective action. Whether in elite-ruled networks or through democratic relations, agential humans can and do collectively take control of their institutions and direct the development of human society. In the historical political contest with inegalitarian naturalism,