Lester Frank Ward (June 18, 1841 – April 18, 1913) was an American botanist, paleontologist, and sociologist. He served as the first president of the American Sociological Association.

In service of democratic development, polymath Lester Ward was the original American leader promoting the introduction of sociology courses into American higher education. His Enlightenment belief that institution-building could be scientifically informed was attractive to democratic intellectuals during the Progressive Era. To avoid anachronism and misinterpretation, it is crucial to understand that what "scientific" means, including scientists' own science concept, has long been contested. Ward's version of social science was based in organicist Enlightenment theories of comparative knowledge for democratic development, as distinguished from the mechanist version of science associated with Spencer's version of Sociology, and which later came to dominate the Anglo-American sciences and, along with micro symbolic interactionism and ethnography, sociology in the Cold War. Ward's significance is in deploying his scientific literacy, including his grasp of geological and biological sciences, to found American Sociology in an historical-materialist paradigm that avoided Cartesian dualism and efficiently distinguished democratic-developmentalist social institutions. Ward's influence in certain circles (see: the Social Gospel) was also affected by his Enlightenment views regarding organized priesthoods, which he believed had been responsible for more evil than good throughout human history.

In the democratic Enlightenment tradition, Ward emphasized the importance of macro social forces which could be guided by the cultivation and use of democratic knowledge, in order to achieve progress toward democratic human development, justice, and security, rather than allowing "evolution"--understood as institionalized, mystified social power--to "take its own course," as proposed by elitists William Graham Sumner and Herbert Spencer. Like other sociological Enlightenment thinkers including Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey, Ward emphasized universal and comprehensive public schooling to provide the public with the knowledge a democracy needs to successfully govern itself.

A collection of Ward's writings and photographs is maintained by the Special Collections Research Center of the George Washington University. The collection includes articles, diaries, correspondence, and a scrapbook. GWU's Special Collections Research Center is located in the Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library.