![]() Sumner, who was an ardent believer in free enterprise, argued with considerable force that any attempt to improve the lot of the poor was both imprudent and undesirable as they had no one to blame for their condition but themselves. ![]() Chief among them was William Graham Sumner, who was the first professor of sociology at Yale University. His ideas about social order proved attractive to some American intellectuals. Instead, his vision of ‘the survival of the fittest’ was one of social conflict where the most successful in any given society were deemed to be the ‘fittest’. Spencer, however, was not referring to the process of natural selection – a key principle of evolutionary biology. In due course, Darwin, adopted the phrase and thereby it acquired popular currency. It is a little-known fact that it was the 19th-century British philosopher Herbert Spencer – and not Charles Darwin – who coined the term ‘the survival of the fittest’. Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
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