Though he was not himself a Social Darwinist (see Weinstein 2012), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) is often thought of as the source of this ideology. Spencer was a social philosopher who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in 1864 after reading The Origin of Species: “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection,’ or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life” (Spencer 1864, 444).
