Reviews of :
Social Darwinism
Science and Myth
Robert C. Bannister
"The most systematic and comprehensive effort yet made to assess the role played by Darwinian ideas in the writings of English-speaking social theorists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This is an instructive and timely book that ought to release historians at last from their preoccupation with 'social Darwinism,' and that ought thereby to create a historiographical setting in which more probing studies of evolutionary social theory can be carried out."- Isis
"In seeking to set the record straight, Bannister cuts through the amalgam with an intellectual shredder, exposing the illogic and incompatibility involved in fusing Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species with Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. . . . Bannister's familiarity with relevant texts and their reception by contemporary social theorists, scholars, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic is impressive."-Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"The author delivers a knockout punch to a concept at which scholars have been hitting (but never before so deftly or definitively) ever since Richard Hofstadter's classic formulation of social Darwinism in 1944.... [Bannister's] scholarship is wide, his research deep, and his insights broad and sharp."-Religions Studies Review
Complete Reviews:
Social Biology 27 #4 (Winter 1980) pp. 319-321.http://www.ferris.edu/ISAR/archives/mehler/social.htm
Preface to Paperback edition (1988)
Copies for Sale at:
In the series American Civilization, edited by Allen F. Davis
Temple University Press
Philadelphia 19122
ISBN 0-87722-566-4