It was a motley collection, these social Darwinists, and Mr Hermans has enough on his plate to find the common denominator. The risk appears of a portrait gallery of eminent Victorians, however ably painted; therefore the author at regular intervals takes up stock to determine what can really be called social Darwinistic. (…) Mr Hermans makes us notice a number of important personalities, with their theories, who for a long time have been in everyone’s black book.

The historian Cor Hermans wrote a bulky, but highly readable and interesting thesis on social Darwinism, in which he paid most attention to what connected the social Darwinists. This was, most of all, the high value they set on the concepts of selection and, joined to it, elimination: the disposal of the socially weak.