Race to Racism in Enlightenment Thought
Did the concept of race, in modern terms, exist in eighteenth century Europe? When did race, as a theory, come into being and how did the understanding of racial differences turn into racism? Is it valid to apply modern concepts, such as racism, to philosophers and scholars of the eighteenth century? Theses questions have come into the forefront of philosophical debate in regards to many theories presented by Enlightenment thinker such ass Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the development of racial classification, the changing meaning of the term “race”, and determine whether the theories presented by these eighteenth century philosophers can be deemed as racism. In order to analyze race, it is necessary to distinguish that this paper will focus on those racial classifications that assign allegedly indisputable negative or positive attributes and characteristics to each racial category.
The first obstacle in analyzing the progression of race is determining what is “race”? The meaning of “race” is constantly interrogated yet rarely understood. Part I of this paper thus examines the origin of the “race” concept. Race can be easily defined in modern terms as a category of persons who share a certain combination of inherited physical traits. The initial separation of humans into “racial” categories was understood to simply reflect inherent biological differences between groups of people. These differences supposedly accounted for natural variances in intelligence, morality, and physical and sexual ability. As such, these “biological” differences were used to justify and explain power differentials between “races” of people. As a biological term, though, race is practically meaningless in modern theory.
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Background
It is unclear when the first theories of race as a tool for categorization and social control were first articulated. There is some value to the argument that racial theories separating people into categories, and assigning positive and negative values to those categories, were prevalent by the end of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance era in England. According to one sociologist, “by the fifteenth century, ‘race, and especially skin color, defined the contours of power relationships…Biological assumptions that were familiar to a nineteenth-century Cuban slave owner would have been recognizable to his fifteenth-century Spanish counterpart.” Further, the noted sociologist Howard Winant has argued that while “the Crusades and the Inquisition and the Mediterranean slave trade were important rehearsals for modern systems of racial differentiation,” that “in terms of scale and inexorability the race concept only began to attain its familiar meanings at the end of the middle ages.”
The noted German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz defined “race” in genetic terms sometime between 1677 -1686. In presenting the “Egyptian Plan” for world conquest to King Louis XIV of France, Liebniz suggesting creating an army formed from slaves from Africa, Arabia, Canada, New Guinea – Ethiopeans, Negroes, Canadians, and Hurons. Persons from these geographic regions were presented as “semi-beasts” and less than human in large part to “resolve the contradiction between humanistic universalism and Christian particularism – by representing non-Christians as nonhuman”. The racial classification system employed by Liebniz thus relied on religious distinctions (Christian –non-Christian) to justify the enslavement of non-European peoples. Religion would continue to play an important role in the development of racial theory for the next three hundred years.
Primary Sources
The French physician Francios Bernier investigated the basis for human differences in 1684, and categorized the world into four different classes: the Europeans, the Blacks, the Far Easterners, and the Lapps. For each human grouping, Bernier offered crude physical descriptions. Notably, however, Bernier did not imbue each group with positive or negative attributes.
While Liebniz and others may have advanced elementary racial theories dependent in part on interpretations of religious doctrine or geography, it does not appear that a formal racial taxonomy was formulated until 1735. Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish biological taxonomist, published Systema Naturae which detailed a new classification system for what he deemed to be the three kingdoms of nature: the plant kingdom, the kingdom of stones, and the animal kingdom.[i] Linnaeus separated human beings into four distinct categories described by both color and geographical region: Europeaus (white), Africanus (black), Americanus (red) and Asiatic (yellow).[ii] These categories -- shockingly similar to modern racial classifications – were also by imbued with personal mental and physical characteristics. As the table below demonstrates, Linnaeus believed that whites were gentle, inventive, keen minded and innovative, American Indians were stubborn and angered easily, Asians were avaricious and easily distracted, while Africans were relaxed, negligent, lazy and careless:
Europeaus
Skin(white); build (muscular); hair (long, flowing),eyes (blue); disposition (gentle, and inventive)
Americanus
Skin (reddish); build (erect); hair (black, straight, thick); distinct facial features (wide nostrils); disposition (stubborn and angered easily)
Asiaticus
Skin (sallow; yellow); hair (black); eyes (dark); disposition (avaricious and easily distracted)
Africanus
Skin (black); hair (black; frizzled); skin texture (silky); distinct facial features (nose flat, lips tumid); disposition (relaxed and negligent)
The four part racial division of humans proved to be a lasting and seemingly fundamental principle of racial taxonomy. Some sociologists believe that “the assumption by Linnaeus that mental and moral traits were associated with race was to inform many scientific investigations during the next two hundred years.”
Immanuel Kant, in his “Essay on Race,” proposed that there were four races: the white race, the Negro race, the Hun race (Mongol or Kalmuck), and the Hindu race. Kant later revised his taxonomy by using the following categories: the noble blond (northern Europe); copper red (America); black (Senegambia); and olive-yellow (Asian-Indians).
Kant’s conception of race was clearly biologically based, as he believed that race was a “real degeneration” within a fixed, permanent species. Kant further argued that each racial group had traits that were “unalterably sustained by succeeding generations even under change of ecological setting for protracted periods of time.”[iii] Similar to Linnaeus, Kant also accorded specific physical, mental and moral traits to each racial group. As described in Kant’s essay “On the Different Human Races”:
“(Whites:) contain all natural motive springs in affects and passions, all talents, all predispositions to culture and civilization and can obey as well as rule. They are the only ones who constantly progress toward perfection… Blacks can become disciplined and cultivated but never truly civilized…All races will become exterminated/uprooted (Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only as slaves) only not the Whites. The stubbornness of Indians in their usages is the reason why they do not melt down with the Whites into a single people. It is not good that they intermix. Spanish in Mexico. On the race of Whites, who have brought about all revolutions in the world. Nomads have only brought about violent revolutions, not ones that sustain themselves… Our (ancient) history of man reliably proceeds only from the white race.”
Kant also maintained that miscegenation between different racial groups would inevitably result in offspring that inherited traits and phenotype equally from both parents.[iv] Kant’s theory of strict miscegenation was short lived and ultimately abandoned, however, when he was first confronted with the ambiguous and unpredictable nature of race – that a mixture of a white person and a “Mongol” did not result, without exception, in a “consistent half-breed.”[v]
The concept of using “race” to account for human variety was a very popular philosophical and scientific project during this time period. Competing with Kant in the effort to promulgate a uniform theory of race based on the teachings of Linnaeus, the German medical doctor and physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proposed a racial classification scheme that endures to this day. Blumenbach felt that any racial classification scheme would be “very arbitrary indeed both in number and definition,” and was strongly against viewing humans as “different species.” Blumenbach observed that there was “almost insensible and indefinable transition from the pure white skin of the German lady through the yellow, the red, and the dark nations, to the Ethiopian of the very deepest black” and that while people of non-European “races” may be different in color, “as a whole they seem to agree in many things with ourselves.” Rather, Blumenbach believed that differences in complexion and phenotype may be caused by climate and protested against theories of racial superiority or inferiority. It thus is ironic that Blumenbach’s racial ideas would come to be regarded as being among the most influential in the development of modern race theory.
Blumenbach adopted Linnaeus’ division of the world into four racial groups, and in 1781 introduced enduring terminology into the racial lexicon: Caucasian and Mongoloid. Blumenbach settled on the term Caucasian not for any scientific or anthropological reason, but rather felt that white Europeans should be labeled as Caucasian as he felt that the inhabitants of the southern slopes of Mount Caucasus of modern day Georgia were the most beautiful race of people.
The Enlightenment played an important role in the unfolding of race and racism in Europe. The Enlightenment of the 1700s marked an intellectual shift defined primarily by an enthusiasm for organizing and understanding the world through secular reason. This shift coincided with a geopolitical expansion that made Europeans far more cognizant of human differences throughout the world. The Enlightenment impulse drove Europeans to categorize the diversity of life on Earth, especially in the arrangement of human difference. The first to use the term race to connote categories of people was François Bernier in 1684. For Bernier, race was entirely a physical distinction: people who looked different were clearly members of different races.
Others took up racial studies in an attempt to identify the exact number of races in the world. The most definitive efforts of the era were Carolus Linnaeus's 1735 four-part division of humanity ("White European, Red American, Dark Asiatic and Black Negro") and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 1776 division into five races ("Caucasians [a term he introduced], Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans, and Malays"). Others countered that there were some thirty to eighty races. How thinkers distinguished between races mattered less than what united each of their approaches. Each definition used physical features as the primary measure of human difference. This physical basis relied on a hierarchical notion of proper development that was rooted in the Enlightenment's exaltation of the classical world as the epitome of beauty and physical form The qualitative differences between races arose when enlightened theorists sought to explain the source of human differences and the varieties of societies that Europeans were encountering.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, was one of the first, in his Spirit of the Laws (1748), to present human history as composed of stages, introducing the idea that races of people had developed their own legal and political systems rooted in their climate and their temperament, or, as he called them, their race. Politics and race ran together; different races created the political systems only they were capable of creating. Other thinkers, like Immanuel Kant in his On the Different Races of Man (1775), aligned peoples' characters with their physical appearance. Now, behavior and appearance ran together; one could assess peoples' potential solely by looking at them. For the most part, however, Kant, like others at this time, used the term race loosely, without any real concern for scientific precision or exactness. Such systems provided a vocabulary for distinguishing between people based on (supposedly) natural differences that determined people's abilities and justified differing applications of rights and liberties.
Secondary Sources
The racial theories of Blumenbach and other philosophers rose to special importance during the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment period is important to understanding the history of the race concept, given that an understanding of race reflects in large part an understanding of how society accounts for human differences and similarities. The Aristotelian notion that inequality was the foundation of the natural order of things, as reflected in the concept of a “great chain of being,” popularized the notion that some people were naturally inferior to others. As such, “it was but a small step to apply the same concept of hierarchical ordering within the ranks of humankind.”
Accordingly, the early theories of race and racial merit provided by Linnaeus, Kant, Blumenbach and others soon became the basis for acceptable science during the Enlightenment period. The Enlightenment philosophies of rationality and empiricism, developed to help understand the larger world, unsurprisingly were applied to the smaller world of racial science. As David Goldberg has stated:
The emergence of independent scientific domains of anthropology and biology defined a classificatory order of racial groupings – subspecies of Homo sapiens – along correlated physical and cultural matrixes. Empiricism encouraged the tabulation of perceivable differences between peoples and from this it deduced their natural differences. Rationalism proposed initial innate distinctions (especially mental ones) to explain the perceived behavioural disparities.
The Enlightenment philosophies engendered a shift from a pre-modern understanding of human identity rooted in religion and the preservation of noble wealth through biological understandings of lineage, to an understanding of human identity rooted in race. That said, Kenan Malik has thoughtfully explained that the Enlightenment concepts of reason, rationality and the scientific method, by themselves, do not give rise to understanding human difference in terms of race. Rather, the Enlightenment beliefs in reason, empiricism and human equality were applied to justify existing inequality in terms of purported “racial” difference.
Nicholas Hudson explains in his article, From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth Century Thought”, how the definition of race has emerged from earlier terms of “lineage”. Hudson proceeds to explain how the idea of race emerged sometime during the eighteenth century with philosophers like Hume and scientists like Linnaeus. He believes that the factors which caused the transformation from “Nation” to “Race” was do to scientific developments as well as economic requirements.
My final secondary source is by Eric Morton. His article, Race and Racism in the Works of David Hume, provides an in depth look at the philosophical theories of David Hume and the contradictory nature of Hume’s philosophies.
The Enlightenment belief in universal human nature and the natural rights idea of social equality necessarily understood social inequality and human difference as being irrelevant artificial expressions of feudal, monarchist social structures. Thus the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume stated, “it is universally acknowledged that there is great uniformity among the acts of men, in all nations and ages, and human nature remains still the same in its principles and operations.” So then what could have led Hume to later state that “I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites” and that “[s]uch a uniform and constant difference [between ‘negroes’ and ‘whites’] could not happen… if nature had not made an initial distinction between these breeds of men”? What led Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers to develop a racially-based “exception” to this general principle of universal human equality?
The call for universal rights by non-propertied social classes clashed with the very bourgeoisie notions of capitalism and the free market that displaced the old order of monarchy and feudalism. The inherent inequality that stemmed from the private ownership of property led Adam Smith and other thinkers to believe that there had to be limits and exceptions to “universal equality” in order to protect the “natural” rights of propertied classes. Indeed, there had been a long standing pre-racial feudal tradition to organize society according to kinship and “blood ties.” Entitlement to political power and class position was determined in large part upon patrilineal descent premised on the transmission of a “common substance” from father to son.
Thus early theories of “race” ostensibly sought to explain class distinctions in a post-feudal society. The writings of Count Arthur Gobineau in Essays on the Inequality of Races, demonstrate this evolving viewpoint:
It has already been established that every social order is founded upon three original classes, each of which represents a racial variety: the nobility, a more or less accurate reflection of the conquering race; the bourgeoisie composed of mixed stock coming close to the chief race; and the common people who live in servitude or at least in a very depressed position. These last belong to a lower race which came about in the south through miscegenation with the negroes and in the north with Finns.
Race theory thus filled the void left by feudal hierarchy in explaining class distinctions, and reconciled the unequal treatment of certain groups of people with liberalism’s embrace of universal equality. Considering the history of such “racializing”, we should, at least, see that it is by no means a permanent or unavoidable way of understanding human kind. Late Renaissance perceptions of the other, while certainly distorted by religious prejudice and contempt for “savagery”, lacked a real foundation in racial classification. The racial world view that slowly emerged in the eighteenth century took shape under the social and intellectual forces of that time—an expanding imperial order, a new science, and the creation of a new, secular myth of human origin and human nature. In terms of the whether the philosophies presented in this paper can be deemed racist, I believe the answer to be no. It is obvious to twentieth and twenty-first century scholars to read these theories and be disgusted by what was written. The fact remains that at this time to be superior t another being was not just based on race but was also based on class. The society in which these theories were developed was just beginning to explore the world outside of Europe and their new discoveries were perplexing and needed immediate explanation. This does not mean that they understood the wrong in which they were committing. The contradictory statements made by each philosopher prove that they believed in equality but could not comprehend the external differences between men of different continents.
































Bibliography

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--------. “Of National Characters,” The Philosophical Works of David Hume. Including all the essays, and exhibiting the more important alterations and corrections in the successive editions published by the author. v. III, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854.
--------. A Treatise of Human Nature. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992.
Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. by John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
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Malik, Kenan The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society, Palgrave / New York University Press, 1996
Morton, Eric (2002). RACE AND RACISM IN THE WORKS OF DAVID HUME. Journal on African Philosophy: 1, 1.