ABSTRACT
Even though a number of major philosophers have contributed to writing the history of race in the nineteenth century – Eric Voegelin in The History of the Race Idea, Georg Lukács in The Destruction of Reason, Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1979), and Michel Foucault in “Society Must Be Defended” – this history is still not well known among philosophers today. Nevertheless, the study of the history of the concept of race is indispensable for all those pursuing the philosophical task of a critique of racism in all its myriad forms, and the nineteenth century in particular was the age when race came of age. In mid-century Benjamin Disraeli, who would become Prime Minister of Britain in 1868, could write: “All is race. In the structure, the decay, and the development of the various families of man, the vicissitudes of history …nd their main solution” (Disraeli 1852: 331). This was not an isolated claim. It was a view shared by others, such as Robert Knox, an anatomist who had also studied the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the Naturphilosophie of Lorenz Oken, and who wrote “Race is everything: literature, science, art – in a word, civilization, depends on it” (Knox 1850: v). Any account of the history of the concept of race needs to be broad. A critical philosophy of race cannot con…ne its historical component to listing what the canonical philosophers have had to say about race: their contributions can only be assessed if they are seen in their context, that is to say, as interventions in ongoing scienti…c debates and responses – or failures to respond – to the social movements of the day: such as calls for the abolition of slavery, the pursuit of Empire, and demands for segregation. Another reason why any such study cannot limit itself to those who are now regarded as canonical philosophers is because the boundary line between philosophers and scientists was a great deal less clear in the nineteenth century than it became later. The nineteenth century was a time of growing specialization in philosophy as a result
of the birth of a number of new disciplines such as biology, ethnology, anthropology and sociology, all of which made race central to the de…nition of their task. However, because these disciplines were not as isolated from each other, and especially from philosophy, as they tend to be today, they cannot be altogether omitted even from a brief account. The history of race thinking in the nineteenth century is a great deal more complex than is usually recognized and it seems that what is needed more than anything else today is an account that offers a richer sense of that complexity, an account that conveys both how foreign the racial thinking of that time is to the conceptual structures dominant at the beginning of the twenty-…rst century and yet one that poses the question as to whether we have yet learned the lessons that history conveys. I will organize my remarks around four issues with which philosophers were deeply involved, leaving aside many other questions that a broader survey of racial issues would need to address. The four are: …rstly, the debate between monogenesis and polygenesis as the source of the scienti…c concept of race; secondly, the place of race mixing in the philosophy of history; thirdly, the role of Lamarckianism in inhibiting a full-blooded debate between racial essentialists and racial environmentalists; and, …nally, eugenics both in its relation to Darwinism and in its introduction of the distinction between nature and nurture.
