Philosophical Histories as Sites of Racism: Race and Civilization in the Age of Chattel Slavery

Historians of racism have tended to focus on natural history and have often anachronistically confined themselves to the concept of race developed within the Boasian school of anthropology, where race is divorced from culture. But the justifications of slavery, colonialism, and even genocide that were developed in the nineteenth century tended to be more reliant on philosophical or conjectural history than natural history. It was in terms of culture and civilization, as much as heredity, that these practices were justified. Indeed, if one looks at far-right groups today, they seem to be more reliant on philosophies of history than biology. The authors addressed in this chapter include Voltaire, Kames, Ferguson, Kant, Herder, Hegel, Gobineau, Spengler, and Yockey.