an essay on the inequality of human races

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Gobineau on the inequality of races (1853)

Joseph-Arthur, Count de Gobineau (1816-1882), was a French aristocratic novelist, diplomat, and theorist whose ideas greatly influenced the development of racist thought in Europe and the United States. He rejected Enlightenment explanations for human diversity, including the impact of geography and cultural or political institutions, instead insisting on permanent and unequal racial characteristics passed down since the earliest days of humankind. He argued that human history was defined by the rise of pure races with superior characteristics who, through a process of mixing with inferior races, gradually lost their vitality and collapsed, leaving the stage clear for purer races to rise. In particular Gobineau championed Germanic “Aryans,” a concept borrowed from the study of ancient languages and then applied to an imagined, superior race with traces running throughout the white races.

He articulated these ideas in his lengthy Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853), which did not attract much attention until he became friends with the composer Richard Wagner and his daughter Cosima in the 1870s. They publicized his ideas within nationalist circles, forming an important link later to the Nazis, who appropriated much of Gobineau’s theory to suit their interests. A 1915 translation into English, excerpted here, really introduced Gobineau’s ideas to English-speaking nationalists and eugenicists. However, these later appropriations should not obscure the central focus of Gobineau’s work. Although German antisemites focused on Jews as the enemy of the Aryan race and American racists focused on the dangers of Black-White miscegenation, Gobineau had some positive, if also stereotypical, things to say about Jews and Blacks and their contributions to civilization, even as he firmly maintained the superiority of whites overall. Gobineau was far more worried about the threat posed to Aryans by other, inferior white peoples, Slavs and Celts in particular, whose traces could be seen among the lower classes. His frame of reference was the 1848 revolution and the threat posed by democracy, which had given him a glimpse of the collapse of European civilization.

In this excerpt, Gobineau defines “degeneracy” and establishes a basic narrative of how a conquering race loses vitality.

Jeff Bowersox

Here especially I must be concrete. I have just taken the example of a people in embryo, whose state is like that of a single family. I have given them the qualities which will allow them to pass into the state of a nation. Well, suppose they have become a nation. History does not tell me what the elements were that constituted the original group; all I know is that these elements fitted it for the transformation which I have made it undergo. Now that it has grown, it has only two possibilities. One or other of two destinies is inevitable. It will either conquer or be conquered.

I will give it the better part, and assume that it will conquer. It will at the same time rule, administer, and civilize. It will not go through its provinces, sowing a useless harvest of fire and massacre. Monuments, customs, and institutions will be alike sacred. It will change what it can usefully modify, and replace it by something better. Weakness in its hands will become strength. It will behave in such a way that, in the words of Scripture, it will be magnified in the sight of men.

I do not know if the same thought has already struck the reader; but in the picture which I am presenting -and which in certain features is that of the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Persians and the Macedonians – two facts appear to me to stand out. The first is that a nation, which itself lacks vigour and power, is suddenly called upon to share a new and better destiny – that of the strong masters into whose hands it has fallen; this was the case with the Anglo-Saxons, when they had been subdued by the Normans. The second fact is that a picked race of men, a sovereign people, with the usual strong propensities of such a people to cross its blood with another’s, find itself henceforth in close contact with a race whose inferiority is shown, not only by defeat, but also by the lack of the attributes that may be seen in the conquerors. From the very day when the conquest is accomplished and the fusion begins, there appears a noticeable change of quality in the blood of the masters. If there were no other modifying influence at work, then – at the end of a number of years, which would vary according to the number of peoples that composed the original stock – we should be confronted with a new race, less powerful certainly than the better of its two ancestors, but still of considerable strength. It would have developed special qualities resulting from the actual mixture, and unknown to the communities from which it sprang. But the case is not generally so simple as this, and the intermingling of blood is not confined for long to the two constituent peoples;

The empire I have just been imagining is a powerful one and its power is used to control its neighbors. I assume that there will be new conquests; and, every time, a current of fresh blood will be mingled with the main stream. Henceforth, as the nation grows, whether by war or treaty, its racial character changes more and more. It is rich, commercial, and civilized. The needs and the pleasures of other peoples find ample satisfaction in its capitals, tis great towns, and its ports; while its myriad attractions cause many foreigners to make it their home. After a short time, we might truly say that a distinction of castes takes the place of the original distinction of races.

Generally the dominating peoples begin by being far fewer in number than those they conquer; while, on the other hand, certain races that form the basis of the population in immense districts are extremely prolific – the Celts, for example, and the Slavs. This is yet another reason for the rapid disappearance of the conquering races. Again, their greater activity and the more personal part they take in the affairs of the State make them the chief mark for attack after a disastrous battle, a proscription, or a revolution. Thus, while by their very genius for civilization they collect round them the different elements in which they are to be absorbed, they are the victims, first of their original smallness of number, and then of a host of secondary causes which combine together for their destruction.

It is fairly obvious that the time when the disappearances take place will vary considerably, according to circumstances. Yet it does finally come to pass, and is everywhere quite complete, long before the end of the civilization which the victorious race is supposed to be animating. A people may often go on living and working, and even growing in power, after the active, generating force of its life and glory has ceased to exist. Does this contradict what I have said above? Not at all; for while the blood of the civilizing race is gradually drained away by being parcelled out among the peoples that are conquered or annexed, the impulse originally given to these people still persists. The institutions which the dead master had invented, the laws he had prescribed, the customs he had initiated – all these live after him. No doubt the customs, laws, and institutions have quite forgotten the spirit that informed their youth; they survive in dishonoured old age, every day more sapless and rotten. But so long as even their shadows remain, the building stands, the body seems to have a soul, the pale ghost walks. When the original impulse has worked itself out, the last word has been said. Nothing remains; the civilization is dead.

It think I now have all the data necessary for grappling with the problem of the life and death of nations; and I can say positively that a people will never die, if it remains eternally composed of the same national elements.

But, if like the Greeks, and the Romans of the later Empire, the people has been absolutely drained of its original blood, and the qualities conferred by the blood, then the day of its defeat will be the day of its death. It has used up the time that heaven granted at its birth, for it has completely changed its race, and with its race its nature. It is therefore degenerate.

In this passage, Gobineau argues that racial differences are permanent.

Whatever side, therefore, one may take in the controversy as to the unity or multiplicity of origin possessed by the human species, it is certain that the different families are to-day absolutely separate; for there is no external influence that could cause any resemblance between them or force them into a homogenous mass.

The existing races constitute separate branches of one or many primitive stocks. These stocks have now vanished. They are not known in historical times at all, and we cannot form even the most general idea of their qualities. They differed from each other in the shape of and proportion of the limbs, the structure of the skull, the internal conformation of the body, the nature of the capillary system, the colour of the skin, and the like; and they never succeeded in losing their characteristic features except under the powerful influence of the crossing of blood.

This permeance of racial qualities is quite sufficient to generate the radical unlikeness and inequality that exists between the different branches, to raise them to the dignity of natural laws, and to justify the same distinctions being drawn with regard to the physiological life of nations, as I shall show, later to be applicable to their moral life.

In this passage, Gobineau sums up his argument.

The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder. The animal character, that appears in the shape of the pelvis, is stamped on the negro from birth, and foreshadows his destiny. His intellect will always move within a very narrow circle. He is not however a mere brute, for behind his low receding brow, in the middle of his skull, we can see signs of a powerful energy, however crude its objects. If his mental faculties are dull or even non-existent, he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, which may be called terrible. Many of his senses, especially taste and smell, are developed to an extent unknown to the other two races.

The very strength of his sensations is the most striking proof of his inferiority. All food is good in his eyes, nothing disgusts or repels him. What he desires to eat, to eat furiously, and to excess; no carrion is too revolting to be swallowed by him. It is the same with odours; his inordinate desires are satisfied with all, however coarse or even horrible. To these qualities may be added an instability and capriciousness of feeling, that cannot be tied down to an single object, and which, so far as he is concerned, do away with all distinctions of good and evil. We might even say that violence with which he pursues the object that has aroused his senses and inflamed his desires is guarantee of the desires being soon satisfied and the object forgotten. Finally, he is equally careless of his own life and that of others: he kills willingly, for the sake of killing; and this human machine, in whom it is so easy to arouse emotion, shows, in face of suffering, either a monstrous indifference or a cowardice that seeks a voluntary refuge in death.

The yellow race is the exact opposite of this type. The skull points forward, not backward. The forehead is wide and bony, often high and projecting. The shape of the face is triangular; the nose and chin showing none of the coarse protuberances taht mark the negro. There is further a general proneness to obesity, which, though not confined to the yellow type, is found there more frequently than in others. The yellow man has little physical energy, and is inclined to apathy; he commits none of the strange excesses sos common among negroes. His desires are feeble, his will-power rather obstinate than violent; his longing for material pleasures though constant, is kept within bounds. A rare glutton by nature, he shows far more discrimination in his choice of food. HE tends to mediocrity in everything; he understands easily enough anything not too deep or sublime. He has a love of utility and a respect for order, and knows the value of a certain amount of freedom. He is practical, int he narrowest sense of the word. He does not dream or theorize; he invents little, but can appreciate and take over what is useful to him. his whole desire is to live int eh easiest and most comfortable way possible. The yellow races are thus clearly superior to the black. Every founder of a civilization would wish the backbone of his society, his middle class, to consist of such men. But no civilized society could be created by them; they could not supply its nerve-force, or set in motion the springs of beauty and action.

We come now to the white peoples. These are gifted with reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence. They have a feeling for utility, but in a sense far wider and higher, more courageous and ideal, than the yellow races; a perseverance that takes account of obstacles and ultimately finds a means of overcoming them; a greater physical power, an extraordinary instinct for order, not merely as a guarantee of peace and tranquility, but as an indispensable means of self-preservation. At the same time, they have a remarkable, and even extreme, love of liberty, and are openly hostile to the formalism under which the Chinese are glad to vegetate, as well as to the strict despotism which is the only way of governing the negro.

The white race are, further, distinguished by an extraoridinary attachment to life. They know better how to use it, and so,a s it would seem, set a greater price on it; both in their own persons and those of others, they are more sparing of life. When they are cruel, they are conscious of their cruelty; it is very doubtful whether such a consciousness exists in the negro. At the same time, they have discovered reasons why they should surrender this busy life of theirs, that is so precious to them. The principal motive is honour, which under various names has played an enormous part in the ideas of the race from the beginning. I need hardly add that the word honour, together with all the civilizing influences connoted by it, is unknown to both the yellow and the black man.

On the other hand, the immense superiority of the white peoples in the whole field of the intellect is balanced by an inferiority in the intensity of their sensations. In the world of the senses, the white man is far less gifted than the others, and so is less tempted and less absorbed by considerations of the body, although in physical structure he is far more vigorous.

Such are the three constituent elements of the human race I call them secondary types, as I think myself obliged to omit all discussion of the Adamite man. From the combination, by intermarriage, of the varieties of these types come the tertiary groups. The quaternary formations are produced by the union of one of these tertiary types, or of a pure-blooded tribe, with another group taken from one of the two foreign species.

Below these categories others have appeared – and still appear. Some the these are very strongly characterized, and form new and distinct points of departure, coming as they do form the races that have been completely fused. Others are incomplete, and ill-ordered, and, one might even say, anti-social, since their elements, being too numerous, too disparate, or too barbarous, have had neither the time nor the opportunity for combining to any fruitful purpose. No limits, except the horror excited by the possibility of infinite intermixture, can be assigned to the number of these hybrid and chequered races that make up the whole of mankind.

It would be unjust to assert that every mixture is bad and harmful. If the three great types had remained strictly separate, the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands of the finest of the white races, and the yellow and black varieties would have crawled for ever at the feet of the lowest of the whites. Such a state is so far ideal, since it has never been beheld in history; and we can imagine it only by recognizing the undisputed superiority of those groups of the white races which have remained the purest.

It would not have been all gain. The superiority of the white race would have bean clearly shown, but it would have been bought at the price of certain advantages which have followed the mixture of blood. Although these are far from counter-balancing the defects they have brought in their train, yet they are sometimes to be commended. Artistic genius, which is equally foreign to each of the three great types, arose only after the intermarriage of white and black. Again, in the Malayan variety, a human family was produced from the yellow and black races that had more intelligence than either of its ancestors. Finally, from the union of white and yellow, certain intermediary peoples have sprung, who are superior to the purely Finnish tribes as well as to the negroes.

I do not deny that these are good results. The world of art and great literature that comes from the mixture of blood, the improvement and ennoblement of inferior races – all these are wonders of which we must needs be thankful. The small have been raised. Unfortunately, the great have been lowered by the sam process; and this is an evil that nothing can balance or repair. Since I am putting together the advantages of racial mixtures, I will also add that to them is due the refinement of manners and beliefs, and especially the tempering of passion and desire. But these are merely transitory benefits, and if I recognize that the mulatto, who may become a lawyer, a doctor, or a business man, is worth more than his negro grandfather, who was absolutely savage, and fit for nothing, I must also confess that the Brahmans of primitive India, the heroes of the Iliad and the Shahnameh, the warriors of Scandinavia – the glorious shades of noble races that have disappeared – give us a higher and more brilliant idea of humanity, and were more active, intelligent, and trusty instruments of civilization and grandeur than the peoples, hybrid a hundred times over, of the present day. And the blood even of these was no longer pure.

However it has come about, the human races, as we find them in history, are complex; and one of the chief consequences has been to throw into disorder most of the primitive characteristics of each type. The good as well as the bad qualities are seen to diminish in intensity with repeated intermixture of blood; but they also scatter and separate off from each other, and are often mutually opposed. The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or, if intelligent, both weak and ugly. Further, when the quantity of white blood was increased to an indefinite amount by successive infusions, and not by a single admixture, it no longer carried with its natural advantages, and often merely increased the confusion already existing in the racial elements. Its strength, in fact, seemed to be its only remaining quality, and even its strength served only to promote disorder. The apparent anomaly is easily explained. Each stage of a perfect mixture produces a new type of diverse elements, and develops special faculties. As soon as further elements are added, the vast difficulty of harmonizing the whole creates a state of anarchy. The more this increases, the more do even the best and reichest of the new contributions diminish in value, and b y their mere presence add fuel to an evil which they cannot abate. If mixtures of blood are, to a certain extent, beneficial to the mass of mankind, if thy raise and ennoble it, this is merely at the expense of mankind itself, which is stunted,a based, enervated, and humiliated int eh persons of its noblest sons. Even if we admit that it is better to turn a myriad of degraded beings into mediocre men than to preserve the race of princes whose blood is adulterated and impoverished by being made to suffer this dishonourable change, yet there is still the unfortunate fact that the change does not stop here; for when the mediocre men are once created at the expense of the greater, they combine with other mediocrities, and from such unions, which grow ever more and more degraded is born a confusion which, like that of Babel, ends in utter impotence, and leads societies down to the abyss of nothingness whence no power on earth can rescue them.

Such is the lesson of history. It shows us that all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it, provided that this group itself belongs to the most illustrious brach of our species.

Of the multitude of peoples which live or have lived on the earth, ten alone have risen to the position of complete societies. The remainder have gravitated round these more or less independently, like planets round their suns. If there is any element of life in these ten civilizations that is not due to the impulse of the white races, any seed of death that does not come from the inferior stocks that mingled with them, then the whole theory on which this book rests is false. On the other hand, if the facts are as I say, then we have an irrefragable proof of the nobility of our own species. Only the actual details can set the final seal of truth on my system, and they alone can show with sufficient exactness the full implications of my main thesis, that peoples degenerate only in consequence of the various admixtures of blood which they undergo; that their degeneration corresponds exactly to the quantity and quality of the new blood, and that the rudest possible shock to the vitality of a civilization is given when the ruling elements in a society and those developed by racial change have become so numerous that they are clearly moving away from the homogeneity necessary to their life, and it therefore becomes impossible for them to be brought into harmony and so acquire the common instincts and interests, the common logic of existence, which is the sole justification for any social bond whatever. There is no greater curse than such disorder, for however bad it may have made the present state of things, it promises still worse for the future.

Source : Arthur Count de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, translated by Adrian Collins (London: William Heinemann, 1915).

Gobineau on the inequality of races (1853) by Jeff Bowersox is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://blackcentraleurope.com/who-we-are/ .

The Inequality of Human Races

Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines ( An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races ) (1853–1855) by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was intended as a work of philosophical enquiry into decline and degeneration. It is today considered as one of the earliest examples of scientific racism. Warning: template has been deprecated. ( Index )

THE INEQUALITY

OF HUMAN RACES

BY ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU

TRANSLATED BY ADRIAN COLLINS, M.A.

INTRODUCTION BY DR. OSCAR LEVY, EDITOR OF THE AUTHORISED ENGLISH VERSION OF NIETZSCHE'S WORKS

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LONDON ⁠ MCMXV

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The inequality of human races by comte de Arthur Gobineau

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Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau

(1816—1882) Comte de, French writer and anthropologist

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French diplomat and scholar, the intellectual founder of racism. His most famous book, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–55), put forward the thesis that the races are innately unequal and that the White Aryan race is not only the purest but also superior to all others. His writings had a sinister influence on the German Nazi theorists, for whom they became a justification for anti-Semitism.

From: Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de in A Dictionary of World History »

Subjects: Literature

Race, Eugenics, and the Holocaust

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First Online: 08 July 2022

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Jonathan Anomaly 14

Part of the book series: The International Library of Bioethics ((ILB,volume 96))

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This chapter will focus on how the Holocaust shaped the concepts of race and eugenics in bioethics. I will begin with a brief account of how these terms were used before the Second World War, and then discuss how the Nazi eugenics programs and the Holocaust altered how scholars think about race and eugenics. In particular, I will discuss the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and 1950 Statement on Race, which signaled a change in how race and eugenics would be used in the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, I will consider how liberal eugenics in contemporary bioethics differs from older forms of eugenics, and how newer views about human populations (as genetic clusters) differ from older views of race. In doing so, I will explore how the Holocaust shaped modern taboos related to human genetics research.

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Is nationalizing universalizing and/or vice-versa?

Snait B. Gissis

an essay on the inequality of human races

The History and Historiography of Eugenics

Eugenics and Racial Hygiene: Applied Research Strategies before, during, and after National Socialism

9.1 introduction.

The terms “eugenics” and “racism” have become so closely tied together by journalists and public intellectuals that they are sometimes interchangeable terms of abuse hurled at anyone who gives a biological explanation of human behavior. To take a recent example, when New York Times staff writer Brett Stephens mentioned in an editorial that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher than average IQ, possibly for biological reasons, he was called a racist and a eugenicist (Jones 2020 ), and many activists on the internet demanded that he resign from his position or be fired by the newspaper.

It may seem odd for a Jewish intellectual to be slandered with terms often associated with Nazi atrocities. It is to some extent an understandable overreaction to history and a conflation of ideas that were forever shaped by the Holocaust. In this chapter, I will review how the concepts of race and eugenics were used before and after 1945, with special focus on the implications for bioethics.

9.2 What Was “Race” then and What is It Now?

9.2.1 before the war.

The first modern scientist to categorize people by race was Johan Blumenbach, a German physician. Blumenbach separated humanity into five basic groups: Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American ( 1775 ). These groups correspond with European, East Asian, South Asian, African, and Native American. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Blumenbach was not especially interested in ranking races by their relative level of achievement. He instead wanted to classify them by reference to their continent of origin and physical similarities. It is striking how close Blumenbach was to the five genetic groupings picked out by recent mathematical cluster analysis (Rosenberg et al. 2002 , 2005 ).

While serious scientific attempts to classify human populations did not improve much until the advent of computational genetics in the early twenty-first century, many Europeans speculated about the nature of race and the value of different racial groups. For five centuries Europeans explored the world, colonized novel territory, and encountered new and seemingly strange people. Like the Greeks and Romans of the classical era, modern Europeans saw themselves at the center of civilization, and regarded other groups as barbaric. The observations philosophers made about race were often couched in negative value judgments. David Hume, for instance, confessed in an essay on human differences that:

I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences ( 1748 , 20, note 6).

In the final edition of his essay, Hume restricted his claim of inferiority only to Black Africans: “I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation” (1777, 20, note 6). In a rare point of agreement, Immanuel Kant echoed David Hume’s view of Africans:

The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. [David] Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color ( 1760 , 110).

Hume and Kant relied primarily on anthropological reports from other authors to justify their claims. Speculation about race and racial differences had to be based on casual observation, since genetics and the theory of evolution by natural selection had not yet emerged.

An example of a crude and pernicious anthropological report is that of Arthur de Gobineau. An influential French author, his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races ( 1853 ) separated humanity into three races corresponding to skin color—white, yellow, and black. Gobineau described Aryans as the most exalted race, with Alpine and Mediterranean ethnicities as degenerative versions of the pure Aryans. This view was popularized by the American author, Madison Grant, and adopted by Adolf Hitler. Unlike Grant and Hitler, Gobineau had complimentary things to say about Jews, describing them as a “free, strong, and intelligent” people (p. 59). Despite his attitude to Jews, Gobineau’s idea that Aryans were a “master race” influenced antisemites like Richard Wagner, Grant, and eventually Hitler.

Charles Darwin discussed human races, and race differences, though he didn’t focus on them much. The full title to his most important book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life ( 1859 ) . Despite the subtitle, which sounds provocative to modern ears, by “race” Darwin just meant a group of related organisms. He did not specifically focus much on human races, but instead was interested in how various populations throughout the natural world evolved through variation and selection. Nevertheless, in The Descent of Man Darwin discussed human racial differences, describing Native Americans as “utterly indifferent to the sufferings of strangers” and as “lacking in feelings of sympathy and kindness” to people outside their tribe, and to animals ( 1871 , 90). Darwin also argued that some races of people were better adapted to the modern world, and he predicted (but did not advocate) that they would eventually exterminate the other races:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world….The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some apes as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla ( 1871 , 193).

It is worth remembering that Darwin wrote these words at a time when Europeans had conquered or colonized a large part of the earth’s surface, so it was unclear how they would use their power over other groups.

In the decades leading up to the Nazi ascent to power, there was disagreement among German scientists about race and racial differences. In particular, there were deep disputes about the status of Jews. Antisemitism was on the rise in Germany, including among cultural icons like Richard Wagner (whom Friedrich Nietzsche broke away from, in part because of Wagner’s increasingly rabid antisemitism and conversion to Christianity). Footnote 1

Antisemitism began to take a racial (rather than religious) turn decades before the National Socialists took power. Influential German biologist and eugenics advocate Eugen Fischer considered Jews to be ethnically distinct from Germans (owing to their origin in the Middle East), but also a group with exceptional mental abilities. Going against Fritz Lenz, the first Professor of “racial hygiene” under the Nazi regime, Eugen Fischer argued that Jewish-German intermarriage might actually be beneficial. Indeed, Fischer’s sympathetic view of Jews is likely the main reason he was replaced by the Nazi party in 1933 as the Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics (Proctor 1988 ).

Some have suggested that Hitler’s Aryan ideal was adopted more from American authors than from German scientists (Proctor 1988 ). For example, it is well known that Hitler greatly admired the work of the American naturalist, Madison Grant, who followed Gobineau in exalting the Nordic (or “Aryan”) race as the most physically beautiful and psychologically capable of all Europeans. Grant complained that America had been admitting fewer Nordic immigrants and more Celts, Jews, and Italians. Upon reading Grant’s Passing of the Great Race in the late 1920s, Hitler declared “This book is my Bible” (Spiro 2009 , xi). Whether Grant was a primary cause of Hitler’s antisemitism, or simply helped him justify it, is hard to know.

9.2.2 During the War: Race Under Hitler’s Regime

As I will argue in the second part of this chapter, the relationship between eugenics and race in Nazi Germany, as in America and Britain, was complicated and subtle. Many people seem to think that those who supported forced sterilizations also supported racially discriminatory laws. However, this view is incorrect. Some influential racists did not support eugenics, and some influential eugenicists did not support the implementation of racist policies. Some of the most famous proponents of eugenic thinking—including Francis Galton, Hermann Muller, Ronald Fisher, and Julian Huxley—thought that instituting eugenic policies was a way to encourage the best members of each race to have more children. This was as true in Germany as it was in the US and the UK.

When German scholars formed an organization dedicated to using advances in biology to improve the gene pool, they coined the ambiguous term “rassenhygiene” (translated as “racial hygiene”), which meant essentially the same thing as “eugenics” in English (Turda 2010 ). Just as we use “human race ” to refer to the human species , so too in German “rassen” was sometimes used to refer to people in general, and sometimes to particular races. “Rassenhygiene” did not necessarily refer to race-based eugenics.

In fact, many of the early members of the largest German eugenics society, the Racial Hygiene Society, were Jewish (Friedlander 1995 ). Some Gentile members of the Society were antisemitic, but many were not. Germans who advocated for the separation of the races did not always think of the Jews as “inferior,” but simply as a different race, and thus as a people who should not mix with Germans. According to the historian Henry Friedlander, “before the victory of the Nazis altered the rules of the game for academics, they did not consider Jews inferior or demand their exclusion. They only argued that Jews were different and that racial mingling of Jews and Aryans was undesirable” (p. 33). Historian Paul Weindling concurs that “the Nazi takeover [of the Racial Hygiene Society] marked a shift from an inclusive biological approach to welfare to one based on race, coercion, and violence against those deemed undesirable for biological and racial reasons” ( 2010 , 321).

As soon as the Nazis took power, they passed sweeping laws intended to segregate non-Germans, including Jews, and prevent them from marrying Germans. The goal was not only to keep the German race pure from outside elements, but also to improve it. Thus, when the first eugenic sterilization laws were passed in 1933, they were primarily aimed at “defective” Germans, not Jews: “The 1933 Sterilization Law made no provision for sterilization on racial grounds. (Jews, for example, were never specifically targeted by the law)” (Proctor 1988 , 112).

In 1935, however, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, specifically forbidding marriage between Jews and Germans. Jews who violated the laws were sent to concentration camps. Many Jews were fired from high status jobs at universities. By 1938 Jews were banned from all occupations. The mass killing of Jews did not begin until late 1941, well after the eugenics programs had sterilized and killed tens of thousands of Germans. It is important to distinguish the mass killing of Jews from the broader German eugenics programs, in part because the rationale seems to have been different and the informal orders authorizing the mass killing of Jews were separate from the official decrees that authorized the Racial Hygiene program meant to improve the genetic stock of the Aryan race (Friedlander 1995 ).

“The Final Solution,” which authorized the mass killing of Jews, was a response to “the Jewish Question,” which originated several centuries earlier in Europe. The question in its original form was whether European Jews should be given the same rights and privileges as Christians, given that Christianity was the official religion of nearly all European countries. Answers to the Jewish Question were often infused with assumptions that Jews were untrustworthy because they rejected Jesus as the Messiah.

Hitler posed the Jewish Question in purely racial terms. He portrayed Jews as ruthless capitalists and as parasitic communists. He blamed them for Russian Bolshevism and for controlling world affairs through international finance. Finally, Hitler even blamed the Jews for “provoking” a Second World War, despite the fact that Germany obviously started the war by invading Poland. Hitler had said in a speech earlier that year that “if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” (Hitler, 1941 ). Footnote 2 Whether Hitler believed that the Jews actually started either of the two World Wars is hard to know. It’s possible he had deluded himself into believing this, perhaps to help him come to terms with the fact that he would be sending millions of German troops to their death in a war that could have been easily avoided. Either way, Hitler invoked the idea of a Jewish threat to Europe as a pretext to launch the Final Solution, which would end with the killing of nearly six million Jews.

The best evidence suggests that the Final Solution was initiated through informal channels in late 1941 (Friedlander 1995 ). Despite meticulous documentation of most aspects of the war, Nazi officials were careful to conceal the authorization and details of the Final Solution presumably because they understood that ordinary people, even those who supported National Socialism, could not stomach the mass torture and extermination of people they had known as neighbors and co-workers just a few years earlier. Whatever the reasons, it is noteworthy that the Final Solution was not an extension of Nazi eugenic policies. The main connection between eugenic euthanasia and the Final Solution is the method used to kill large numbers of people. The mass murder of millions of Jewish prisoners was conducted primarily through the same methods as the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, named after the street address at which it was conceived.

The T4 program was first tested when, in 1939, Hitler authorized physicians to kill patients deemed unworthy of life. Henry Friedlander summarizes the connection between gassing Germans and Jews:

The murder of the handicapped preceded the murder of Jews and Gypsies, and it is therefore reasonable to conclude that T4's killing operation served as a model for the final solution. The success of the euthanasia policy convinced the Nazi leadership that mass murder was technically feasible, that ordinary men and women were willing to kill large numbers of innocent human beings, and that the bureaucracy would cooperate in such an unprecedented enterprise (1995, 288).

The Final Solution began when the SS was authorized to shoot Jews captured in Russia. However, this was too public and inefficient, so SS officers began deporting Jews to concentration camps. By 1942, the SS had moved from shooting Jews in the open, to killing them in vans with carbon monoxide, and then to stationary gas chambers in more clandestine death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz (Friedlander 1995 ). By the time Auschwitz was liberated in 1945, millions of Jews and hundreds of thousands of Sinti and other perceived enemies of the Nazis had been killed.

9.2.3 After the War: The United Nations’ Statement on Race

Within months of the war’s end, the United Nations (UN) had emerged. By the end of 1945 it had ratified a preliminary Constitution, and, by 1948, the UN Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. While the Declaration’s ideals are part of a much longer tradition of liberal political thought that emphasizes individual liberty, responsibility, and equality under the law, its first ten provisions are clearly a reaction to Nazi policies. They include a repudiation of racism, as well as the most egregious forms of coercive eugenics. Article 16, for example, contends that “[m]en and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family” (Declaration 1948). By implication, this provision expressed opposition to forced sterilization and the unequal application of laws to different racial groups.

In 1946, Julian Huxley wrote an influential manifesto defending the UN’s aim to create a Declaration of Rights, as well as a division tasked with promoting science and education. In defense of the Declaration, Huxley argued that all nations should enable every individual within every group to flourish, even if there are genetic inequalities between individuals and groups. He stressed that there should be “equality of educational opportunity without regard to race, sex or any distinctions, economic or social” (p. 4). And he emphasized that the preamble to the UN’s 1945 Constitution “expressly repudiates racialism and any belief in superior or inferior races, nations, or ethnic groups” (p. 6).

After the Declaration was ratified, the UN assembled a group of scientists and public intellectuals to craft a statement on the science and morality of race. The statement was crafted by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), of which Huxley was the first Director. From the outset, UNESCO’s statement on race was politically fraught, since the people selected for the task had strong political views and were drawn primarily from the humanities and social sciences rather than from the natural sciences. This is no surprise, since the stated purpose of the Declaration on Race was “to make known the scientific facts about race and to combat racial prejudice ” ( 1969 , 5, emphasis added).

The 1950 Statement on Race defined “race” as “a group or population characterized by some concentrations, relative as to frequency and distribution, of hereditary particles (genes) or physical characters” (1969, 30). While this conception of “race” was fairly standard, the authors also asserted that there were probably no socially significant racial differences, arguing that “the range of mental capacities in all ethnic groups is much the same” (1969, 34). After the Statement on Race was published, a handful of biologists, including Ernst Mayr, Ronald Fisher, and Julian Huxley, harshly criticized it. They objected not only to the politicization of science, but also to the implicit attempt to connect moral equality (which they all wished to affirm) with the scientific claim of biological equality (which many of them doubted).

Ernst Mayr affirmed that “equality of opportunity and equality in law do not depend on physical, intellectual, and genetic identity” ( 1952 , 18). Footnote 3 Like Mayr, many of the biologists who were asked for feedback on the Statement on Race worried that the committee was under pressure to manipulate the science to fit a political agenda. For example, biologist Walter Lindauer concluded that “the UNESCO document was written on the assumption that from a certain body of scientific facts necessarily flowed certain ethical commandments” ( 1952 , 19). The geneticist Kenneth Mather was concerned that the committee may be telling “noble lies”— scientifically inaccurate statements about race in order to promote the moral goal of toleration: “I felt that at times it was bending over backwards to deny the existence of race in the sense that this term has been used for political purposes in the recent past. I, of course, entirely agree in condemning Nazi race theory, but I do not think that the case against it is strengthened by playing down the possibility of statistical differences in, for example, the mental capacities of different human groups” ( 1952 , 25). Agreeing with other dissenting scientists, the biologist Sir Ronald Fisher concluded that “the practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature, [but] this problem is being obscured by entirely well-intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exist” ( 1952 , 27).

9.2.4 After the War: Race in Contemporary Bioethics

While we do not have good survey evidence on what bioethicists believe, some of the most influential bioethicists today explicitly argue against the tendency to tie moral equality together with genetic equality (Singer 2011 ; Buchanan 2009 ). Outside of bioethics, however, many people seem to implicitly connect moral status with genetic abilities. For example, people who have stronger egalitarian political concerns are more likely to dismiss scientific findings that purport to reveal group differences (Anomaly and Winegard 2020b ). As New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade put the point, “[m]any people, including social scientists and much of the academic left, have long made what seems to me an unsupportable choice, that of basing their opposition to racism not on principle but on the claim that race is a social construct, not a biological reality” ( 2014 , viii).

The persistence of the post-war attitudes about race can be illustrated by the furious condemnations by many journalists and academics of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve ( 1994 ). The book’s main focus was on the relationship between measured intelligence (IQ) and social outcomes, but they included a chapter on average group differences in intelligence. Although they said they were agnostic about the causes of racial differences in intelligence, the book provoked a furious reaction by many journalists and academics who saw the book as a means to support racist inequalities. More recently, as Nathan Cofnas has documented ( 2016 , 2020 ), many professional philosophers, including some who work in bioethics, have called for research on race and intelligence to be banned or otherwise shunned. This is yet another illustration of how political considerations altered the conception of race in philosophy (Sesardic 2010 ) and informed taboos around investigating racial differences (Pinker 2002 ).

It is likely that biological conceptions of race fell out of favor after the war in part because of their invidious use by Germany and Japan to justify their conquest of other nations. Anthropologists after the war began to increasingly describe race as a “social construct,” rather than a natural fact or natural kinds. Philosophers, too, began embracing this view of race, and it is only recently, with the advent of cluster analysis in genetics, that “race realism”—the view that some of our common concepts of race map onto biological reality—has made a comeback. One would be hard-pressed, though, to find an academic race realist who thinks some races are better than others, or that average group differences justify treating members of other groups better or worse than one’s own group simply by virtue of their membership in that group.

Roughly speaking, there are three views of race in contemporary philosophy: race realism , which holds that race is a biologically and metaphysically real category in the world (Hardimon 2017 ); social constructionism (or “anti-realism”), which holds that race is a social category separate from any biological categorization of human populations (Haslanger 2012 ); and pragmatism , which holds that there are differences between human genetic populations that may correspond with our ordinary concept of race, but whether we should divide the world up in this way depends on the practical value of doing so (Kitcher 2007 ). As with any philosophical dispute, there are more than three ways of thinking about race, and each position includes plenty of subtleties. But these three views provide a simple way of thinking about the different conceptions of race held by philosophers in general, and bioethicists in particular.

Nearly all philosophers who think about race concede that there are more or less useful ways of grouping people together. And nearly all of them agree that race is—like other categories—socially constructed. How we divide up the world is a function of how we wish to navigate the world. We may wish to do so in some contexts to investigate how and when groups of humans diverged from one another and populated the world (Reich 2018 ). In another context, we may wish to divide groups into categories based on susceptibility to disease, which may more neatly map onto sub-groups within a larger group (e.g., Ashkenazi Jews are more susceptible to Tay Sachs than Sephardic Jews; sub-Saharan Africans are much more likely to develop sickle cell anemia than North Africans).

The biologist Theo Dobzhansky anticipated this view in his response to UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race:

Populations which are geographically remote show greater genetic differences, on the average, than do populations which reside close together. It is, then, an arbitrary matter whether we divide mankind, for purposes of classification, into few or into many races. The number of races recognized by giving them names is a matter of convenience. Some anthropologists find it useful to distinguish only few major races, while others prefer finer subdivisions. But while the number of races which we recognize is, thus, arbitrary, the existence of racial differences is an objectively ascertainable fact. Mankind is not a single breeding population, but a very complex system of breeding communities. These communities are maintained by geographic, cultural and economic barriers. And these communities are racially distinct when they differ in the frequencies of various hereditary traits. We set up races and give them names for the purpose of describing human diversity; racial differences between human populations are a biological reality. (1952, 80-81).

As Dobzhansky argues, to ask whether something is socially constructed or metaphysically real is often a false dichotomy. We distinguish between tables and chairs, for example, because doing so helps us decide whether we should sit on an object, or put our food and drinks on it. The distinction between a table and a chair can be blurry, and categories don’t have strict implications for what we should do. For example, we can use tables to sit on and chairs to eat on if we feel like it. Likewise, race realists can concede to social constructionists that it is up to us how to divide the world into groups, and concede to pragmatists that some divisions are more useful than others for social or scientific purposes. But race realists, in contrast to pragmatists and social constructionists, think some divisions are more scientifically fruitful than others.

In a recent editorial in the journal Science , a number of scholars argued that since “race” is vague, and potentially invidious, it should be eliminated from biomedical discourse. According to Michael Yudell et al., “Phasing out racial terminology in biological sciences would send an important message to scientists and the public alike: Historical racial categories that are treated as natural and infused with notions of superiority and inferiority have no place in biology” ( 2016 , 565). The authors seem to think that people find it hard to disentangle racial categories from moral judgments, so we should throw out racial categories.

In a rejoinder to Yudell and his colleagues, a prominent philosopher of race has argued that the way people talk about race corresponds quite closely with the underlying genetic structure of human populations (Spencer 2019 ). According to Quayshawn Spencer, “In a landmark study by Noah Rosenberg et al. ( 2002 ), which was cross-checked by Rosenberg et al. ( 2005 ), five levels of genetic structure were detected,” and these clusters closely match the categories the US government uses to divide populations up (2019, 18). Spencer agrees that “race” is, in part, a socio-linguistic convention, and thus our language may change as our concepts do. It may be that conceptions of race in bioethics will diverge from those in biology or that English conventions will move away from “race” altogether, in favor of “population” or “ethnicity.” Only time will tell. However, it is clear that the divisive ways racial categories were used to justify the Nuremberg Laws and the Holocaust have led some scholars to reject the concept of race and the possibility of group differences (Yudell et al. 2016 ), while other scholars still consider race to be a meaningful concept, and argue that group differences are a likely result of Darwinian evolution (Winegard et al. 2020 ).

9.3 What Was Eugenics, and What is It Now?

9.3.1 before the war: american and british eugenics.

The idea of eugenics was born in England around the same time naturalists were beginning to piece together how evolutionary forces shape different populations. Long before genetics emerged as a distinctive science, it became obvious that traits are somehow transmitted from parents to children. In formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin drew on the knowledge farmers had gained through the intentional breeding of animals, and discussed how different environmental niches could unintentionally do the same thing ( 1859 ). Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, figured that if we could understand the mechanisms of heredity, we could use that knowledge to direct evolution down a path of our own choosing.

Long before Galton, Plato and Aristotle argued that a successful political society will have a strong set of norms and laws aimed at promoting good breeding, since the qualities of the citizens who comprise a polity will determine its success or failure (Ojakangas 2016 ).

Francis Galton coined term “eugenics,” and defined it as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage” ( 1904 ). Galton’s definition captures two aspects of eugenics: it is both the scientific study of how traits are transmitted (which later became the field of genetics), and a moral commitment to harnessing our knowledge of genetics to improve the traits of our children. Galton and most classical eugenicists focused on populations, while many modern bioethicists who advocate for liberal eugenics focus more on the choices parents make to shape the traits of their kids. This ambiguity between whether the focus of eugenics should be on specific parental choices to have children with traits deemed beneficial for the child, or whether we should be concerned with the average traits in a population, persists in how the word is used in bioethics. For example, in a recent book called The Ethics of the New Eugenics , the term eugenics is defined as involving “strategies or decisions aimed at affecting, in a manner which is considered to be positive, the genetic heritage of a child, a community, or humanity in general” (MacKellar and Bechtel 2016 , 3). This definition encompasses the individual and collective aspects of eugenics.

While Francis Galton and Charles Darwin were concerned that civilization might have begun to have a dysgenic Footnote 4 effect on the population of England, neither advocated extensive coercion to solve the problem. Galton, in particular, was mainly concerned with documenting demographic trends and with publicizing findings from (what we now call) behavior genetics so that parents would make informed choices about whether and with whom they would have children. For example, Galton provided evidence that in modern industrialized societies, more educated couples tend to have fewer children than less educated couples, and they tend to delay reproduction so that they can pursue other ambitions. The cumulative effect of this, Galton thought, is that civilization tends to encourage dysgenic reproductive trends. Galton appeared to be vindicated by independent scholarship which, by the turn of the nineteenth century, “demonstrated an inverse correlation between fertility and socioeconomic status, with the birthrate apparently falling much more sharply among the middle and upper-middle classes than among workers and agricultural laborers” (Paul and Moore 2010 , 12).

Like Galton, Darwin worried about successful and ambitious people having fewer children, but also speculated about the potentially dysgenic effects of social welfare programs:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment… Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed ( 1871 , 168).

Darwin did not altogether oppose social welfare programs. He did, however, worry about their long-term genetic consequences. He also counseled that “both sexes ought to refrain from marriage [procreation] if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind,” but he cautioned that “such hopes are utopian and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known” ( 1871 , 403). Darwin worried that, “as Mr. Galton has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members will tend to supplant the better members of society” ( 1871 , 403).

While eugenics originated in England, it flourished in the United States. Unlike the British eugenics movement, which never produced much in the way of legislation, the American eugenics movement led just over half of American states to pass forced sterilization laws for those deemed especially “unfit” for reproduction. The British biologist and first Professor of Eugenics in England, Karl Pearson, had a race-based view of eugenics, and one that favored Northern Europeans. Pearson anticipated Hitler’s view that life is a struggle between different groups, or races, for living space and raw materials (Paul and Moore 2010 ). Nevertheless, Hitler seems to have been more directly influenced by the British author Houston Chamberlain, whose unscientific writings about race reflected the influence of authors like Gobineau rather than Karl Pearson, who located himself more in the Darwinian tradition (Richards 2013 ).

9.3.2 During the War: German Eugenics

The Racial Hygiene Society of Germany began in 1905 and concerned itself with purifying the race of unwanted traits (Weindling 2010 ). To this end, it pursued environmental efforts to reduce the intake of alcohol and tobacco, and its members considered ways to reverse some of the same demographic trends that were occurring in England: successful people in Germany were moving to cities, marrying later, and having fewer children than those with less ability, ambition, and education.

Although antisemitism been on the rise since the late nineteenth century in Germany, Jews played an active role in the Racial Hygiene Society (which was not overtly antisemitic), until they were purged from the society when the National Socialists came to power (Weindling 2010 ). The first eugenic sterilization law was passed in 1933. By the time the war was over, at least 375,000 Germans were sterilized due to eugenic considerations (Weindling 2010 ).

Like the eugenic sterilization laws, the eugenic euthanasia program was primarily directed at Germans, not Jews. Unlike the sterilization laws, the euthanasia program was never formally legislated. The euthanasia program began after Hitler signed an internal memorandum authorizing physicians to kill patients with birth defects, or with serious mental or physical problems that made them a public charge. The number of Germans killed in the euthanasia program has been estimated at almost 300,000 (Proctor 1988 ).

The Final Solution was initiated by a separate order, beginning at the end of 1941. Although it might be construed as a eugenics program in the broad sense that it aimed to purge Europe of a group Hitler considered parasitic, the rationale for the Final Solution was not that the Jews were disabled or intellectually inferior to Germans. It was instead that they were a threat to all Europeans, in part because of their presence in positions of power, including academic jobs, journalism, banking, and the arts. Footnote 5 Because Jews were widely considered to have exceptional intellectual ability, an editorial in The Eugenics Review , published in Britain, opposed his treatment of the Jews, arguing “Herr Hitler has still not realised… that in declaring that the small number of Jews in Germany have achieved an altogether disproportionate measure of success…he has publicly acknowledged their superiority” (Bland and Hall 2010 , 218).

Hitler saw Jews as a rival group competing with Germans for scarce resources and cultural influence. Whatever the psychological explanation is for Hitler’s obsession with Jews, The Final Solution succeeded in killing most European Jews, and Hitler’s war claimed tens of millions of European lives around the world. When the totality of torture and death was uncovered at the Nuremberg Trials after the war, there were two major consequences that remain with us today. First, Western nations crafted treaties that attempted to prevent future genocides by requiring European countries to accept refugees fleeing political persecution. Second, academics in Europe and the United States distanced themselves from anything that seemed connected to Nazi medicine, including what seemed to be scientific justifications for “racism” or “eugenics.” Even the mention of race, or of genetic influences on human behavior, fell out of favor in universities.

9.3.3 After the War: UNESCO and Eugenics

UNESCO (the branch of the UN tasked with promoting scientific education) was formed soon after the founding of the United Nations, and by 1948 the UN General Assembly ratified the Declaration of Human Rights. As discussed above, article 16 of the Declaration rejected state-sponsored, coercive eugenics by guaranteeing that “[m]en and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family” (UNDHR 1948 ). Nevertheless, UNESCO’s first Director, Julian Huxley, defended eugenics throughout his life (despite his brother’s objections, expressed in Brave New World ). Huxley opposed most coercive forms of eugenics, while embracing voluntary eugenics, and opposed racism and prejudice, while maintaining that race differences almost certainly exist. Many other influential biologists of the age agreed with Huxley on this, including JBS Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Hermann Mueller (Crew et al. 1939 ).

In his 1946 manifesto explaining the aim of UNESCO, Julian Huxley argued that we need to acknowledge genetic differences in order to have fair institutions with policies that work for the good of all. According to Huxley, “Biological inequality is, of course, the bedrock fact on which all of eugenics is predicated… [The] primary aim of eugenics should be the raising of the mean level of all desirable qualities. While there may be dispute over certain qualities, there can be none over a number of the most important, such as a healthy constitution, a high innate general intelligence, or a special aptitude such as that for mathematics or music” ( 1946 , 21).

Moreover, Huxley maintained that UNESCO should promote non-coercive eugenics:

At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable (Huxley 1946 , 21).

Huxley was not alone. Although many intellectuals distanced themselves from eugenics after the war, it never entirely went away. Eugenic sterilizations continued to occur in various countries around the world, including Sweden and the United States, until the late twentieth century (Kevles 1985 ). Moreover, the Supreme Court decision that authorized coercive eugenics in the United States in 1927, Buck v Bell , has never been overturned. Although eugenic sterilizations are only rarely performed in the early twenty-first century, many states do have laws that permit physicians to sterilize patients with serious mental disabilities who are at risk of becoming pregnant.

Eugenics has not (yet) become a social movement in the way it did in the early twentieth century, but many prominent intellectuals continued to support some version of eugenics after World War II, despite its general decline. In 1963 the CIBA Foundation sponsored a symposium called “Man and His Future,” which was attended by some of the most well renowned scholars of the twentieth century, including Julian Huxley, and Nobel laureates like Hermann Muller, Francis Crick, and James Watson. Some of the ideas entertained included parental licensing, paying especially successful people to reproduce, and subsidizing the provision of genetic information so that parents could make informed reproductive choices (Crick 1963 ; Muller 1963 ).

9.3.4 After the War: Eugenics in Modern Bioethics

What people publicly say and privately believe are often very different. In the United States, survey evidence suggests that support for eugenic policies increases when people believe a condition is heavily influenced by genes (Zigerell 2020 ). Many ordinary people don’t seem to understand just how powerfully our traits are sculpted by genetics, perhaps because experts in behavior genetics are routinely denounced when their findings contradict egalitarian and environmentalist orthodoxies (Pinker 2002 ; Plomin 2018 ). These taboos are plausibly explained by the legacy of the Second World War.

Bioethicists often reflect popular consensus as much as they shape it. And their views on eugenics fit this pattern. It is safe to say that most bioethicists reject eugenic sterilizations. However, many support the use of government power to redistribute resources in a way that empowers women to use techniques like in vitro fertilization and embryo selection (Daar 2017 ). These techniques enable parents to screen embryos for diseases such as Tay Sachs and will soon allow them to select for more complex traits (Greely 2018 ; Anomaly 2020 ). Many also support laws forbidding incest, and some even support the use of “wrongful life” laws to prevent parents from knowingly imposing genetic burdens on their children (Archard 2004 ). These examples show that “coercive eugenics” comes in different forms and enjoys different degrees of support.

Many bioethicists, including members of the US Presidential Bioethics Commission, have argued that reproductive rights are limited by the interests of future people, especially when children impose foreseeable harms on others (Buchanan et al. 2000 ; Brock 2005 ; Benatar 2010 ). Some suggest in addition that parents have a moral obligation to produce children with the best chance of the best life (Savulescu and Kahane 2009 ), or to produce children who are most likely to improve the welfare of other people (Douglas and Devolder 2013 ). These moral obligations are difficult to discharge without expert advice, and widespread access to enhancement technologies (Gyngell and Selgelid 2016 , as well as social norms that encourage eugenic choices (Anomaly and Jones 2020a ).

Contemporary bioethicists disagree about whether we should use the word “eugenics” to describe debates about the obligations parents and political institutions have in shaping the genetic endowment of future people (Cavaliere 2018 ). Some authors in bioethics prefer using the euphemism “genetic enhancement” rather than “eugenics” in order to avoid associations with Nazi eugenics (Wilkinson 2008 ; Camporesi 2014 ). Others prefer using “eugenics” to describe any actions we take to shape the traits of our children, focusing less on the word and more on the ethical issues surrounding particular kinds of interventions (Agar 2019 ; Anomaly 2018 ; MacKellar and Bechtel 2016 ; Selgelid 2014 ).

Another debate in bioethics concerns whether the word “eugenics” should be used solely to designate actions or laws that intentionally shape the traits of children, or also include actions or laws that predictably affect the genetic composition of future people (Veit et al. 2021 ). The historian of eugenics Daniel Kevles argues that if policies that subsidize genetic counseling and contraception affect the gene pool, they are eugenic (or dysgenic ) policies, even if this is not their intent ( 1985 , 258). The philosopher Philip Kitcher agrees: “Once we have left the garden of genetic innocence, some form of eugenics is inescapable” (p. 174). This is because, Kitcher thinks, the choice to use or not use genetic screening, contraception, or abortion predictably influences what kinds of people are born, and what kinds of traits they will have. As Kitcher understands the term (consistent with Galton’s usage), eugenics is “a mixture of the study of heredity and some doctrines about the value of human lives” ( 1997 , 191). He suggests that even if a parent or policy is not attempting to alter the human gene pool, insofar as policies that affect the genetic endowments of future people are shaped by values and beliefs about genetics, they constitute a form of eugenics.

Nobody has the power to unilaterally change the meanings of words, or the concepts words represent. Of course, scholars, journalists, and influential celebrities probably influence how words are used more than ordinary people do. But because language shapes how we frame political debates, we should be careful not to castigate people with whom we disagree by simply labeling their views as “racist” and “eugenicist.” Terms that have emotional associations with Nazi Germany are likely to lose their force if they continue to be used in imprecise ways by influential people in order to achieve political goals.

See Nietzsche contra Wagner ( 1889 ).

For an overview of Hitler’s transcribed speeches blaming the two world wars on Jews, see The Jewish Virtual Library: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hitler-s-threats-against-the-jews-1941-1945 .

More than five decades later, Mayr reaffirmed this view in “The Biology of Race and the Concept of Equality” ( 2002 ).

Dysgenic is the opposite of eugenic : the idea is that socially valued traits like intelligence, kindness, or conscientiousness might be in decline rather than increasing in the general population.

The arts were especially targeted by Hitler in part because new forms of art and entertainment, including sexually explicit artwork and film, were thought to be subversive to traditional society.

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Anomaly, J. (2022). Race, Eugenics, and the Holocaust. In: Gallin, S., Bedzow, I. (eds) Bioethics and the Holocaust. The International Library of Bioethics, vol 96. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01987-6_9

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Savages! Innocents! Sages! What Do We Really Know About Early Humans?

In “The Invention of Prehistory,” the historian Stefanos Geroulanos argues that many of our theories about our remote ancestors tell us more about us than them.

This illustration depicts an early human man naked from the waist up, his arms crossed over his chest, his face unshaven, his scraggly hair matted. He has a scar under his collarbone on his right side.

By Jennifer Szalai

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THE INVENTION OF PREHISTORY: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins , by Stefanos Geroulanos

History may not be bunk, but prehistory is: So argues Stefanos Geroulanos in his spirited new book, “The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins.” Best-selling authors like Yuval Harari , Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker have all distilled (or cherry-picked) research about early humanity in order to make grand claims about the near inevitability (or impossibility) of human progress. Even “The Dawn of Everything” (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which took issue with the simplistic narratives offered by the Big Thinkers with their Big Books, provided an alternative narrative of its own — that of early human communities experimenting and making do without resorting to structures of hierarchy and domination.

Geroulanos expends few words addressing his contemporaries, preferring instead to guide us through several centuries of research into (and consequent conjecture about) human origins. “The Invention of Prehistory” begins around the mid-18th century, moving through various concepts of early humanity to conclude that even as our knowledge of specifics becomes undeniably richer and more detailed, our sense of the bigger picture remains tenuous and subject to change.

I already anticipate some grumbling from fans of Harari & Co. that Geroulanos, a professor of European intellectual history at New York University, is advancing an anti-science argument. He is not. He has plenty of praise for geneticists and paleontologists who have enlarged our understanding of various areas of inquiry, including human migration, food intake and the Neanderthal genome. What both fascinates and troubles him is our seemingly irrepressible urge to look to the lives of early humans — to that mysterious time before recorded history — to tell us who, essentially, we are. Not to mention that such interpretations can condition how we relate to others: Prehistoric “findings” have been used to shore up a prejudice, justify an injustice or expand an empire.

“Human origins are not mere abstractions,” Geroulanos writes. “Nor are they simple prompts for thought experiments and pure scientific inquiry. Promises and violence have regularly been unleashed in their name.”

Geroulanos dates the invention of prehistory, at least as we understand it, to sometime around 1750, when Enlightenment imperatives meant that religious tales of creation would no longer do. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes had already declared that “man is wolf to man” in the state of nature, and so it was in everyone’s interest to submit to a sovereign for protection from fellow humans. A century later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued something different. Disgusted by the extreme inequality in French society, Rousseau proposed that the “noble savage” had instead been corrupted by civilization. He assumed an analogous notion of childhood: innocent and pure. “Man is born free,” he wrote, “yet everywhere he is in chains.”

The more you want to upend the status quo, the more likely you’ll be to venerate an idyllic past. The reverse is also true: The more you want to preserve the status quo, the more likely you’ll be to scorn the past as horrific — or, at least, unsustainable. Geroulanos traces the long history of Europeans depicting Indigenous and colonized peoples as “savage” — thereby rationalizing every violent measure used against them, from brutality to annihilation. One trope that came up again and again was that of “the disappearing native,” which Geroulanos deems a “convenient euphemism,” because of how it couched colonial destruction in terms of biological inevitability. “Natives don’t die of diseases introduced by settlers,” he writes, in an acerbic aside. “They’re not murdered in asymmetrical warfare; really, they disappear.”

“The Invention of Prehistory” mostly follows a rough chronology, though the chapters are arranged conceptually. Geroulanos, who started his research for this project more than a decade ago, includes so many thinkers and theories that it can be hard to keep track of the mounting contradictions. But the tumbling cadence of conflicting ideas also serves to illustrate his point. He is dismantling, not synthesizing. He devotes an entire chapter to the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who tried to reconcile evolution with Christian theology. Another chapter starts with Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”; turns to the “Out of Africa” thesis of the Australian-born anthropologist Raymond Dart; discusses the work of the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius and its influence on the Negritude movement; brings in the racism promulgated by the Hollywood screenwriter turned-nonfiction naturalist Robert Ardrey; and ends with a mention of Wakanda.

Most readers will already be familiar with the pejorative uses of “savage” and the positive uses of “civilization”; they will also recognize reversals like Rousseau’s. Less familiar to me were the distinctions that 19th-century Europeans made between “good barbarians” (Germanic tribes) and “bad barbarians” (Mongols, Huns and other “Asiatic” invaders). And Geroulanos reminded me that depictions of Neanderthals have undergone a transformation during my own lifetime. No longer the hunched and hairy creatures of the 1980s and ’90s, they are now blond and blue-eyed tool users.

Given the racialized stereotypes embedded in these iterations, it’s perhaps no surprise that the current, lighter-skinned version has figured in grotesque, far-right talking points about “white genocide” and a “great replacement.” Geroulanos quotes an anthropology paper describing the Neanderthals as “the Indigenous European race” that was “demographically and genetically swamped by the African biological race of Homo sapiens.” Over on the dark web, Geroulanos finds white supremacists portraying Neanderthals as victims of “diversity.” He doesn’t dispute the science that has added to our store of knowledge, but he does dispute the meanings we project onto it. “The Neanderthals themselves say nothing,” he writes. “We arrange them into whatever position we need them to take.”

“The Invention of Prehistory” isn’t simply critique for critique’s sake. “When early humanity is presented as violent or weak, we pronounce ourselves triumphant,” Geroulanos writes. “When it is presented as strong or complex, we empathize with it.” Meanwhile, we “make excuses for the real humanity that burns forests and oil and cares little for the poverty right outside our door or on the other side of the planet.”

It’s a thought that’s both undeniably unsettling and surprisingly hopeful: Why cling to speculations of what our forebears may or may not have done, way back when, in order to make sense of what we actually do, right now?

THE INVENTION OF PREHISTORY : Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins | By Stefanos Geroulanos | Liveright | 498 pp. | $29.99

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

Primary Source 13.1

ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU, AN ESSAY ON THE INEQUALITY OF THE HUMAN RACES (1853-55)1

Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), a French man of letters, formulated an early theory about race, which he propounded as “scientific,” but like all such theories was in fact pseudo- scientific. He also first posited the superiority of the “ Aryan ” people, an idea later taken up by the Nazis to justify their goal of world domination. According to de Gobineau, humans experience two major impulses in their collective development: attraction and repulsion. Those communities governed by attraction toward other groups gain strength through mixing. Yet most peoples tended historically to obey repulsion by intermarrying only within their group. The white Indo-European race, he asserted, was the first in world history to mingle widely with various peoples, thus giving birth to civilization. De Gobineau then went on to argue that further merging with other races and peoples would cause (and indeed was already causing) the downfall of Western civilization. The passage below, which is excerpted from his major work on the race question, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, mainly focuses on the superiority of the Aryan race , although it also discusses the “yellow” race and the “black” race. Be advised that the text is deeply offensive and in many respects preposterous. Yet de Gobineau’s ideas had powerful and often miserable historical effects. For a link to the text, click here.

CHAPTER XVI

RECAPITULATION; THE RESPECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE THREE GREAT RACES; THE SUPERIORITY OF THE WHITE TYPE, AND, WITHIN THIS TYPE, OF THE ARYAN FAMILY

I have shown the unique place in the organic world occupied by the human species, the profound physical, as well as moral, differences separating it from all other kinds of living creatures. Considering it by itself, I have been able to distinguish, on physiological grounds alone, three great and clearly marked types, the black, the yellow, and the white. However uncertain the aims of physiology may be, however meagre its resources, however defective its methods, it can proceed thus far with absolute certainty. The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder. The animal character, that appears in the shape of the pelvis, is stamped on the negro from birth, and foreshadows his destiny. His intellect will always move within a very narrow circle. He is not however a mere brute, for behind his low receding brow, in the middle of his skull, we can see signs of a powerful energy, however crude its objects. If his mental faculties are dull or even non-existent, he often has an intensity of desire, and so of will, which may be called

1 Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races. trans. Adrian Collins (London: Heinemann, 1915), 205– 212. 2 terrible. Many of his senses, especially taste and smell, are developed to an extent unknown to the other two races. The very strength of his sensations is the most striking proof of his inferiority. All food is good in his eyes, nothing disgusts or repels him. What he desires is to eat, to eat furiously, and to excess; no carrion2 is too revolting to be swallowed by him. It is the same with odours; his inordinate desires are satisfied with all, however coarse or even horrible. To these qualities may be added an instability and capriciousness3 of feeling, that cannot be tied down to any single object, and which, so far as he is concerned, do away with all distinctions of good and evil. We might even say that the violence with which he pursues the object that has aroused his senses and inflamed his desires is a guarantee of the desires being soon satisfied and the object forgotten. Finally, he is equally careless of his own life and that of others: he kills willingly, for the sake of killing; and this human machine, in whom it is so easy to arouse emotion, shows, in face of suffering, either a monstrous indifference or a cowardice that seeks a voluntary refuge in death. The yellow race is the exact opposite of this type. The skull points forward, not backward. The forehead is wide and bony, often high and projecting. The shape of the face is triangular, the nose and chin showing none of the coarse protuberances that mark the negro. There is further a general proneness to obesity, which, though not confined to the yellow type, is found there more frequently than in the others. The yellow man has little physical energy, and is inclined to apathy; he commits none of the strange excesses so common among negroes. His desires are feeble, his will-power rather obstinate than violent; his longing for material pleasures, though constant, is kept within bounds. A rare glutton4 by nature, he shows far more discrimination in his choice of food. He tends to mediocrity in everything; he understands easily enough anything not too deep or sublime. He has a love of utility and a respect for order, and knows the value of a certain amount of freedom. He is practical, in the narrowest sense of the word. He does not dream or theorize; he invents little, but can appreciate and take over what is useful to him. His whole desire is to live in the easiest and most comfortable way possible. The yellow races are thus clearly superior to the black. Every founder of a civilization would wish the backbone of his society, his middle class, to consist of such men. But no civilized society could be created by them; they could not supply its nerve-force, or set in motion the springs of beauty and action. We come now to the white peoples. These are gifted with reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence. They have a feeling for utility, but in a sense far wider and higher, more courageous and ideal, than the yellow races; a perseverance that takes account of obstacles and ultimately finds a means of overcoming them; a greater physical power, an extraordinary instinct for order, not merely as a guarantee of peace and tranquility, but as an indispensable means of self-preservation. At the same time, they have a remarkable, and even extreme, love of liberty, and are openly hostile to the formalism under which the Chinese are glad to vegetate, as well as to the strict despotism which is the only way of governing the negro.

2 The deceased and decomposing carcass of an animal. 3 Unpredictable and impulsive in nature. 4 A greedy eater. 3

The white races are, further, distinguished by an extraordinary attachment to life. They know better how to use it, and so, as it would seem, set a greater price on it; both in their own persons and those of others, they are more sparing of life. When they are cruel, they are conscious of their cruelty; it is very doubtful whether such a consciousness exists in the negro. At the same time, they have discovered reasons why they should surrender this busy life of theirs, that is so precious to them. The principal motive is honour, which under various names has played an enormous part in the ideas of the race from the beginning. I need hardly add that the word honour, together with all the civilizing influences connoted by it, is unknown to both the yellow and the black man. On the other hand, the immense superiority of the white peoples in the whole field of the intellect is balanced by an inferiority in the intensity of their sensations. In the world of the senses, the white man is far less gifted than the others, and so is less tempted and less absorbed by considerations of the body, although in physical structure he is far the most vigorous. Such are the three constituent elements of the human race. I call them secondary types, as I think myself obliged to omit all discussion of the Adamite5 man. From the combination, by intermarriage, of the varieties of these types come the tertiary groups. The quaternary formations are produced by the union of one of these tertiary types, or of a pure-blooded tribe, with another group taken from one of the two foreign species. Below these categories others have appeared—and still appear. Some of these are very strongly characterized, and form new and distinct points of departure, coming as they do from races that have been completely fused. Others are incomplete, and ill-ordered, and, one might even say, anti-social, since their elements, being too numerous, too disparate, or too barbarous, have had neither the time nor the opportunity for combining to any fruitful purpose. No limits, except the horror excited by the possibility of infinite intermixture, can be assigned to the number of these hybrid and chequered races that make up the whole of mankind. It would be unjust to assert that every mixture is bad and harmful. If the three great types had remained strictly separate, the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands of the finest of the white races, and the yellow and black varieties would have crawled forever at the feet of the lowest of the whites. Such a state is so far ideal, since it has never been beheld in history; and we can imagine it only by recognizing the undisputed superiority of those groups of the white races which have remained the purest. It would not have been all gain. The superiority of the white race would have been clearly shown, but it would have been bought at the price of certain advantages which have followed the mixture of blood. Although these are far from counterbalancing the defects they have brought in their train, yet they are sometimes to be commended. Artistic genius, which is equally foreign to each of the three great types, arose only after, the intermarriage of white and black. Again, in the Malayan6 variety, a human family was produced from the yellow and black races that had more intelligence than either of its ancestors. Finally, from the union of white and yellow, certain intermediary peoples have sprung, who are superior to the purely Finnish tribes as well as to the negroes.

5 The nature of humanity at the time of the human creation (that is, of Adam and Eve). 6 Those inhabiting the Malayan Peninsula in Southeast Asia . 4

I do not deny that these are good results. The world of art and great literature that comes from the mixture of blood, the improvement and ennoblement of inferior race—all these are wonders for which we must needs be thankful. The small have been raised. Unfortunately, the great have been lowered by the same process; and this is an evil that nothing can balance or repair. Since I am putting together the advantages of racial mixtures, I will also add that to them is due the refinement of manners and beliefs, and especially the tempering of passion and desire. But these are merely transitory benefits, and if I recognize that the mulatto ,7 who may become a lawyer, a doctor, or a business man, is worth more than his negro grandfather, who was absolutely savage, and fit for nothing, I must also confess that the Brahmans8 of primitive India , the heroes of the Iliad9 and the Shahnameh ,10 the warriors of Scandinavia—the glorious shades of noble races that have disappeared—give us a higher and more brilliant idea of humanity, and were more active, intelligent, and trusty instruments of civilization and grandeur than the peoples, hybrid a hundred times over, of the present day. And the blood even of these was no longer pure. However it has come about, the human races, as we find them in history, are complex; and one of the chief consequences has been to throw into disorder most of the primitive characteristics of each type. The good as well as the bad qualities are seen to diminish in intensity with repeated intermixture of blood; but they also scatter and separate off from each other, and are often mutually opposed. The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or, if intelligent, both weak and ugly. Further, when the quantity of white blood was increased to an indefinite amount by successive infusions, and not by a single admixture, it no longer carried with it its natural advantages, and often merely increased the confusion already existing in the racial elements. Its strength, in fact, seemed to be its only remaining quality, and even its strength served only to promote disorder. The apparent anomaly is easily explained. Each stage of a perfect mixture produces a new type from diverse elements, and develops special faculties. As soon as further elements are added, the vast difficulty of harmonizing the whole creates a state of anarchy. The more this increases, the more do even the best and richest of the new contributions diminish in value, and by their mere presence add fuel to an evil which they cannot abate. If mixtures of blood are, to a certain extent, beneficial to the mass of mankind, if they raise and ennoble it, this is merely at the expense of mankind itself, which is stunted, abased, enervated,11 and humiliated in the persons of its noblest sons. Even if we admit that it is better to turn a myriad of degraded beings into mediocre men than to preserve the race of princes whose blood is adulterated and impoverished by being made to suffer this dishonorable change, yet there is still the unfortunate fact that the change does not stop here; for when the mediocre men are once created at the expense of the greater, they combine with other mediocrities, and from such unions, which grow ever more and more degraded, is born a

7 A person born to one white parent and one black parent. 8 Brahmins were the traditional Hindu social and cultural elite. 9 An ancient Greek epic poem written by Homer, who lived in the eighth century B.C. 10 A Persian epic poem written by Ferdowsi (940–1020A.D.). 11 To cause someone to feel weakened. 5 confusion which, like that of Babel,12 ends in utter impotence, and leads societies down to the abyss of nothingness whence no power on earth can rescue them. Such is the lesson of history. It shows us that all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it, provided that this group itself belongs to the most illustrious branch of our species. Of the multitude of peoples which live or have lived on the earth, ten alone have risen to the position of complete societies. The remainder have gravitated round these more or less independently, like planets round their suns. If there is any element of life in these ten civilizations that is not due to the impulse of the white races, any seed of death that does not come from the inferior stocks that mingled with them, then the whole theory on which this book rests is false. On the other hand, if the facts are as I say, then we have an irrefragable13 proof of the nobility of our own species. Only the actual details can set the final seal of truth on my system, and they alone can show with sufficient exactness the full implications of my main thesis, that peoples degenerate only in consequence of the various admixtures of blood which they undergo; that their degeneration corresponds exactly to the quantity and quality of the new blood, and that the rudest possible shock to the vitality of a civilization is given when the ruling elements in a society and those developed by racial change have become so numerous that they are clearly moving away from the homogeneity necessary to their life, and it therefore becomes impossible for them to be brought into harmony and so acquire the common instincts and interests, the common logic of existence, which is the sole justification for any social bond whatever. There is no greater curse than such disorder, for however bad it may have made the present state of things, it promises still worse for the future.

Note−The “ten civilizations” mentioned in the last paragraph are as follows. They are fully discussed in the subsequent books of the “Inequality of Races,” of which the present volume forms the first. I. The Indian civilization, which reached its highest point round the Indian Ocean, and in the north and east of the Indian Continent, south-east of the Brahmaputra.14 It arose from a branch of a white people , the Aryans . II. The Egyptians, round whom collected the Ethiopians, the Nubians,15 and a few smaller peoples to the west of the oasis of Ammon.16 This society was created by an Aryan colony from India, that settled in the upper valley of the Nile. III. The Assyrians,17 with whom may be classed the Jews , the Phoenicians,18 the Lydians,19 the Carthaginians,20 and the Hymiarites.21 They owed their civilizing qualities to

12 A city of ancient Babylon located in Mesopotamia, mentioned in the Bible as where a tower was built to reach the heavens. 13 Irrefutable. 14 One of the major rivers of Southeast Asia , running through Tibet, the Himalayas, Bangladesh, and India. 15 An ethnic group from southern Egypt and northern Sudan depicted by the Egyptians as very dark skinned. 16 The capital of an ancient civilization that thrived from c. 1000 to 332 B.C., the site of Amman, the capital of modern-day Jordan. 17 A Semitic kingdom located in the ancient Near East, which lasted from 2500 to 605 B.C. 6 the great white invasions which may be grouped under the name of the descendants of Shem and Ham.22 The Zoroastrian23 Iranians who ruled part of Central Asia under the names of Medes,24 Persians, and Bactrians,25 were a branch of the Aryan family. IV. The Greeks, who came from the same Aryan stock, as modified by Semitic26 elements. V. The Chinese civilization, arising from a cause similar to that operating in Egypt. An Aryan colony from India brought the light of civilization to China also. Instead however of becoming mixed with black peoples, as on the Nile, the colony became absorbed in Malay and yellow races, and was reinforced, from the north-west, by a fair number of white elements, equally Aryan but no longer Hindu. VI. The ancient civilization of the Italian peninsula, the cradle of Roman culture. This was produced by a mixture of Celts,27 Iberians,28 Aryans, and Semites. VII. The Germanic races, which in the fifth century transformed the Western mind. These were Aryans. VIII-X. The three civilizations of America, the Alleghanian,29 the Mexican,30 and the Peruvian.31 Of the first seven civilizations, which are those of the Old World , six belong, at least in part, to the Aryan race, and the seventh, that of Assyria, owes to this race the Iranian Renaissance , which is, historically, its best title to fame. Almost the whole of the Continent of Europe is inhabited at the present time by groups of which the basis is white, but in which the non-Aryan elements are the most numerous. There is no true civilization, among the European peoples, where the Aryan branch is not predominant. In the above list no negro race is seen as the initiator of a civilization. Only when it is mixed with some other can it even be initiated into one. Similarly, no spontaneous civilization is to be found among the yellow races; and when the Aryan blood is exhausted stagnation supervenes.

18 An ancient Semitic civilization located in the coastal region of the Near East, which flourished in 1200–539 B.C. 19 A kingdom located in western Asia Minor, which lasted from 1200 to 546 B.C. 20 A Semitic empire founded by the Phoenicians in the region of present-day Tunisia in 750 B.C. 21 A kingdom in ancient Yemen which lasted from 110 B.C. to 525 A.D. 22 Shem and Ham were sons of Noah in the Hebrew Bible. 23 An ancient Iranian religion that divides the universe into competing forces of good and evil. 24 People of the Median Empire in ancient Iran , existing from 678 to 549 B.C. 25 Ancient inhabitants in an area between India and China. 26 An ethnic and language family from Western Asia. 27 A group of tribal societies who once encompassed most of Europe but were gradually confined to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Northeast France . 28 A group of peoples from the Iberian Peninsula. 29 Referring to the Native American tribes settled in the regions around the Alleghany Mountain range. 30 The Aztec. 31 The Inca.

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An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853-1855) is a racist and pseudoscientific work of French writer Arthur de Gobineau, [1] which argues that there are intellectual differences between human races, that civilizations decline and fall when the races are mixed and that the white race is ...
The inequality of human races
The inequality of human races by Gobineau, Arthur, comte de, 1816-1882. Publication date 1915 Topics Race relations, Civilization, Ethnology Publisher London : William Heinemann Collection prscr; unclibraries; americana Contributor University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
In white supremacy. …l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-55; Essay on the Inequality of Human Races ), the French writer and diplomatist Arthur de Gobineau wrote about the superiority of the white race, maintaining that Aryans (Germanic peoples) represented the highest level of human development. According to 19th-century British ...
Race
Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of Human Races. The most important promoter of racial ideology in Europe during the mid-19th century was Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau, who had an almost incalculable effect on late 19th-century social theory.Published in 1853-55, his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races was widely read, embellished, and publicized by many different kinds of writers.
PDF Arthur De Gobineau, an Essay on The Inequality of The Human Races (1853
1 Primary Source 13.1 ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU, AN ESSAY ON THE INEQUALITY OF THE HUMAN RACES (1853-55)1 Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82), a French man of letters, formulated an early theory about race, which he propounded as "scientific," but like all such theories was in fact pseudo- scientific. e also first posited the superiority of the "Aryan" people, an idea later taken up by
Gobineau on the inequality of races (1853)
Gobineau on the inequality of races (1853) Joseph-Arthur, Count de Gobineau (1816-1882), was a French aristocratic novelist, diplomat, and theorist whose ideas greatly influenced the development of racist thought in Europe and the United States. He rejected Enlightenment explanations for human diversity, including the impact of geography and ...
The Inequality of Human Races
Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines ( An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) (1853-1855) by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was intended as a work of philosophical enquiry into decline and degeneration. It is today considered as one of the earliest examples of scientific racism. — Excerpted from An Essay on the Inequality of ...
The inequality of human races by comte de Arthur Gobineau
English. Title. The inequality of human races. Original Publication. United Kingdom: William Heinemann,1915. Credits. Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https: //www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Language. English.
Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau
Quick Reference. (1816-82) French diplomat and scholar, the intellectual founder of racism. His most famous book, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-55), put forward the thesis that the races are innately unequal and that the White Aryan race is not only the purest but also superior to all others. His writings had a sinister ...
The Inequality of Human Races by Arthur de Gobineau
Arthur de Gobineau. 3.22. 138 ratings28 reviews. Written in the mid -19th century, Gobineau's book provided the classic synthesis of ideas which largely determined the nature of modern racist thought. Drawing upon anthropology, linguistics and history, The Inequality of Human Races is the basic document which puts forward racism as a world view.
Arthur de Gobineau
Cover of the original edition of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. In his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published in 1855, Gobineau ultimately accepts the prevailing Christian doctrine that all human beings shared the common ancestors Adam and Eve (monogenism as opposed to polygenism). He suggests, however, that ...
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races: The hidden causes of
This beautiful essay details the hidden causes of War and Lawlessness that is the ruin of great nations. Arthur's Essay is profound in its though and style in dealing with the question of equality. It deems the human race to be bound by the same laws of nature that governs all animals, and it is a damning criticism of new age democracy.
Arthur de Gobineau
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (July 14, 1816 - October 13, 1882) was a French aristocrat, writer, diplomat, and social thinker.He became infamous for advocating developing the racist theory of the Aryan master race, in his book, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855). Gobineau approached his work from a scholarly viewpoint, trying to understand the course of human history ...
Gobineau, Comte Joseph Arthur de (1816-1882)
Joseph Arthur De Gobineau, Gobineau, Comte de Gobineau, Comte de 1814-1882 Discredited today and largely ignored by his compatriots during his lifetime, Comte Joseph Arthur de… Race, The concept of race as a categorization system for human beings did not exist formally until the late eighteenth century. Most analysts (e.g., Feagin… Automobile Racing, Automobile racing is one of the world's ...
PDF The inequality of human races
contents chap. pagb introduction vii fromtheauthor'sdedication xi author'spreface xvii i.themortaldiseaseofcivilizationsand societiesproceedsfromgeneralcauses ...
Inequality Of The Human Races
Inequality Of The Human Races. Today, differences between individuals in terms of intelligence and behaviour is never disputed. However in late 19th century many intellectuals argued that these differences were fixed in terms of ethnicity, gender and economic class. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (French: [ɡɔbino]; 14 July 1816 - 13 October 1882 ...
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
Illustration. by Daehan. published on 07 October 2020. Download Full Size Image. Original edition of Arthur de Gobineau's (1816-1882 CE) An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. 1853 CE. Library of the National Museum of Natural History, Paris. Remove Ads.
Race, Eugenics, and the Holocaust
An influential French author, his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races separated humanity into three races corresponding to skin color—white, yellow, and black. Gobineau described Aryans as the most exalted race, with Alpine and Mediterranean ethnicities as degenerative versions of the pure Aryans. This view was popularized by the American ...
The Inequality of Human Races : Arthur Gobineau
The Inequality of Human Races Bookreader Item Preview remove-circle Share or Embed This Item. Share to Twitter. Share to Facebook. Share to Reddit. Share to Tumblr. Share to Pinterest. Share via email. EMBED. EMBED (for wordpress.com hosted blogs and archive.org ...
Tocqueville and the Problem of Racial Inequality
terminism. As the author of the Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855), Gobineau separated himself from the typical assumptions about race in intellectual circles in mid-19th century France. The central theme of the Essay is that "race" is the master key for understanding social reality. Gobineau identified
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races: Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur de
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races: The hidden causes of revolutions, bloody wars, and lawlessness. Arthur De Gobineau. 4.3 out of 5 stars ...
Transatlantic Perspectives on Men, Women, and Other Primates ...
Notions of race and culture as set forth in Gobineau's treatise An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55) touted a superior "Aryan" race and informed later debates on gender and species. These concepts are already obvious in Kafka's "A Report to an Academy," which was published toward the end of the First World War when the
Jane Elliott, anti-racism teacher, slams efforts to limit how race is
Jane Elliott will never forget her sister's April 4, 1968, phone call telling her the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. Elliott, like many people across the US, was shocked ...
Book Review: 'The Invention of Prehistory,' by Stefanos Geroulanos
Geroulanos, who started his research for this project more than a decade ago, includes so many thinkers and theories that it can be hard to keep track of the mounting contradictions. But the ...
Arthur De Gobineau, an Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853
The passage below, which is excerpted from his major work on the race question, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, mainly focuses on the superiority of the Aryan race, although it also discusses the "yellow" race and the "black" race. Be advised that the text is deeply offensive and in many respects preposterous.

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