Was the Enlightenment racist? In many parts of academia, the idea is now taken for granted. If the movement’s greatest thinkers were once best known for inspiring declarations about toleration and liberty, now a different set of statements competes for attention. Immanuel Kant: “Humanity has achieved its greatest perfection in the white race.” David Hume: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites.” Voltaire: “Whites are superior to Negroes, just as Negroes are superior to monkeys.” These thinkers, it is said, not only reserved enlightenment for people who looked like them but helped to invent modern scientific race theory.
The stakes here are potentially as high as for any historical argument. As both a synonym for and a supposed origin point of “modernity,” the Enlightenment has a singular position in contemporary culture and politics. Philosophers spend relatively little time asking whether Western thought took a terribly wrong turn in the High Middle Ages. European politicians do not insist that immigrants adhere to “Renaissance values.” Steven Pinker does not write best sellers with titles like Reformation Now (although the idea that Islam needed a Reformation did have a brief vogue after September 11, 2001).
The Enlightenment is seen as different, as more essential. One reason is that its greatest writers themselves made the case for its significance so powerfully, boasting eloquently that they had broken with ignorance and superstition and ushered in a new age of knowledge and progress. Another has to do with the radical questioning of modernity and progress that occurred amid the horrors of the twentieth century and the desperate search by intellectuals to identify the moment when everything turned sour (leading, at the absurd extreme, to one critic’s statement that “the Enlightenment leads to Auschwitz”). But whatever the case, calling the Enlightenment racist suggests that modern Western civilization is itself, in important respects, irredeemable.
In response to these charges, others have rushed to defend the Enlightenment. They argue that statements like the ones quoted above were unrepresentative of their authors’ works. They were simply men of their time who occasionally and thoughtlessly recycled common prejudices. Nor do the statements cancel out their far better developed arguments in favor of freedom of thought, popular sovereignty, the rule of reason, and much else that we today take for granted as foundations of our culture and politics. Many Enlightenment thinkers forcefully condemned colonialism and slavery. Moreover, as the philosopher Susan Neiman has put it, Enlightenment writers “laid the theoretical foundation for the universalism upon which all struggles against racism must stand.”
The entire debate, though, is somewhat off base. The historical Enlightenment was in no sense a cohesive, coherent movement. It produced nothing like a cohesive, coherent ideology. Its major thinkers liked few things better than contradicting and criticizing one another. The label “the Enlightenment,” complete with definite article, did not enter common usage until well after the eighteenth century—in English not until the twentieth. Intellectually the Enlightenment is best thought of as a loose constellation of ideas—a Venn diagram with many areas of intersection but no union of all the sets. Furthermore, whatever ideas and practices it gave birth to hardly provided a fixed, unchanging matrix for modernity. These ideas and practices were repeatedly challenged and reworked over the subsequent centuries. Neiman’s careful formulation is the right one. At best (or worst) the Enlightenment laid a theoretical foundation on which others later built.
But did something as multifaceted and influential as the Enlightenment lay just one theoretical foundation? William Max Nelson’s impressive Enlightenment Biopolitics examines a different and troubling set of ideas and practices that can also be traced back, at least in part, to this moment in history. Nelson links the Enlightenment to modern racism, but in a sophisticated manner that involves more than simply stringing together quotations. His book suggests that while some clearly racist statements might indeed be unrepresentative of the writers in question, they are all too representative of a broader and important current of eighteenth-century thinking.
This broader current involved what Nelson calls “the coming into being of the human species as an object of scientific knowledge.” In the eighteenth century, more than ever before, major thinkers started to ask what it might mean to consider humans as part of the animal kingdom. Many different developments made this shift possible. Challenges to orthodox Christian beliefs encouraged criticisms of the biblical account of creation and its presentation of human beings as fundamentally distinct from animals. Newly extensive global travel and communication made Europeans increasingly aware of nonhuman primates—especially orangutans, then seen as the species most closely resembling humanity. New biological research cast both humans and animals as organisms sharing systems such as a circulating bloodstream and demonstrating traits inherited from both male and female parents. New work on natural history, especially by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, showed that humans and animals both belonged to a natural world that was perpetually changing, as climate and breeding altered the shape of flora and fauna alike.
The result, Nelson argues, was an unprecedented “intertwining of the life sciences and political economy.” Political problems came to be seen as biological ones. If France was in decline, losing wars and territory to its rivals, perhaps the reason was the physical degeneration of the country’s human stock. French thinkers of the Enlightenment era saw this degeneration at work everywhere: in the increasing number of vagabonds on French roads, in the racial mixing between enslavers and enslaved in France’s Caribbean colonies, and in the physical qualities of French Jews, whose alleged inbreeding and insalubrious personal habits had supposedly rendered them repellently ugly.
In response, these thinkers recommended measures that Nelson compares to nineteenth- and twentieth-century eugenics. The Enlightenment economist Guillaume-François Le Trosne called for the isolation of vagabonds in work camps, in part to keep them from breeding with the rest of the population. The popular novelist Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne imagined a society in which healthy individuals would be forced to marry, the “infirm” would be prohibited from doing so, and “deformed” men would only have the right to marry widows approaching or past menopause. Gabriel de Bory, a former governor-general of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), proposed mating white men with Black women so as to produce a “new perfected race” of mulatto soldiers. He was inspired, he explained, by recent advances in sheep breeding. Charles-Augustin Vandermonde, in Essay on the Means of Perfecting the Human Species (1756), one of the most influential proposals for planned human breeding, asked,
Since we have succeeded in improving the race of horses, dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons, and canaries, why should we not make any attempt on the human species?
Emmanuel Sieyès, who later became one of the leading figures of the French Revolution, even speculated about creating a plan for what he called “a species between men and animals, a species capable of serving man for consumption and production”—a race of natural slaves.
None of these writers were philosophes of the first rank, but versions of the same ideas appear in some of the period’s most important works. In 1772, for instance, Denis Diderot wrote his brilliant Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, the title referring to a popular travelogue by a French explorer of the South Pacific. A dialogue between two characters called A and B, it also includes a speech supposedly made by a Tahitian elder denouncing the French visitors for corrupting his society and a conversation between a Tahitian named Orou and a French cleric, which is a small comic masterpiece. Orou offers his wife and daughters to the cleric as sexual partners. The celibate cleric refuses and tries to explain his Christian beliefs to the Tahitian, who ridicules and outwits him at every turn, insisting that there is nothing more natural than the free satisfaction of sexual urges. He calls the cleric’s ideas “opposed to nature, contrary to reason,” and exclaims, “You are more barbarous than we are!” The cleric finally gives in to temptation, shouting, “But my religion! But my position!” each time he climaxes.
The book, which the cautious Diderot refrained from publishing in his lifetime, is generally read as a critique of imperialism, of Christianity, and even of European civilization as a whole. It is less often noted that Orou justifies his offer to the cleric in eugenicist terms:
While we are healthier and stronger than you, we noticed from the start that you were more intelligent than we are; and so, right away, we chose some of our most beautiful wives and daughters to collect the seed of a race superior to our own.
Other philosophes believed that in the future, the physical improvement or even “perfection” of humanity might be possible. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who speculated that humans had already evolved from animalistic, fur-covered creatures, wrote in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia: “It is good to know how to use men as they are. It is better still to make them into what one needs them to be.” The philosopher and mathematician Condorcet predicted that one day biological engineering would extend the human life span indefinitely.
These ideas about the diversity and malleability of the human species were not inherently racist, but they arguably provided a theoretical foundation for modern racism. And they had immediate and hugely toxic effects. The specific proposals Nelson cites never gained large-scale popular support. (Explicit eugenicist movements, and the word “eugenics” itself, did not appear until the later nineteenth century.) But the racial ideas associated with them allowed defenders of the slave system in the Americas to answer the newly vocal arguments of abolitionists by pointing to the supposed biological inferiority of Africans.
The ideas also helped justify, on the same grounds, the passage of harsh discriminatory legislation against the increasingly large and wealthy population of free people of color in Caribbean colonies. And they encouraged imperial officials to call for a rigid separation of the races, lest Africans in some way taint European blood. Already in 1777 the French official Guillaume Poncet de la Grave was warning that the few thousand people of color then residing in metropolitan France posed “the greatest danger to the white nation.” Another official (and future revolutionary), Pierre Victor Malouet, spoke darkly about what might happen “if the black man is assimilated to the whites among us,” calling such mixing the way “that individuals, families, [and] Nations alter, degrade, and dissolve.”
In France itself, it is unclear how far these fears initially spread beyond elite intellectual and government circles. In her book An Infinite History, the historian Emma Rothschild recounts the story of Louis Félix, born to an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue in 1765 and freed at birth by his mother’s owner.1 By 1780 he had moved to the French town of Angoulême, where he apprenticed as a goldsmith. He married twice, both times to white women, and during the French Revolution became a prominent municipal official. He lived until 1851, his fellow citizens apparently failing to treat him as a threat to their racial purity.
For that matter, racial theory did not always fare well in the face of basic human emotion. The Caribbean-born writer and jurist Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, who minutely classified different sorts of racial mixtures and commented scathingly, in the abstract, on the moral qualities of mixed-race women, nonetheless treated his own mixed-race daughter with considerable affection. But in a colony like Saint-Domingue, where in 1790 enslaved Blacks outnumbered whites by more than fifteen to one and the whites barely outnumbered free people of color, what Nelson calls “Enlightenment biopolitics” helped justify and solidify a system of horrific racial oppression.
New biological theories also provided a basis for new forms of antisemitism. The parish priest and future revolutionary Henri Grégoire is remembered by many as an advocate of Jewish rights. In 1989 the French government even gave him the honor of reburial in the Paris Pantheon, alongside Voltaire and Rousseau. But the work that made him famous, An Essay on the Physical, Moral, and Political Regeneration of the Jews (1788), reads very uncomfortably today, because Grégoire urged the ultimate assimilation and conversion to Christianity of French Jews, and because he portrayed them as both physically and morally degenerate. He blamed this degeneration squarely on Christian prejudice and discrimination but also described it in salacious detail, drawing on familiar antisemitic tropes (hooked noses, filthiness, clannishness). Citing Vandermonde’s Essay on the Means of Perfecting the Human Species, he called for interbreeding Jews and gentiles to reverse this degeneration as quickly as possible.
Nelson takes the concept of “biopolitics” from Michel Foucault and, following Foucault, focuses tightly on the way scientific knowledge of human bodies relates to “political techniques.” He also insists on limiting his inquiry to “modern biological thought,” which Foucault believed emerged out of a fundamental rupture in Western ways of thinking in the years around 1800. Nelson dates the rupture earlier than Foucault did but otherwise adopts his schema. In particular, he closely analyzes the way thinkers started to understand systems of all sorts, from physical to biological to social and economic—everything from the solar system to living bodies to markets—as potentially “self-generating and self-organizing.” This focus has the advantage of keeping the book cohesive and concise. It also risks making the story too tidy.
For one thing, Nelson doesn’t relate eighteenth-century developments to earlier thinking about race and human diversity. He might usefully have consulted a recent book by the Paris-based historians Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani, which traces the issues explored in Enlightenment Biopolitics back to fifteenth-century Spanish concerns with “purity of blood” and the marriage of Christians to Jewish and Muslim converts.2 Even more pertinent is Mackenzie Cooley’s fascinating study of race and animal breeding in the Renaissance, The Perfection of Nature.3 Cooley highlights, for instance, a 1602 utopian novel by a Dominican friar, centered on an imaginary people called the Solarians. “They laugh at us who exhibit a studious care for our breeding of horses and dogs, but neglect the breeding of human beings,” says the European narrator. However, since these earlier works did not follow “modern biological thought” in conceiving of humans and animals as “self-generating and self-organizing,” Nelson doesn’t consider how they might have influenced the Enlightenment.
Nelson briefly suggests that Enlightenment biopolitics had severe consequences for women as well as people of color. He calls attention to a number of eighteenth-century French texts that stressed both women’s biological differences from men and their inherent inferiority. He suggests, reasonably enough, that these texts influenced the revolutionary and Napoleonic legislation that formally limited women’s rights in France. But again the chronology proves tricky for his larger argument. As Thomas Laqueur showed in his pathbreaking Making Sex,4 during the early modern period medical writers embraced a stark new vision of sexual difference. Previously they had understood women to be “inverted,” inferior males, literally men with their sexual organs turned outside-in. Now they embraced a model of “radical dimorphism, of biological divergence,” classifying women as fundamentally different from—if still inferior to—men. But in Laqueur’s account, this shift took place over a long period centered on the early eighteenth century, well before the conceptual break that Nelson associates with the birth of biopolitics.
Nelson might even have explored the way biopolitics simultaneously built on and struggled against Christian ways of thinking. The concept of “regeneration,” which Grégoire, Sieyès, and many other Enlightenment authors made central to their work, was in no sense a purely physical one. In many ways, it translated into secular terms the Christian notion of “rebirth”: “Ye have put off the old man…and have put on the new man” (Colossians 3:9–10; also Ephesians 4:22–24). When French politicians spoke of regeneration and claimed that the Revolution had made them “new men,” or the French a “different species” (“two thousand years beyond the rest of the human species,” as Robespierre put it), they were invoking spiritual as much as biological change.
Yet at the same time the view of guided sexual reproduction as a source of human physical progress, even of human “perfection,” flew in the face of Christian ideas that linked sex to sin. As the historian E. Claire Cage has argued, in the eighteenth century the celibacy once seen as proof of the clergy’s spiritual superiority increasingly became a sign of its perversion and degeneracy—an abnormal suppression of natural urges (as in Diderot’s Supplement). The shift helped French revolutionaries depict the Catholic Church as an inherently corrupt, evil enemy. Taking a page from Restif de la Bretonne’s eugenicist novel, they forced priests, monks, and nuns to marry as proof of good citizenship.5
These caveats suggest that Nelson, like so many writers today, may be putting too great an emphasis on the Enlightenment as the essential source of modern thought, identifying a handful of thinkers over just a few decades as the originators of changes that actually took much longer and involved a larger and messier range of writers. At least he does not pose as the Enlightenment’s prosecutor or defense attorney. In his conclusion he admirably calls for doing away with “false binaries and questionable genealogies” and urges modern readers to appreciate the way the Enlightenment “produced such powerful discourses” of liberty, equality, and exclusion simultaneously.
But still, like many excellent scholars before him, he has perhaps fallen too easily under the spell of Enlightenment writing itself and the philosophes’ own claims as to their historical importance. While these writers indeed produced many astonishingly innovative works, they were also accomplished synthesizers, publicists, and militants, borrowing more than they let on from a wide range of intellectual predecessors—and even from their own enemies. Their visions of human diversity were arguably as much a synthesis as a brand-new invention, and we should resist seeing it as one. Still, a powerful, well-argued synthesis can have a far greater effect than works that are more inventive but also more obscure and difficult. In this sense, the Enlightenment did indeed help lay theoretical foundations for some of modernity’s most baleful ideas and practices, along with some of its most commendable ones.
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