Revisiting Enlightenment racial classification: time and the question of human diversity

Abstract

The Enlightenment is commonly held accountable for the rise of both racial classification and modern scientific racism. Yet this argument sits uneasily alongside the birth of a modern rights language and strong anticolonial perspectives within the same intellectual movement. This article seeks to make sense of this paradox by arguing that one of the contexts in which we can best understand eighteenth-century race concepts is humanity's place in a transformed history of nature that brought together novel understandings of deep time and a materialist view of reproduction. Analysing the thought of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and Denis Diderot, the article demonstrates that the waning of both the authority of biblical genealogies and ancient environmentalist explanations of human physical diversity left a lacuna in the eighteenth-century human sciences. Buffon and Diderot's "races" of humanity are not fixed entities, but rather exist in the flux of time. New understandings of heredity and reproduction combined with a time revolution led these Enlightenment thinkers to reconceive humanity's place in the natural world. The article suggests that while "race" is a biologically incoherent concept, two elements of these Enlightenment thinkers' anthropologya materialist understanding of reproduction and humanity's place in deep timeremain central to how we understand human diversity.

Curious about race: Generous methods and modes of knowing in practice

“…In the 16 th century, the English and French word race was also used for humans to mean lineage, family, or kin. The French physician and travelogue François Bernier is credited with being the first to cluster humans in four races, in 1684, based on physical, mostly facial, features (Hacking, 2005; Vartija, 2021a). Meanwhile, ‘race’ also came to signify a more general idea of nation or people of common stock, or even humans at large, as in ‘the human race’.…”

“…In 1777, Buffon postulated that race is identical to variété , (variety) or espèce (in its understanding of kind). He forcefully defended the unity of the human species and argued that physical differences between populations must be primarily explained by environmental effects (Vartija, 2021a, b). Important for us here is that he added to the idea of race as lineage, race as resemblance , based on similarities in appearance, that is, phenotype .…”

Identifying intersectional feminist principles in the One Health framework

“…Although societies have historically engaged in social organization, compelling evidence suggests that the natural impulse towards cognitive stratification was solidified during the expansion of Western colonialism, often at the expense of marginalized communities. [ 8 ] For example, many “modern racial classification can be understood as an ‘overextension’ of biological classification more generally” that was popularized during the enlightenment era. [ 8 ]…”

“…[ 8 ] For example, many “modern racial classification can be understood as an ‘overextension’ of biological classification more generally” that was popularized during the enlightenment era. [ 8 ]…”

On Conspiracy Thinking: Conspiracist Ideology as a Modern Phenomenon

“…Enlightenment thinking and Enlightenment's scientific approach paved the way for modern, biologistic, and essentialist racism (though Enlightenment philosophy also paved the ground for universal human rights and Fraternité). So, Jew-targeted hatred became disenchanted in the Age of Enlightenment: A mash-up of Jew-targeted hatred and essentialist racism led to modern antisemitism (Vartija, 2020). Even more, the first elements of anti-modernist (Salzborn, 2014, p. 13) and anti-emancipatory (Wyrwa, 2019, pp.…”