An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races

Title page of the original edition of 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) by Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, is a controversial book that was intended to awaken people to the differences between human races. It is today considered one of the earliest examples of scientific racism.

Expanding upon Boulainvilliers' use of ethnography to defend the Ancien Régime against the claims of the Third Estate, Gobineau aimed for an explanatory system universal in scope: namely, that race is the primary force determining world events. Using scientific disciplines as varied as linguistics and anthropology, Gobineau divides the human species into three major groupings, white, yellow and black, claiming to demonstrate that "history springs only from contact with the white races." Among the white races, he distinguishes the Aryan race as the pinnacle of human development, comprising the basis of all European aristocracies. However, inevitable miscegenation led to the 'downfall of civilizations'.

Background

Gobineau was a Legitimist who despaired at France's decline into republicanism and centralization. The book was written after the 1848 revolution when Gobineau began studying the works of Xavier Bichat and Johann Blumenbach.

The book was dedicated to King George V of Hanover (1851–66), the last king of Hanover. In the dedication, Gobineau writes that he presents to His Majesty the fruits of his speculations and studies into the hidden causes of the "revolutions, bloody wars, and lawlessness" ("révolutions, guerres sanglantes, renversements de lois") of the age.

In a letter to Count Anton von Prokesch-Osten in 1856 he describes the book as based upon "a hatred for democracy and its weapon, the Revolution, which I satisfied by showing, in a variety of ways, where revolution and democracy come from and where they are going."

Content

Gobineau divides all the races of mankind into the masculine and feminine, or active and passive races; or those again in which the emotional or moral nature prevails, and those in which the intellectual and practical prevails. According to him, the best races are those fertilized by the conjunction of the two characteristics, the moral and the practical, while the lowest are those in which one predominates to the exclusion of the other.

Gobineau asks what is the cause of the ruin of nations, which has occurred with such uniformity as to suggest that it is a law of nature? He shows that the causes usually assigned, such as fanaticism, the corruption of morals, irreligion, luxury, bad governments, are not the true causes, because nations have suffered all these and retained their vitality. The real cause is degeneracy, in the etymological sense of the term, or the alternation of the original blood of the nation. A nation is degenerate, when the blood of its founders no longer flows in its veins, but has been gradually deteriorated by successive foreign admixtures; so that the nation, while retajning its original name, is no longer composed of the same elements. The corruption of the blood leads to a modification of the original instincts, or modes of thinking—the new elements assert their influence, and when they have once gained preponderance, the degeneration is complete. Every civilization must grow out of the primary instincts of the races: those instincts cannot be implanted or taught by other races.

Gobineau and the Bible

Gobineau

In Vol I, chapter 11, "Les différences ethniques sont permanentes" ("The ethnic differences are permanent"), Gobineau writes that "Adam is the originator of our white species" ("Adam soit l'auteur de notre espèce blanche"), and creatures not part of the white race are not part of that species.

By this Gobineau refers to his division of humans into three main races: white, black, and yellow. The biblical division into Hamites, Semites, and Japhetites is for Gobineau a division within the white race. In general, Gobineau considers the Bible to be a reliable source of actual history, and he was not a supporter of the idea of polygenesis.

Translation

Josiah Clark Nott hired Henry Hotze to translate the work into English. Hotze's translation was published in 1856 as The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, with an added essay from Hotze and appendix from Nott. However, it "omitted the laws of repulusion and attraction, which were at the heart of Gobineau's account of the role of race-mixing in the rise and fall of civilizations". Gobineau was not pleased with the version; Gobineau was "particularly concerned that Hotze had ignored his comments on 'American decay generally and upon slaveholding in particular'."

The German translation Versuch über die Ungleichheit der Menschenrassen first appeared in 1897 and was translated by Ludwig Schemann, a member of the Bayreuth Circle and "one of the most important racial theorists of imperial and Weimar Germany".

A new English language version The Inequality of Human Races, translated by Adrian Collins, was published in Britain and the USA in 1915 and remains the standard English language version. It continues to be republished in the USA.

Influence

Gobineau's "influence on the development of racial theory has been exaggerated and his ideas have been routinely misconstrued".

Gobineau's ideas found an audience in the United States and in German-speaking areas more so than in France, becoming the inspiration for a host of racial theories, for example those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. "Gobineau was the first to theorize that race was the deciding factor in history and the precursors of Nazism repeated some of his ideas, but his principle arguments were either ignored, deformed, or taken out of context in German racial thought".

The historian and Hitler-biographer Joachim C. Fest describes Gobineau, in particular his negative views on race-mixing as expressed in his essay, as an eminent influence on Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. In the chapter "Vision" in his book Hitler he writes that the influence of Gobineau on Hitler can be easily seen and that Gobineau's ideas were used by Hitler in simplified form for demagogic purposes: "Significantly, Hitler simplified Gobineau's elaborate doctrine until it became demagogically usable and offered a set of plausible explanations for all the discontents, anxieties, and crises of the contemporary scene." However, Professor Steven Kale has cautioned that "Gobineau's influence on German racism has been repeatedly overstated".

Although cited by groups such as the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), the text implicitly criticizes antisemitism and describes Jews in positive terms, the Jews being seen as a superbly forged race of "ancient Greek-like strength" of cohesion. Implicitly, the folk of Judah merely represented a wandering, semi-austral variation of Ur-Aryan blood-stock. Gobineau stated, "Jews... became a people that succeeded in everything it undertook, a free, strong, and intelligent people, and one which, before it lost, sword in hand, the name of an independent nation, had given as many learned men to the world as it had merchants." Philo-Judaic sentiment was intermixed with ethnological theories concerning the primally Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan archeogenetic matrix whence sprang the Jews. In these lines of speculative anthropology, the Jews were anciently (supposedly) primordially interpreted as of atypical Indo-European ethnicity: Judaic racial typology emerged from Iranid–Nordid founders, the details considered inessential, possessors of compatibly "white" "Aryan" blood being the main point. The latter-day "Hamiticized" Jewish folk came into existence from non-Afro-Asiatic Hurrian (or Horite), Jebusite, Amorite or early-Hittite, Mittani-affiliated racial nuclei, the "consensus science" of the time asserted. The blatantly, ironically almost aggressive pro-Jewish attitude of Gobineau, akin to Nietzsche in sheer admiration and lionization of the Jews as one of the "highest races", proved ideologically vertiginous to the NSDAP propagandists and Procrustean thinkers—here Gobineau unmistakably contradicted perhaps the main pillar of NSDAP political ideology, the schizoid, neo-Gnostic dualism of "Jewish demonology", painfully obvious as reflective of low-grade moral-intellectual barbarism. Incompatible with NSDAP ideology, the Count's fervent Judaic positivity and total dearth of antisemitism the National Socialists could only attempt to ignore or minimize away in the silence of hypocrisy.

See also

• IQ and Global Inequality

References

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Bibliography

• Gobineau, Arthur (Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau) The Inequality of Human Races translated by Adrian Collins
• Gobineau, Arthur (Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau) The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, with particular reference to their perspective influence in the civil and political history of mankind translated by Henry Hotze
• Gobineau, Arthur (Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau) Versuch Uber Die Ungleichheit Der Menschenracen' translated by Ludwig Schemann

External links

• Essai sur l'Inegalite de Races Humaine in French at Google Books Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 4
• Versuch über die Ungleichheit der Menschenracen trans. by Ludwig Schemann at Google Books Vol. 1, Vol. 2,
• Vol. 3,
• Vol. 4
• The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races: With Particular Reference to Their Respective trans. by H. Hotz, with an Appendix by J. C. Nott