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’ anthropology – a materialist understanding of reproduction and humanity’s place in deep time – remain central to how we understand human diversity.

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