Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830

Notes

153 Notes Preface 1. See Sergio Moravia, La scienza dell’uomo nel Settecento (Bari: Laterza, 1970), 209f.; Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, “Des choses occultes en histoire des sciences humaines: le destin de la ‘science nouvelle’ de Christoph Meiners,” in L’Ethnographie 90–91 (1983): 131–83, and “C. Meiners et J. M. Gérando: un chapitre du comparatisme anthropologique,” in L’homme des Lumières et la découverte de l’autre: Études sur le XVIIIe siècle, ed. Daniel Droixhe and PolPierre Gossiaux (Brussels: Université libre de Bruxelles, 1985), 21–47. 2. Christoph Meiners, Geschichte des Ursprungs, Fortgangs und Verfalls der Wissenschaften in Griechenland und Rom (Lemgo: Meyer, 1781). 3. Meiners is completely passed over by Peter Hanns Reill in his work on The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) and by Karl J. Fink in his essay “Storm and stress anthropology,” History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 1 (1993): 51–71. Meiners sans racism comes up in Hans-Jürgen Schings’s Melancholie und Aufklärung: Melancholiker und ihre Kritiker in Erfahrungsseelenkunde und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977) and Annette Meyer’s Von der Wahrheit zur Wahrscheinlichkeit: Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in der schottischen und deutschen Aufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008). 4. Georg G. Iggers, “The University of Göttingen 1760–1800 and the Transformation of Historical Scholarship,” Storia della storiografia 2 (1982): 11–37 (see p. 33); and Johan van der Zande, “Popular philosophy and the history of mankind in eighteenth-century Germany,” Storia della storiografia 22 (1992): 37–56 (see p. 52). In more recent conversations with me, van der Zande was more doubtful that the term racism could be used to describe eighteenth-century phenomena. 5. Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Because Carhart separates “Meiners’s cultural theory” from “his racial theory” and discusses the former without discussing the latter, his is a distorted portrait of Meiners (see pp. 243–47 in his book). Carhart is less apologetic on Meiners in his more recent study, “Polynesia and polygenism: the scientific use of travel 154 Notes to Preface literature in the early 19th century” (History of the Human Sciences 22, no. 2 [2009]: 58–86). 6. These few studies are a forty-six-page essay by Friedrich Lotter, “Christoph Meiners und die Lehre von der unterschiedlichen Wertigkeit der Menschenrassen,” in Geschichtswissenschaft in Göttingen: Eine Vorlesungsreihe, ed. Hartmut Boockmann und Hermann Wellenreuther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987), 30–75; a twelve-page section in Luigi Marino’s Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995), 110–21; and Susanne Zantop’s essay on Meiners, “The Beautiful , the Ugly, and the German: Race, Gender, and Nationality in EighteenthCentury Anthropological Discourse,” in Gender and Germanness, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1997), 21–35. There are twenty pages and several notes on Meiners in Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham , NC; London: Duke University Press, 1997), 82–94 and passim. Martin Gierl is the latest to explore the ideological functions of Meiners’s work in his essay “Christoph Meiners, Geschichte der Menschheit und Göttinger Universalgeschichte : Rasse und Nation als Politisierung der deutschen Aufklärung,” in Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um 1800: wissenschaftliche Praktiken , institutionelle Geographie, europäische Netzwerke, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker , Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2008), 419–33. 7. Michael Banton, Race Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 7–8. Pierre-André Taguieff adopts Banton’s tripartition of racism in The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), see p. 145. 8. David Hume, “Of National Characters,” in his Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 4 vols. containing Essays, Moral and Political, 4th ed. (London : A. Millar; Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, 1753), 277–300. See Richard H. Popkin’s essays on “Hume’s Racism,” in idem, The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (San Diego: Austin Hill, 1980), 251–66, and “Hume’s Racism Reconsidered,” in idem, The Third Force in Seventeenth Century Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 64–75; John Immerwahr, “Hume’s Revised Racism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (July–Sept. 1992): 481–86; Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “Hume, Race, and Human Nature,” Journal of the History...