The German Invention of Race (review)

The German Invention of Race argues that the eighteenth century was a crucial point in the development of modern notions of race and that German thinkers in particular played an important role in transforming race into a relatively stable concept. As editors Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore explain in this book's introduction, most histories of the idea of race have focused on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have examined how race became an object of scientific study by sociologists, physicians, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and others. The eighteenth century generally has not been seen as an equally important era in the modern racialization of the human species that helped establish white supremacy and dominance over nonwhite people. But as this multidisciplinary collection shows, eighteenth-century Germany was a hotbed of debate around the meaning and importance of the emerging idea of race as a category marking different groups of people related by common descent. The rich diversity of positions in that debate, which produced the concept of race on which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century racial science relied, deserves thoughtful attention and study.

The German Invention of Race provides just that, in eleven chapters divided into four parts. Part I, "Modes of Difference: Race, Color and Culture," examines conflicting eighteenth-century attempts to make sense of visible differences between groups of people, such as skin color. The two essays in this section, Peter Feaves's "What 'Progresses' Has Race-Theory Made Since the Times of Leibniz and Wolff?" and Michel Chaouli's "Laocoon and the Hottentots," show how some eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Leibniz, turned to language and reason, rather than physiological differences, to mark the decisive distinction between different beings, whereas others, such as Lessing and Hegel, believed that skin color was indicative of not only the aesthetic but the moral and metaphysical superiority of white people.

The second part of this collection fittingly focuses on Kant, who increasingly is recognized as the "inventor" of the scientific concept of race. "Race in Philosophy: The Problem of Kant" is the anthology's longest and strongest section, with four essays that carefully discuss the role of race in Kant's critical philosophy. John H. Zammito's "Policing Polygeneticism in Germany, 1775: (Kames,) Kant, and Blumenbach" provides a microhistory of Kant and Blumenbach's different reasons (theoretical and empirical, respectively) for rejecting the then-popular polygenetic views of the origin of the human species. In "Kant's Concept of a Human Race," Susan M. Shell asks why Kant concludes that white people are intellectually and morally superior to nonwhite people when this view is not entailed by his conception of race. The answer, as Shell explains, is found in Kant's cosmopolitanism, which requires a way of measuring humanity's progress toward perfection. Robert Bernasconi returns to the relationships of Kant and Blumenbach in "Kant and Blumenbach's Polyps: A Neglected Chapter in the History of the Concept of Race." Even if Blumenbach's work was the main point of reference for nineteenth-century scholars of race, it was Kant's work in The Critique of Judgment that led Blumenbach to adopt a concept of race very similar to that of Kant. For this reason, Bernasconi argues, Kant must be regarded as "the first champion of a scientific concept of race" (73). Mark Larrimore's "Race, Freedom and the Fall in Steffens and Kant" closes the section on Kant by reading his views of race through the lens of Henrich Steffens's anthropology. Showing how Kant's contemporaries would have understood Kant's account of race in theological terms, Larrimore connects race to sin, freedom, and a fall from God's grace in eighteenth-century German thinking.

The three essays in Part III, "Race in the Sciences of Culture," explore the emergence of disciplines related to race theory. Focusing on early ethnology, Han F. Vermeulen's "The German Invention of Völkerkunde: Ethnological Discourse in Europe and Asia, 1740–1798" demonstrates...