Preface

/*. LL BUT ONE of the following essays—Robert Darnton’s “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolu­ tionary France”—were presented at the third annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held in Los Angeles at the University of California, in March, 1972. The So­ ciety owes a debt of gratitude to G. S. Rousseau, who was chair­ man of the program committee for the annual meeting; he com­ missioned a wide-ranging set of papers from many disciplines, including French, German, Spanish, Russian, and English litera­ ture, as well as from history, philosophy, musicology, cultural ge­ ography, and history of science. Professor Darnton’s article, which earlier appeared in ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA P ast a n d P resent for May 1971, was awarded the first annual ASECS prize for a scholarly article in eighteenthcentury studies; it is here reprinted, as will be future prize-winning articles, to bring it to the special attention of members of the So­ ciety. Though only about a third of the papers in the present vol­ ume fall within the limits of the meeting’s one symposium—its subject was racism in the eighteenth century—the Publication Com­ mittee of the Society has decided to continue the practice of adopt­ ing the subject of the symposium as the title of the Proceedings so that the annual meeting and its printed record may be linked to­ gether, despite the partial inaccuracy that results from so doing. With the possible exception of A. Owen Aldridge’s article on Feijoo, the essays on racism in the present volume indicate clearly that in the eighteenth century groups of whites—and individual whites as well—whenever they were faced with the social necessity for regarding persons of color en masse, found ways of denying them equality with whites and found theoretical support for such denial. Like the ways, the theories now seem unacceptable: they ix Ra c is m in t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y reveal more the need of the whites to rationalize a preestablished policy than they do objectivity. Whether these formulations cou­ ple white skin and Christianity, black skin and non-Christian reli­ gions; or white skin and intelligence, black skin and dullness; or white skin and energy, black skin and torpor, they all turn on the need to justify and thus help perpetuate sets of mind or social prac­ tices already in existence. In certain circumstances, the "white” European imagination might both sponsor and receive persons of color. The "noble sav­ age,” Chinese and other eastern sages, Crusoe’s clear-headed and loyal Friday, Johnson’s Francis Barber, and Blake’s Little Black Boy all enjoyed a special beneficence from the minds that begot them —I believe that in one obvious sense, at least, Johnson fathered the Francis Barber we know—and all were met in a kindly way by the world that first received them, though time saw variations in this initial response, at least in some cases. But it is nevertheless true that the "white mind” of the eighteenth century, very much like our own in this regard, executed such maneuvers of the psyche as would allow it to prove to its own satisfaction its superiority to "minds of color” and to justify whatever social advantages it might have gained over those minds as entirely natural. In a discussion following the presentation of papers during the symposium on racism—part of the discussion is recorded below— Richard H. Popkin, Herbert Marcuse, Magnes Morner, and Win­ throp B. Jordan attempted to cope with a fundamental problem in the objective treatment of racism: that of defining racism itself. I believe their remarks will suggest several conclusions about the task they set themselves and about the subject of racism. Most obvious among these conclusions is that a definition is hard to reach. Closely related is the fact that the experts are cautious in what they say, less because they are unwilling to risk a tentative generalization than because they know the subject too well to be satisfied with formulations that come readily to mind. Perhaps the most...