In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xi Preface When I began this project more than a decade ago, I did not consider that racism could have been involved in the formation of the modern canon of philosophy. Having paid little attention to Christoph Meiners , I could not have suspected that the racist arguments of this halfforgotten anthropological writer of the late eighteenth century lay at the origin of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy. Two developments since the completion of my dissertation in 2005 affected my thinking. The first was that I read the dozen articles by the philosopher Robert Bernasconi on race concepts and racism in the thought of Kant and Hegel. The second was that I read more extensively in Meiners’s corpus. Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) was a professor of philosophy at the University of Göttingen and the author of more than forty books and one hundred and eighty journal articles on psychology and aesthetics; the history of science, philosophy, and universities; and early anthropology. Meiners is included in Johann Gustav Droysen’s account of the “Göttingen Historical School,” which is credited with the development of the modern historical sciences. There is evidence to suggest that Meiners shaped the human sciences in Germany and France through his numerous publications and that he continued to influence historical and anthropological thought in the nineteenth century.1 In this book, I argue that Meiners was the first agent of a successful campaign to exclude Africa and Asia from the history of philosophy and that this campaign was carried forward by Wilhelm Tennemann, who was the most important Kantian historian of philosophy at the turn of the nineteenth century, and Hegel. Meiners’s direct influence on them is evident in their arguments for excluding the Orient from the history of philosophy. The central arguments that cut across both Kantian and Hegelian histories of philosophy were racial-anthropological ones, imported from Meiners’s publications and repeated without much change. Kant never produced a work of xii Preface history of philosophy, but he sketched the outlines of one in his logic lectures. There, one can behold Kant’s own words authorizing the exclusion of the Orient from the history of philosophy. His reasons for the exclusion were ones he got from Meiners, whose influential Geschichte des Ursprungs, Fortgangs und Verfalls der Wissenschaften in Griechenland und Rom (History of the Origin, Progress, and Decline of the Sciences in Greece and Rome) appeared in 1781.2 I should note that Meiners remains a conspicuously underresearched Aufklärer. The exact nature of his contribution to the human or social sciences, the kind and degree of his influence on his contemporaries and on posterity is still mostly unknown. Historians, including literary historians, of the German Enlightenment either have completely passed over him or have discussed him without addressing his racism.3 A couple of historians have described his work just enough to denounce it as racist.4 More recently, one historian of the German Enlightenment has attempted to treat Meiners’s “science of culture” without discussing his science of race.5 Studies that confront his racism with analysis are few.6 I believe that the position of Meiners , always on the periphery of historical accounts of the eighteenthcentury “science of man,” is a result of the shock and revulsion that historians in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust have felt for his racist ideas. Meiners is not the face of the German Enlightenment that the historians can countenance. The present work is not a history of scientific racism in the German Enlightenment. That history still awaits to be written. And when that history comes out, it will provide a vital context for readers of my work. That history will show that racism of the modes or types identified by our contemporary social scientists existed in the eighteenth century. According to the sociologist Michael Banton, there are three types of racism: racist ideology, racial prejudice, and racial discrimination.7 All three describe eighteenth-century phenomena. It was racial prejudice that animated David Hume to write the footnote to his essay “Of National Characters” (1753), where he states that non-whites, especially negroes, are naturally inferior to whites.8 Racial prejudice is the substance of Kant’s comments about blacks in “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime” (1764).9 Racial discrimination was embodied in the electoral laws in France (before and after the Revolution), the Dutch Republic, and much of the rest...

Share