In my last post, on The Enlightenment’s “Race Problem”, I questioned the idea that the modern roots of the idea of race lie in the Enlightenment. The  relationship between race and the Enlightenment is, I argued, far more complex than much contemporary discussion allows for. It was the transformation of Enlightenment attitudes through the course of the nineteenth century that helped mutate the eighteenth century discussion of human variety into the nineteenth century obsession with racial difference. This is the […]

Categories: History, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: cuvier, enlightenment, herder, positivism, race, racial science, romanticism, samuel morton, thomas huxley