“Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, founder of race realism”
“Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, founder of race realism”
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816 – 1882), to use his full name and title, has been called the “father of racism,” ...he does deserve study—both because of his influence as a thinker and for the inherent interest of what he wrote. As Gobineau recognized, many people had written about race before he did—“The idea of an original, clear-cut and permanent inequality among the different races is one of the oldest and most widely held opinions in the world.”—but he was the first to study race seriously as an important force in world history.
Gobineau was a French diplomat, journalist, novelist, Orientalist, and poet as well as a race theorist. He was a confirmed elitist, and was deeply annoyed that his birthday was Bastille Day, the commemoration of what he thought was one of the most shameful movements in French history… Gobineau differed from these men in his careful attempt to trace how race unfolds in history. He got many things wrong—some comically so by today’s standards—but his clear understanding of inherent racial differences and their importance in all human outcomes makes him not the father of racism but the founder of race realism.
And on a related note:
Toward Renewal and Renaissance by Fr. James Thornton
Everyone here probably has some familiarity (directly or indirectly) with the writings of Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau. Gobineau, in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races makes clear that he believes that different races of men have been blessed by God with different attributes and that certain races of men are exclusively responsible for the creation and maintenance of high culture and civilization. The important matter for me is that this author was a devout Christian, and accepted as a matter of course that, a) men, and ethnic groups of men, are not equal in their inherent abilities, and, b) that all men, from the most noble to the most primitive, have within themselves a divine spark, the Imago Dei, that entitles each to the special dignity reserved for children of God. Each is unique in his abilities, in the gifts that God has bestowed on him, — and this is true also of ethnic groups — but all are human and all possess a dignity appropriate to humankind.
In Gobineau’s own words, “I believe, of course, that human races are unequal; but I do not think that any of them are like the brute, or to be classed with it.” To the theory that some human races are simply bipedal beasts, Gobineau responds: “I absolutely reject such an insult to humanity …” Though some of his friends and some other writers disagreed with him, Comte de Gobineau was never chastised by his Church for his widely published belief in the inequality of the human races. So far as I can determine, he remained a faithful communicant of the Roman Catholic religion until his death in 1882.
