ABSTRACT
Arthur de Gobineau, who was born on 14 July 1816 and died on 13 October 1882,15 is credited with inventing modern racism in his Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines, published in two volumes in 1853 and 1855. Gobineau shares with the world his conviction that the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny. ‘The fall of civilizations’ was for Gobineau the most striking and, at the same time, the darkest of all phenomena of history. Gobineau’s reading of human history was bleak and pessimistic. Gobineau’s theories fell on fertile ground. The nineteenth century was a spawning ground for theories of development, growth and decay, ultimately for a re-instatement of teleology.
