ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the history of race in European thought. It shows how European thinkers progressed from a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century interest in categorizing people in accord with racial difference (what it calls racialism) to a nineteenth- and twentieth-century interest in ranking people by race (which it identifies as racism). It also holds that we cannot understand the history of race without taking account of the gap between thinkers’ actual experience of racial difference, which was quite limited, and the European tradition’s pretensions to having a global knowledge base. It also discusses, among others, François Bernier (1620–1688), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), Carleton S. Coon (1904–1981), Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1778), Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), and Ashley Montagu (1905–1999).
