The German Invention of Race

Sara Eigen, Mark Larrimore, Sara Eigen, Mark Larrimore

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791466780, 9780791466773
• eBook ISBN: 9780791482070
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Illuminates the emergence of race as a central concept in philosophy and the social sciences.

In The German Invention of Race, historians, philosophers, and scholars in literary, cultural, and religious studies trace the origins of the concept of "race" to Enlightenment Germany and seek to understand the issues at work in creating a definition of race. The work introduces a significant connection to the history of race theory as contributors show that the language of race was deployed in contexts as apparently unrelated as hygiene; aesthetics; comparative linguistics; anthropology; debates over the status of science, theology, and philosophy; and Jewish emancipation.

The concept of race has no single point of origin, and has never operated within the constraints of a single definition. As the essays in this book trace the powerful resonances of the term in diverse contexts, both before and long after the invention of the scientific term around 1775, they help explain how this pseudoconcept could, in a few short decades, have become so powerful in so many fields of thought and practice. In addition, the essays show that the fateful rise of racial thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was made possible not only by the establishment of physical anthropology as a field, but also by other disciplines and agendas linked by the enduring associations of the word "race."

Table of contents

• The German Invention of Race
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction:The German Invention of Race Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore
• 1. What “Progresses” HasRace-Theory Made Since theTimes of Leibniz and Wolff?
• 2. Laocoön and the Hottentots
• 3. Policing Polygeneticism in Germany, 1775(Kames,) Kant, and Blumenbach
• 4. Kant’s Conception of a Human Race
• 5. Kant and Blumenbach’s Polyps: A Neglected Chapter in theHistory of the Concept of Race
• 6. Race, Freedom and the Fallin Steffens and Kant
• 7. The German Invention of Völkerkunde Ethnological Discourse in Europe and Asia, 1740–1798
• 8. Gods, Titans, and Monsters: Philhellenism, Race, and Religion in Early-Nineteenth-Century Mythography
• 9. From Indo-Germans to Aryans: Philology and the Racialization of Salvationalist National Rhetoric, 1806–30
• 10. Policing the Menschen=Racen
• 11. Jewish Emancipation and thePolitics of Race
• Contributors
• Index