Race, Culture, and Politics in German Historical Thought, 1785-1815

Abstract This monograph offers a new interpretation of ideas about race, culture, and politics in the historiography of the German late Enlightenment. It pays particularly close attention to the importance of the institutional contexts within which these ideas were articulated. Using the work of August Ludwig Schlözer, Christoph Meiners, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and Charles de Villers, the monograph reveals the variety of complex, often idiosyncratic ways that these ideas were formulated. They are situated in relation to major contemporary controversies, from the rise of abolitionism to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Consequently, one argument is that the ideas about race and culture developed by Germans in the years preceding the French Revolution played an important role in shaping their responses to the crises of the years 1789–1815. However, the monograph also cautions against ignoring or attempting to resolve incoherencies in contemporary thought, suggesting instead that these inconsistencies themselves offer important insights into the formation of contemporary ideas. The book both identifies the contemporary significance of ideas and explores their longer-term impact in European thought. By carefully comparing these ideas with later analogues, it shows that, while the texts under consideration produced tropes, ideas, and arguments of long-term significance, these did not represent the birth of modern political programmes such as nationalism, much less modern racial thought. It calls instead for the Enlightenment to be understood on its own terms as an important phase in European intellectual history, but one ultimately bound to the world of the ancien régime.