Epilogue

Abstract The concluding epilogue uses Christoph Meiners’ Investigations into the Varieties of Human Natures (1811–15) as a starting point to consider the shifts in German thought in the early nineteenth century. While in the 1780s German readers had been fascinated with accounts of distant and unfamiliar peoples, in the wake of the Revolutionary upheavals their focus had largely returned to Europe. The rise of Napoleon, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and then the 1815 settlement at Vienna transformed the questions that had long been central to German intellectual and political life. As well as overviewing the transitions charted over the preceding chapters, the epilogue considers the relationship between Enlightenment racial thought and later racial programmes, especially Aryanism and Nazism. It argues that, while there are some plausible threads of long-term continuity, the Enlightenment should not be seen as the birth of modern racial theory in any meaningful sense. Rather than simply transported across the centuries, Enlightenment ideas were substantially reinterpreted in the light of very different circumstances. The epilogue does however show how the ideas encountered in the book shed light on both the character of Enlightenment racial thought and the nature of the Enlightenment as a whole. It further reflects on the role of institutions in shaping Enlightenment intellectual history. It concludes by considering major historiographic debates around continuity and change in the period, arguing that the Enlightenment should be understood on its own terms as a historical phenomenon, not in terms of present debates about liberal democracy.