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Gobineau: Selected Political Writings
Contents Racial inequality; Elite morality; French crisis and Global crisis."
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Published January 1, 1971
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About the author
Arthur de Gobineau
251 books51 followersJoseph Arthur de Gobineau was a French aristocrat, novelist and man of letters who became famous for developing the racialist theory of the Aryan master race in his book "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races"
Gobineau went to a French diplomatic school and became a diplomat in the USA, Norway, Brazil and Persia. His racial ideas were spawned in Persian society, he considered there was a natural barrier between the etnicities in Persian society.
Gobineau was born in a staunch royalist family and his mother is to be said was of Creole-Haitian origin.
Gobineau was also an admirer of Greek and Scandinavian culture
Gobineau went to a French diplomatic school and became a diplomat in the USA, Norway, Brazil and Persia. His racial ideas were spawned in Persian society, he considered there was a natural barrier between the etnicities in Persian society.
Gobineau was born in a staunch royalist family and his mother is to be said was of Creole-Haitian origin.
Gobineau was also an admirer of Greek and Scandinavian culture
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January 21, 2019
I love these little ‘Roots of the Right’ books—concise presentations of otherwise turgid rightwing pseudo-theory, distilled down to the essence so that we reasonable persons might learn the enemy. (I’ve quite enjoyed Italian Fascisms from Pareto to Gentile and The French Right from de Maistre to Maurras. (The series has volumes on Rosenberg, de Rivera, and Stirner, too.)
This text is apparently the archetype of so-called ‘scientific racism,’ and it is on the whole, without reprieve or exception, utterly, absolutely, embarrassingly abject. One marvels that these ideas ever had adherents; the mind fails to comprehend how there are as yet living adherents.
The text has a curious translation history; apartheid proponents in the United States liked it because its ideas on Africans helped justify their institutions on chattel slavery and Jim Crow—but they neglected to translate and disseminate the parts wherein Gobs disapproves generally of the US as too miscegenated. Similarly, the NSDAP much appreciated his uncommonly silly notion that a ‘white’ ‘race’ exists and is in fact superior by virtue of some indefinite ethereal metric--but of course they had little use for Gobs’ appreciative commentary on Jewish persons and declined to publish those portions. (Gobs is Loringian and accordingly ambiguously French/German.)
The introduction (by one Biddiss) attempts to characterize ‘the Right’ tentatively as tending “to assertions of human inequality and to denials of common humanity and in so far as it opposes socialism and distrusts parliamentary democracy” (13), and “indulges in elitism, irrationalism and myth, abjuring conventional morality and embracing organic doctrines of society,” all of which is in accord with Gobineau’s beliefs (14). The introduction advances the proposition that “the Right represents not the wave of the future but a nihilistic hostility to modernity” inter alia (id.)—so, some consistency with Herf’s and Paxton’s and Griffin’s writings on fascism. That said, Gobineau lacks the “militarism and nationalism” normally diagnosed as part of the Rightwing Syndrome; he is not willing to exterminate purported inferiors.
Gobs himself was born to bourgeois parents on Bastille Day (“a lifelong source of annoyance to him since he regarded the French Revolution as anathema” (15)) but some in his family “had already arrogated to themselves the particle de and Arthur himself had no hesitation in adopting the pleasant self-delusion that he was of French nobility” (16). The introduction regards Gobs as similar to Marx to the extent that “what class conflict was to one the mixture of races had become to the other,” a “deterministic historical explanation in terms of a single idea” (21). This strikes me as a trifling comparison, as class relations invariably exist as part of economics, whereas race is simply fabricated doctrine. His definition of race is based on the “clear and striking differences between certain human groups” (98)—there’s an ellipsis at that point of the translation, so there may be some falsifiable criteria omitted in this edition, but we should not expect too much sophistication: “We must of course acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor of the white race” (99). This mythologizing is no accident, insofar as the argument concerns “the causes which have their ultimate home in the mind of God” (104). He otherwise adopts the old race doctrines regarding japhetic and hamitic peoples (109). A total mess.
The introduction nevertheless considers both Big Gob and Marx to articulate “responses to the same crisis” (id.)—capitalist development and its fruits, including the association of “urbanization and industrialization not only with ideas of materialism, equality, democracy and socialism, but also with a growing cosmopolitanism and movement toward human unity encouraged by miscegenation” (id.). In Spengler’s mind, this results in “the destruction of classes and states”—for Marx “an ideal” and “necessary precondition” but for our pseudo-aristocrat “a prospect of unmitigated disaster” (id.). Are we lachrymose, or laughing? Plenty more otherwise worthwhile in the introductory materials.
Gobbler himself begins with the proposition that “the racial question overshadows all other problems of history” (41)—“the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny” (id.). This is simply postulated; there is no rigor here in proving it. Even the key concepts go without definition—which makes sense, as ‘race’ is singularly worthless and lacking in useful definition, as above, the great bane of all rightwing theory, this core conceptual instability that depends ultimately on unapologetic mysticism. He is certainly intriguing in wanting to create a “moral geology” (42)—but it fails to get off the ground, as that would require work with actual evidence, entirely absent here. Instead, the basic thesis—race inequality—is based on the weakest of supports: “The idea of an original, clear-cut and permanent inequality among the different races is one of the oldest and most widely held opinions in the world” (69)—this rationale also recommends grand ideas such as heliocentrism, animism, flat-earth doctrine, human sacrifice, and so on.
He adopts an organic metaphor in “this very necessity of coming to an end, that weighs imperiously on all societies without exception, presupposes such a general cause” (44)—found in race mixing, of course—and that societies (stupidly defined as “assemblage of men moved by similar ideas and the same instincts” (47)) suffer a “natural death.” This death is theologized: “all societies perish because they are sinful” (45). The organic metaphor is central: “To put my ideas into a clearer and more easily intelligible form I may compare a nation to a human body” (60)—which reveals the paucity of analysis and evidence here: we need evidence, literalness, attention to detail; figurative language is unable to substitute in for the basic accoutrements of instrumental rationality.
Gobs thinks that “societies perish because they are degenerate, and for no other reason” (58). The term degenerate is said to mean “the people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood” (59). This is, again, mere postulate, lacking any rigor in terms of a rational assessment of any evidence whatsoever that might warrant it as a conclusion, nevermind the puerile 'blood' metaphor. Part of the problem is that the discussion is papered over with ill-defined abstraction in ‘race’ and ‘people’ and ‘society’—what concrete particulars might give measurable quantity or assessable quality to these generalities? He proposes nothing. Even the metric ‘blood’ wants quantitative elaboration or qualitative criteria—the conclusion that we are forced to draw is that he reads history selectively with an eye jaundiced by classbound right-elitist identity politics in order to set up part I’s theoretical system—and then tautologically and all too predictably will find that theory confirmed in part II’s historical analysis.
Witness the complete want of rigor: “the man of a decadent time, the degenerate man properly so called, is a different being, from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages” (59)—the only marker of race is accordingly environmental, living in ‘decadent time,’ a matter of historical development rather than internal ‘essence’ rooted in animus or biology or whatever. Instead, it is deduced from mere mutable historical circumstance that “the heterogeneous elements [what, ‘blood’?] that henceforth prevail in him give him quite a different nationality” (id.)—but wait a minute: we were discussing ‘race’; why ‘nationality,’ which is a pure question of law? This distinction does not matter to Gobs, who is fixated on imminent death “when the primordial race-unit is so broken up and swamped by the influx of foreign elements” (id.). Curious! What is the origin and identity of these 'primordial race-units'? (NB there's something like a Zeno paradox here: if there are 'permanent' relations between 'races,' how do primordial race-units change? One can't have permanency and mutability together.) The race-units at least strikes me as something falsifiable in the popperian sense: we can seek them out and test their existence. Gobs however simply assumes them and runs with it—much like Tolkien assumes the existence of elves and orcs and runs with it in a charming story of an aggrieved owner of stolen jewelry and the thieves who fenced it for more sweetleaf.
We see moreover the complete inability to draw rational conclusions. Even assuming arguendo for instance that his historical readings are accurate (and they most certainly are not), Gobstopper's conclusion that “the human race in all its branches has a secret repulsion from the crossing of blood” (65) is completely unwarranted on the basis of his own presentation, which urges a repeated ‘crossing of blood’ throughout history—and by necessity, insofar as contact and mixture is a precondition for civilization in his recitation. ‘Civilization,’ incidentally, is another key term, wanting definition—but it is the most important metric for his ‘race’ abstraction: “for it is only by the existence in some measure, or the complete absence, of this attribute [!] that I can gauge the relative merits of the different races” (84). His definition: “not an event” but rather “a series, a chain of events linked more or less logically together and brought about by the interaction of ideas,” “an assemblage of events and ideas, a state in which human society subsists, an environment with which it has managed to surround itself” (id.). With that as the main metric, it is elementary to see race theory doomed ab initio, as it infers coarsely from the quantity of collective material circumstance the quality of individual immaterial value.
He is very jittery about vulgar French Revolution slogans, challenging the lowest hanging fruits thereof instead of citing interlocutors with precision. So, when he boasts that he can present the issue in “scientific form” (71), he means that “’All men,’ say the defenders of human equality [who, exactly, at which precise textual locus?], ‘are furnished with similar intellectual powers, of the same nature, of the same value, of the same compass,’” we see a nasty straw person set up. He then runs at it to knock it down with the non-sequitur--“So the brain of the Huron Indian contains in an undeveloped form an intellect which is absolutely the same as that of the Englishman or the Frenchman! Why then, in the course of the ages, has he not invented printing or steam power?” (id.)—and fairly plainly fails, as it is impossible to infer collective ‘intellect’ from technological development; we don’t need to read Jared Diamond for that, though Gobs’ adherents could use a dose of Guns, Germs, and Steel. What is truly marvelous is that he regards his logical fallacies and sophomoric historical ideas as sufficient: “I am overwhelmed by the multitude of facts that support my theory” (78), recalling that the main metric is inferences dubiously drawn from a nebulously defined status of ‘civilization.’ We see how it works in how
And perhaps he will not in the end resist the disqualification, as he regards the downfall of western civilization as “inevitable,” “the blow cannot be turned aside” (97). This is because the presence of white Aryans is “irrelevant,” insofar as “their general role was to effect an intermixture of different types by uniting them to each other”—and this process is now complete in a cosmopolitan world (171). Therefore, “the existence of the finest human species, of the whole white race, the magnificent capacities shared by each, and the creation, development and death of societies and civilizations—the amazing result of the interplay of these capacities—are revealed as the fulfillment, as the culmination, as the supreme goal of all history” (id). White people apparently were appointed the world-historical task of being mere genetic couriers. Because this task has been fulfilled, Gobs believes that “nations, or rather human herds, oppressed beneath a mournful somnolence, will thenceforth live benumbed in their nullity” (173)--a decidedly right elitist pastoral metaphor for biopolitical management: “Viewed abstractly, the white race has disappeared from the face of the earth” (172).
So that’s that. All’y’all white power nationalist people can give up and go home; y’all already done lost and got bred out of existence because it was your god-given world-historical mission to breed yourselves out of existence. Mission impossible but mission accomplished.
This text is apparently the archetype of so-called ‘scientific racism,’ and it is on the whole, without reprieve or exception, utterly, absolutely, embarrassingly abject. One marvels that these ideas ever had adherents; the mind fails to comprehend how there are as yet living adherents.
The text has a curious translation history; apartheid proponents in the United States liked it because its ideas on Africans helped justify their institutions on chattel slavery and Jim Crow—but they neglected to translate and disseminate the parts wherein Gobs disapproves generally of the US as too miscegenated. Similarly, the NSDAP much appreciated his uncommonly silly notion that a ‘white’ ‘race’ exists and is in fact superior by virtue of some indefinite ethereal metric--but of course they had little use for Gobs’ appreciative commentary on Jewish persons and declined to publish those portions. (Gobs is Loringian and accordingly ambiguously French/German.)
The introduction (by one Biddiss) attempts to characterize ‘the Right’ tentatively as tending “to assertions of human inequality and to denials of common humanity and in so far as it opposes socialism and distrusts parliamentary democracy” (13), and “indulges in elitism, irrationalism and myth, abjuring conventional morality and embracing organic doctrines of society,” all of which is in accord with Gobineau’s beliefs (14). The introduction advances the proposition that “the Right represents not the wave of the future but a nihilistic hostility to modernity” inter alia (id.)—so, some consistency with Herf’s and Paxton’s and Griffin’s writings on fascism. That said, Gobineau lacks the “militarism and nationalism” normally diagnosed as part of the Rightwing Syndrome; he is not willing to exterminate purported inferiors.
Gobs himself was born to bourgeois parents on Bastille Day (“a lifelong source of annoyance to him since he regarded the French Revolution as anathema” (15)) but some in his family “had already arrogated to themselves the particle de and Arthur himself had no hesitation in adopting the pleasant self-delusion that he was of French nobility” (16). The introduction regards Gobs as similar to Marx to the extent that “what class conflict was to one the mixture of races had become to the other,” a “deterministic historical explanation in terms of a single idea” (21). This strikes me as a trifling comparison, as class relations invariably exist as part of economics, whereas race is simply fabricated doctrine. His definition of race is based on the “clear and striking differences between certain human groups” (98)—there’s an ellipsis at that point of the translation, so there may be some falsifiable criteria omitted in this edition, but we should not expect too much sophistication: “We must of course acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor of the white race” (99). This mythologizing is no accident, insofar as the argument concerns “the causes which have their ultimate home in the mind of God” (104). He otherwise adopts the old race doctrines regarding japhetic and hamitic peoples (109). A total mess.
The introduction nevertheless considers both Big Gob and Marx to articulate “responses to the same crisis” (id.)—capitalist development and its fruits, including the association of “urbanization and industrialization not only with ideas of materialism, equality, democracy and socialism, but also with a growing cosmopolitanism and movement toward human unity encouraged by miscegenation” (id.). In Spengler’s mind, this results in “the destruction of classes and states”—for Marx “an ideal” and “necessary precondition” but for our pseudo-aristocrat “a prospect of unmitigated disaster” (id.). Are we lachrymose, or laughing? Plenty more otherwise worthwhile in the introductory materials.
Gobbler himself begins with the proposition that “the racial question overshadows all other problems of history” (41)—“the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny” (id.). This is simply postulated; there is no rigor here in proving it. Even the key concepts go without definition—which makes sense, as ‘race’ is singularly worthless and lacking in useful definition, as above, the great bane of all rightwing theory, this core conceptual instability that depends ultimately on unapologetic mysticism. He is certainly intriguing in wanting to create a “moral geology” (42)—but it fails to get off the ground, as that would require work with actual evidence, entirely absent here. Instead, the basic thesis—race inequality—is based on the weakest of supports: “The idea of an original, clear-cut and permanent inequality among the different races is one of the oldest and most widely held opinions in the world” (69)—this rationale also recommends grand ideas such as heliocentrism, animism, flat-earth doctrine, human sacrifice, and so on.
He adopts an organic metaphor in “this very necessity of coming to an end, that weighs imperiously on all societies without exception, presupposes such a general cause” (44)—found in race mixing, of course—and that societies (stupidly defined as “assemblage of men moved by similar ideas and the same instincts” (47)) suffer a “natural death.” This death is theologized: “all societies perish because they are sinful” (45). The organic metaphor is central: “To put my ideas into a clearer and more easily intelligible form I may compare a nation to a human body” (60)—which reveals the paucity of analysis and evidence here: we need evidence, literalness, attention to detail; figurative language is unable to substitute in for the basic accoutrements of instrumental rationality.
Gobs thinks that “societies perish because they are degenerate, and for no other reason” (58). The term degenerate is said to mean “the people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood” (59). This is, again, mere postulate, lacking any rigor in terms of a rational assessment of any evidence whatsoever that might warrant it as a conclusion, nevermind the puerile 'blood' metaphor. Part of the problem is that the discussion is papered over with ill-defined abstraction in ‘race’ and ‘people’ and ‘society’—what concrete particulars might give measurable quantity or assessable quality to these generalities? He proposes nothing. Even the metric ‘blood’ wants quantitative elaboration or qualitative criteria—the conclusion that we are forced to draw is that he reads history selectively with an eye jaundiced by classbound right-elitist identity politics in order to set up part I’s theoretical system—and then tautologically and all too predictably will find that theory confirmed in part II’s historical analysis.
Witness the complete want of rigor: “the man of a decadent time, the degenerate man properly so called, is a different being, from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages” (59)—the only marker of race is accordingly environmental, living in ‘decadent time,’ a matter of historical development rather than internal ‘essence’ rooted in animus or biology or whatever. Instead, it is deduced from mere mutable historical circumstance that “the heterogeneous elements [what, ‘blood’?] that henceforth prevail in him give him quite a different nationality” (id.)—but wait a minute: we were discussing ‘race’; why ‘nationality,’ which is a pure question of law? This distinction does not matter to Gobs, who is fixated on imminent death “when the primordial race-unit is so broken up and swamped by the influx of foreign elements” (id.). Curious! What is the origin and identity of these 'primordial race-units'? (NB there's something like a Zeno paradox here: if there are 'permanent' relations between 'races,' how do primordial race-units change? One can't have permanency and mutability together.) The race-units at least strikes me as something falsifiable in the popperian sense: we can seek them out and test their existence. Gobs however simply assumes them and runs with it—much like Tolkien assumes the existence of elves and orcs and runs with it in a charming story of an aggrieved owner of stolen jewelry and the thieves who fenced it for more sweetleaf.
We see moreover the complete inability to draw rational conclusions. Even assuming arguendo for instance that his historical readings are accurate (and they most certainly are not), Gobstopper's conclusion that “the human race in all its branches has a secret repulsion from the crossing of blood” (65) is completely unwarranted on the basis of his own presentation, which urges a repeated ‘crossing of blood’ throughout history—and by necessity, insofar as contact and mixture is a precondition for civilization in his recitation. ‘Civilization,’ incidentally, is another key term, wanting definition—but it is the most important metric for his ‘race’ abstraction: “for it is only by the existence in some measure, or the complete absence, of this attribute [!] that I can gauge the relative merits of the different races” (84). His definition: “not an event” but rather “a series, a chain of events linked more or less logically together and brought about by the interaction of ideas,” “an assemblage of events and ideas, a state in which human society subsists, an environment with which it has managed to surround itself” (id.). With that as the main metric, it is elementary to see race theory doomed ab initio, as it infers coarsely from the quantity of collective material circumstance the quality of individual immaterial value.
He is very jittery about vulgar French Revolution slogans, challenging the lowest hanging fruits thereof instead of citing interlocutors with precision. So, when he boasts that he can present the issue in “scientific form” (71), he means that “’All men,’ say the defenders of human equality [who, exactly, at which precise textual locus?], ‘are furnished with similar intellectual powers, of the same nature, of the same value, of the same compass,’” we see a nasty straw person set up. He then runs at it to knock it down with the non-sequitur--“So the brain of the Huron Indian contains in an undeveloped form an intellect which is absolutely the same as that of the Englishman or the Frenchman! Why then, in the course of the ages, has he not invented printing or steam power?” (id.)—and fairly plainly fails, as it is impossible to infer collective ‘intellect’ from technological development; we don’t need to read Jared Diamond for that, though Gobs’ adherents could use a dose of Guns, Germs, and Steel. What is truly marvelous is that he regards his logical fallacies and sophomoric historical ideas as sufficient: “I am overwhelmed by the multitude of facts that support my theory” (78), recalling that the main metric is inferences dubiously drawn from a nebulously defined status of ‘civilization.’ We see how it works in how
We often hear of Negroes who have learnt music, who are clerks in banking houses, and who know how to read, write, count, dance and speak like white men. People are astonished at this, and conclude that the Negro is capable of everything! And, then, in the same breath, they will express surprise at the contrast between the Slav civilization and our own. The Russians, Poles, and Serbians (they will say [NB no actual citations to actual writings], even though they are far nearer to us than the Negroes, are only civilized on the surface; the higher classes alone participate in our ideas, owing to the continual admixture of English, French, and German blood. The masses, on the other hand, are invincibly ignorant of the Western world and its movements, although they have been Christian for many centuries—in many cases before we were converted ourselves! The solution is simple. There is a great difference between imitation and conviction. Imitation does not necessarily imply a serious breach with hereditary instincts; but no one has a real part in any civilization until he is able to make progress by himself, without direction from others. (83)A series of dangerous admissions here, insofar as members or a ‘race’ can be ‘civilized’ but this in itself is not evidence of civilization. If self-reflexive, this admission, deployed against a doctrine of African equality, erodes the foundations for Western European superiority insofar as the existence of impoverished proletarians in England and France destroys the claim advanced by their ruling classes for the civilization of their own purported race. And thus race doctrine eats itself in revealing that it is simply ruling class ideology—which we might have inferred from Gobs’ biography and biographical pretense, but then we would have missed out on amusing exegesis. He confirms the class basis of the race superstructure at multiple points, e.g., on classical antiquity: “The result was a very complex and learned society, with a culture far more refined than before. But it had one striking disadvantage: both in Italy and in Hellas, it existed merely for the upper classes, the lower strata being left quite ignorant of its nature, its merits and its aims” (92). Following the African exception, supra, this should disqualify Western ‘civilization’ from the title of civilized; but it does not for Gobs, who is nothing if not a self-interested ideologue.
And perhaps he will not in the end resist the disqualification, as he regards the downfall of western civilization as “inevitable,” “the blow cannot be turned aside” (97). This is because the presence of white Aryans is “irrelevant,” insofar as “their general role was to effect an intermixture of different types by uniting them to each other”—and this process is now complete in a cosmopolitan world (171). Therefore, “the existence of the finest human species, of the whole white race, the magnificent capacities shared by each, and the creation, development and death of societies and civilizations—the amazing result of the interplay of these capacities—are revealed as the fulfillment, as the culmination, as the supreme goal of all history” (id). White people apparently were appointed the world-historical task of being mere genetic couriers. Because this task has been fulfilled, Gobs believes that “nations, or rather human herds, oppressed beneath a mournful somnolence, will thenceforth live benumbed in their nullity” (173)--a decidedly right elitist pastoral metaphor for biopolitical management: “Viewed abstractly, the white race has disappeared from the face of the earth” (172).
So that’s that. All’y’all white power nationalist people can give up and go home; y’all already done lost and got bred out of existence because it was your god-given world-historical mission to breed yourselves out of existence. Mission impossible but mission accomplished.
July 26, 2014
Few authors in the modern era have written about racial issues so frankly and at the same time so elegantly. This collection includes most of the first volume of the Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, his correspondence with Tocqueville, a selection from his almost proto-Nietzschean novel Sons of Kings, and a few others. Just ignore George Steiner's idiotic introduction and commentary.
August 15, 2017
Underwhelming, good selections and his criticisms of royalist were more interesting than his racism.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews