The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought

by Devin J. Vartija

Overview

The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How should we make sense of this paradox? The Color of Equality is the first book to investigate both the inclusive language of common humanity and the hierarchical language of race in Enlightenment thought, seeking to understand how eighteenth-century thinkers themselves made sense of these tensions. Using three major Enlightenment encyclopedias from England, France, and Switzerland, the book provides a rich contextualization of the conflicting ideas of equality and race in eighteenth-century thought.

Enlightenment thinkers used physical features to categorize humanity into novel "racial" groups in a discourse that was imbued with Eurocentric aesthetic and moral judgments. Simultaneously, however, these very same thinkers politicized equality by putting it to new uses, such as a vitriolic denunciation of slavery and inhumane treatment that was grounded in the nascent philosophy of human rights. Vartija contends that the tension between Enlightenment ideas of race and equality can best be explained by these thinkers' attempt to provide a naturalistic account of humanity, including both our physical and moral attributes. Enlightenment racial classification fits into the novel inclusion of humanity in histories of nature, while the search for the origins of morality in social experience alone lent equality a normative authority it had not previously possessed.

Eschewing straightforward approbation or blame of the Enlightenment, The Color of Equality demonstrates that our present-day thinking about human physical and cultural diversity continues to be deeply informed by an eighteenth-century European intellectual revolution with global ramifications.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812299670
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press
Publication date:	08/06/2021
Series:	Intellectual History of the Modern Age
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Devin J. Vartija is Assistant Professor of History at Utrecht University.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Enlightenment thinkers present us with a predicament: they politicized the concept of equality while simultaneously making the naturalization of inequalities between Europeans and non-Europeans thinkable. What are we to make of this tension in Enlightenment thought? Scholars have often viewed this situation as a dichotomy: either the Enlightenment was an emancipatory intellectual movement foundational to the modern, liberal democratic defense of human rights, or it is the primary culprit in the dark side of modernity, from scientific racism and sexism to colonialism and even genocide. Sensible intellectuals have interjected that this dichotomy between "acceptance" or "rejection" of the Enlightenment is in fact misguided. As Barbara Taylor explains, the "Enlightenment project" that postmodernists chastise and liberals defend "cannot survive even a cursory glance at the noisily argumentative world of Enlightenment, with its multiple renditions of reason and truth purveyed by lively minds of diverse sorts, from Encyclopedists and philosophical theologians to bluestockings and Grub Street hacks of both sexes." Over the past three to four decades, our appreciation for just how noisy that argumentative world of Enlightenment was has been deepened thanks to the pluralization of the Enlightenment. What was once seen as a relatively monolithic intellectual movement centered around the ideas held by a handful of men in mid-eighteenth-century Paris has now become a vast collage of women and men active in various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European and colonial cities, belonging to a variety of institutions, and holding a diverse array of ideas.

In these debates, equality and race are recurrent themes, as it is generally accepted that Enlightenment thinkers fundamentally altered the way we think about human sameness and difference. Whereas people were once viewed as equal only in terms of souls in an otherworldly realm, Enlightenment thinkers postulated the basic equality of human beings in this world, based on shared rational and emotive capacities. Yet just as worldly hierarchies were being called into question, the philosophes also sought naturalistic explanations of human differences and thus laid the groundwork for postulating that natural inequalities might permanently separate human groups from one another. As our understanding of the Enlightenment has become more capacious, it makes it difficult to disentangle the messy history of Enlightenment, equality, and racial classification. This study aims to make sense of this complicated history by searching for the ways in which equality and race, human sameness and difference, may have been linked in Enlightenment thought. How was the tension between these ideas dealt with and possibly resolved? And what do transformations in thinking about equality and race tell us about the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement?

To address these questions, I have chosen three influential Enlightenment encyclopedias as my main corpus of primary sources: Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (London, 1728), Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (Paris, 1751-1765), and Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice's Encyclopédie d'Yverdon (Yverdon, 1770-1775). These encyclopedias form a genealogy in that each work explicitly drew on the material of its predecessor. Chambers's Cyclopaedia may be considered the first "modern" encyclopedia, because it was alphabetically ordered, was grounded in Lockean epistemology, and popularized Newtonian science. Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie began as a translation of Chambers's work but, principally thanks to Diderot's leadership, was expanded immensely and is widely considered the most important work of the European Enlightenment. With the Encyclopédie d'Yverdon, De Felice aimed to update and correct its Parisian predecessor, as well as to excise the more libertarian and atheistic ideas and install liberal Protestant theology in their place. While much remains the same between these two encyclopedias, scholars stress that many of the important, lengthy articles—those that extend beyond a simple definition of a few sentences—were reworked by De Felice and his collaborators. These encyclopedias capture three moments in the intellectual history of the Enlightenment: early eighteenth-century England, mid-eighteenth-century France, and mid- to late eighteenth-century Switzerland. This set of sources thus brings forth not only the distinctiveness of particular national or regional political, philosophical, and religious debates but also the pan-European nature of the Enlightenment.

Because my focus is primarily on Enlightenment ideas of equality and race, my use of encyclopedias in general, as well as these encyclopedias in particular, as a main corpus of primary sources requires explanation. Encyclopedias were immensely important texts in early modern Europe, as they responded to the surge of printed material following the invention of moveable type print and aimed to distill essential information from the ever-expanding mass of printed texts into an easily accessible reference work. In the prospectus to the Encyclopédie, Diderot attributed the spread of "enlightenment" since the Renaissance to, in large measure, the availability and use of reference works: "One cannot dispute that since the rebirth of letters among us, we partially owe to dictionaries the general enlightenment that has spread throughout society and this germ of science which imperceptibly disposes minds to a more profound knowledge." Charles Joseph Panckoucke, the most important publisher in late eighteenth-century France, echoed this sentiment, stating that "the Encyclopédie will always be the first book of any library or cabinet."

These specific encyclopedias will allow me to bring to the fore some of the key issues in the development of Enlightenment thought. John Locke and Isaac Newton have long been associated with the early Enlightenment, and Chambers's work fits well into the consolidation of what we might call an "early Enlightenment culture." From its inception in the 1740s, contemporaries recognized the Encyclopédie as crystallizing and embodying an intellectual movement, one that pushed forward the struggles surrounding Newtonianism and philosophical liberty, as well as the attack on both orthodox religious dogma and absolute political authority. Including the Encyclopédied'Yverdon allows me to interrogate how thinkers of a different confessional standpoint within the Enlightenment used ideas of equality and race. Given that the issue of a "radical" versus a "moderate" Enlightenment, in addition to various confessional Enlightenments, is a pressing topic in the current historiography, the Encyclopédied'Yverdon provides an interesting case study to assess the interplay between religion, philosophy, and politics in the Enlightenment.

Besides offering a window onto the cultural and social milieu from which they emerged, encyclopedias can be seen as expressions of and contributors to key trends in Enlightenment culture: namely, making knowledge accessible to as broad a public as possible to facilitate debate and conversation across national and social divides. Diderot's Encyclopédie in particular occupies a central place in Enlightenment scholarship because the work was founded on a spirit of equality and reciprocity and committed to gathering knowledge together for the service of humanity. The work reflects one of the central tenets of Enlightenment thought: the individual's power to rationally understand the world.

Interestingly, scholars opposed to a sanguine view of the advance of philosophie in the century of light have seized upon these same encyclopedias, Diderot's Encyclopédie in particular, to highlight the sinister workings of the power/knowledge dynamic. Michel Foucault famously referred to the eighteenth century as "the age of the catalogue" and argued that the eighteenth century was a turning point in which new classifications and modes of thinking worked in menacing ways to produce social control. Charles Withers follows Foucault's lead in his investigation of the connections between geography, encyclopedism, and natural history, referring to an "Enlightenment project" characterized by "an imperializing masculinist gaze" that aimed to understand and subdue all of nature. Likewise, Gunnar Broberg remarks that "the same ambition to keep possession of what had been discovered, indeed conquered, characterized both the Systema Naturae and the great French Encyclopédie." In our current postcolonial moment, more attention has been paid to the ways in which dictionaries and encyclopedias reinforce stereotypes and biases. Race has been found to be a biologically incoherent concept, but it continues to be a powerful organizing principle in politics and society, and even in science, in a modified form. Given that many experts single out the eighteenth century as the beginning of both "race thinking" and racism, it is particularly illuminating to discover whether Enlightenment encyclopedias reflect the state of the "givenness" of race that some researchers argue took hold in eighteenth-century Europe.

For many scholars, there is thus an umbilical connection between classification, Enlightenment, and domination, and in this regard, it is entirely fitting to investigate how eighteenth-century encyclopedists included racial classifications in their reference works. While these scholars have brought the ethical issues involved in creating classificatory systems to the fore, classification is a necessary precursor to the employment of our faculty of understanding and, as such, is inescapable. Issues of power and social control will become abundantly clear when we analyze how these Enlightenment thinkers engaged with racial classifications, but to reduce their reflections on human diversity to apologies for European hegemony alone would be misguided. As we will see, equality became politicized to a degree unseen in reference works before the eighteenth century. The postcolonial reading of Enlightenment reference works, while important, is not the only reading that one should put forward, as Aude Doody has demonstrated in her study of Pliny's Natural History and its reception. Doody shows that both the present-day postcolonial criticism of Pliny's imperial Roman politics and Diderot's appropriation of Pliny as a subversive philosophe are valid, representative as they are of the concerns of different ages. Encyclopedias, which are necessarily expressive of an era's attitudes and biases, are particularly apropos to studying the tension between an emerging egalitarian perspective and nascent racial science.

Enlightenment encyclopedias sat on a thin line between confident syntheses of knowledge and interventions in polemical debates, and, as such, using these sources offers a unique perspective into the co-construction of difference and equality in eighteenth-century thought. Louis de Jaucourt's article "Natural Equality" was the first entry in a major European encyclopedia to treat equality as a political concept rather than as a logical or mathematical concept, and his entry "Slave Trade" put equality to novel usage in what was the most fervent abolitionist text published in French thought up to that volume's publication, in 1765. At the same time, however, the French colonial administrator Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Romain contributed an article that offered a summary of the principal characteristics of various African ethnicities in order that slave owners may better manage their human chattel. These encyclopedias thus put into particularly sharp relief the tensions raised by European colonialism and slavery and addressed by Enlightenment thinkers, a tension between the desire to "change the common mode of thinking" in the direction of a more humane society and to serve a useful governmental and administrative function.

I have used the methodology of the so-called Cambridge School of intellectual history to understand how these encyclopedists used and transformed the concepts of equality and race. In the chapters that follow, I analyze these encyclopedias in chronological order, placing each in its particular political and social context. To study an idea in context means that we can understand the meaning of any given idea only if we study the unique sphere of meanings to which it once belonged by looking at its procedures, aims, and vocabularies. This robust method serves to guard against anachronism and to, as far as possible, discover an author's intentions in writing a given text. Quentin Skinner has demonstrated the importance of considering the conventions of a given genre when studying the history of thought, because only then, and not by reading the same text "over and over," can we better understand a past thinker's innovations and aims. As we will see, Diderot and some of his collaborators deliberately played with the conventions of the reference work, and this impacts how we should make sense of its content. We should, however, be careful not to grant Cambridge-style contextualism a global and exhaustive theory of meaning. Cultural history and intellectual history can supplement one another, since cultural historians might be more attuned to the logic of culture as a set of practices, while intellectual historians guard against totalizing ideas of culture.

As J. G. A. Pocock has remarked, "Languages plainly denote, both consciously and unconsciously, elements of experience, feeling, and conditioning outside the structure of intellectuality" and that, as a historian, one strives to make the implicit explicit to discover meanings in a context of which the author was not perhaps aware. In this regard, I have sought to recover the emotions inherent in new ideas. With regard to equality, its vindication entailed crucial affective elements, because the idea of natural equality had to be internalized in some way before it could have any political consequence. The potential political consequences that equality might have depend at least to a certain extent upon empathy and compassion. Eighteenth-century thinkers themselves, of course, reflected extensively on "the passions" and "sentiment" and their role in our moral and political lives. While I consider these writings, I also attempt to recover the ways in which affect, empathy in particular, can help us to better understand how equality came to resonate with more and more eighteenth-century Europeans.

I analyze how the encyclopedists reflected upon political and social equality within their own societies as well as the ways in which concepts of common humanity and cross-cultural equality operate in these texts. I have narrowed my focus to the encyclopedic entries concerning peoples of the Americas, Africa, and China—with the peoples of Europe as the often implicit point of reference—sufficiently limiting my scope to allow for a more in-depth analysis of how these encyclopedists situated themselves among populations that they considered distinct in crucial ways. In the conjectural historical scheme that acquired greater theoretical complexity in the Enlightenment, Native Americans were broadly considered to be "closer to nature" than Europeans, whether in a noble or ignoble state. The blackness of sub-Saharan Africans was taken to be the major axis of difference in the racial discourse of the eighteenth century, and the institution of slavery was the most important context in which Europeans interacted with Africans; thus, consideration of writings on Africans and slavery/abolitionist debates are particularly pertinent for understanding both racial and egalitarian thinking. Europeans considered China to be the most autonomous intellectual entity outside of Europe—a sophisticated, ancient civilization whose inhabitants were ethnically distinct from Europeans. Rather than investigating how these various eighteenth-century peoples and places "actually" were, my main focus is on how eighteenth-century European encyclopedists perceived them to be. Taken together, these three cases allow a thorough investigation into how eighteenth-century European thinkers positioned themselves within the panoply of human diversity and consideration of the influence of ideas of civilizational progress on their racial and egalitarian thinking.

Because all eighteenth-century encyclopedists relied heavily on previous dictionaries and encyclopedias or copied large sections from other published material, I have tried to identify the sources that the encyclopedists used. This is an important aspect of the contextual analysis of the encyclopedias, enabling an assessment of which debates the encyclopedists entered into and the often-interesting ways in which they subtly altered the texts they relied upon. As Marie Leca-Tsiomis has stated, "Borrowing is . . . a law of lexicographical work and what is interesting to study is not the similarities, which are obvious, but the differences." Leca-Tsiomis has made an important contribution to the comparison of Diderot's Encyclopédie and Chambers's Cyclopaedia, but she and others remark that more work remains to be done. Although my focus is on the ideas of equality and race in Enlightenment thought and not on the publishing history or impact of the encyclopedias I am using, I hope that my study will also contribute to the body of scholarship on the nature and importance of eighteenth-century reference works.

While issues of authorship are certainly important, and Frank and Serena Kafker's work has been indispensable in this regard, I approach these reference works from the general reader's perspective. I am not interested in encyclopedia readers' accounts or a general pattern of readership but rather in the reader imaginatively addressed by the texts. In my analysis, I bring together cross-cultural equality and racial classification, themes that were not necessarily brought together by eighteenth-century thinkers themselves but that were nonetheless linked in interesting ways. Most significantly, the philosophes often grounded their defenses of equality in the authority of nature. Simultaneously, however, physical differences and a myriad of inequalities that many imagined to accompany these differences were also ascribed to nature. Thus, Montesquieu's aversion to torture results from, as he stated, "the voice of nature crying out against me," while Thomas Jefferson wrote that although the cause of dark skin is not well understood by natural philosophers, "the difference [between Black and White] is fixed in nature." Then, as now, the understanding of nature was capacious enough to accommodate such tensions, even contradictions. How have historians made sense of these contradictions? We now turn to a brief overview of some of the most important attempts at making sense of the ambiguities of Enlightenment thinkers' transformations of race and equality.


The Contours of the Debate on Race and Equality in the Enlightenment

It is tempting to search for a "good Enlightenment" of thinkers committed to equality and human rights and for a "bad Enlightenment" of thinkers who laid the foundations of racial science. Indeed, such an approach has been pursued. In Jonathan Israel's monumental multivolume study of the Enlightenment, materialist-monist thinkers from Baruch de Spinoza onward take the starring role as defenders of a sweeping list of a "package of ideas" that includes, but is not limited to, equality: "The Enlightenment—European and global—not only attacked and severed the roots of traditional European culture in the sacred, magic, kingship, and hierarchy, secularizing all institutions and ideas, but (intellectually and to a degree in practice) effectively demolished all legitimation of monarchy, aristocracy, woman's subordination to man, ecclesiastical authority, and slavery, replacing these with the principles of universality, equality, and democracy." Such an approach is misguided for at least three reasons. First, it anachronistically sets up camps of thinkers who upheld a list of values that supposedly logically hang together but that, upon closer inspection, fall apart. As Darrin McMahon puts it, "Even Israel's most intrepid radicals never completed the package, were never doctrinally pure." Second, Antoine Lilti argues that Israel's conception of what it meant to be radical may be misguided, as what was really novel about free-thinking in the Enlightenment was its public usage. Last, it ignores the modern discourses of inequality that the Enlightenment produced, racial classification among them, as Siep Stuurman has demonstrated in his magisterial history of equality in world history.

In addition to wholesale defense, some quarters on the political left have also pleaded for wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment because of its sexism and racism. For example, it has been stated that "the Enlightenment scientists rationalized that 'subhumans' were genetically inferior, and behaviorally irrational (of course, according to the criteria they devised). They created intelligence/power in their own image. How convenient." Or, take Catherine Belsey on the Enlightenment's role in the history of misogyny: "The Enlightenment commitment to truth and reason, we can now recognize, has meant historically a single truth and a single rationality, which have conspired in practice to legitimate the subordination of . . . women." And reading some postcolonial scholarship would make one believe that slavery, colonialism, and inhumane treatment did not exist before the Enlightenment, but instead were uniquely the progeny of the intellectual movement. While many scholars do not adhere to either of these two poles, such a sketch helps us to understand the contours of the discussion and why the debate on the Enlightenment and its legacy continues at a fairly high temperature.

The argument presented here extends a line of inquiry that has long been part of Enlightenment studies and is positioned somewhere in between the extremes outlined above: one that remains committed to the promise of individual and collective emancipation through Enlightenment while simultaneously recognizing Enlightenment thinkers' exclusions and blind spots. The Enlightenment's most important legacy lies in its self-reflexivity, not in a set of rationalist or moral premises that must be defended. In an older historiography, equality was taken to be an integral part of the Enlightenment. In the preface to his classic The Crisis of the European Mind, Paul Hazard wrote that, for eighteenth-century thinkers, "the one absorbing dream was Equality." While the advance of freedom took center stage in postwar Anglophone Enlightenment historiography, equality was nonetheless an important concept in classic works like those of Peter Gay, Robert Darnton, Roy Porter, and Jonathan Israel, in what Annelien De Dijn has called "the modernization thesis." In French-language Enlightenment historiography, equality has played as important a role, as demonstrated by Paul Hazard in the 1930s and continued by Alphonse Dupront in the 1960s and Daniel Roche in the 1990s.

With the postmodern challenge and the impact of such key texts as Edward Said's Orientalism, the Enlightenment's complicity in, even fundamental contribution to, "othering" became one of the most important and fruitful new avenues of research from the 1970s onward. In addition to Said's seminal work, which did not really touch on the Enlightenment at any length, Michèle Duchet and a number of other scholars drew explicit attention to the Eurocentric, neocolonial, and sometimes even racist aspects of Enlightenment thought. One of Duchet's principal aims was to expose the anti-colonialism of the Enlightenment as a myth. She demonstrated that although many philosophes critiqued colonialism and slavery, this was launched from a perspective that she calls neocolonial, in that they aimed to reform the system not because of their humanitarian ideals, but because changes had to be made in order to keep European colonial rule intact. Using such examples as the encyclopedist Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Romain, she argues that Le Romain and other "administrators-philosophes" demonstrate the tight connection between the Enlightenment and European imperialism. The power of Duchet's work was to give agency to non-Europeans in the eighteenth-century fight against colonialism and slavery, as she showed that the philosophes' humanism evolved in response to slave revolts and other insurrections against European domination.

In a similar vein as Duchet's work, William B. Cohen's The French Encounter with Africans went against the then-reigning consensus that France was and had always been a fundamentally anti-racist country. In the chapter "The Philosophes and Africa," he identifies the Enlightenment as a key moment in the transformation of French attitudes of superiority over Black Africans: while the perspective of a heathen, "savage" other had dominated French discourse from the sixteenth century, the eighteenth century saw the displacement of this religious framework with a "biological" one that continued to emphasize African inferiority in another key. Although most of the philosophes believed that Africans were Europeans' potential equals and a thoroughgoing and systematic racism is absent from their thought, Cohen nonetheless placed the emphasis on their views of Africans as degenerated from an implicitly white, "superior" standard. Duchet and Cohen's research—and that of many others—was immensely important because it demonstrated the centrality of the European colonial project to Enlightenment reflections on humanity's natural history and brought the issue of European and non-European agency to the forefront of the discussion. Duchet and Cohen wrote in the thick of the rise of postmodernism and can thus be placed in the context of a more critical distancing from the Enlightenment because of its Eurocentrism and racialism.

Writing after the peak of postmodernist debates on the Enlightenment and highlighting a very different strand of Enlightenment thought than Duchet and Cohen's focus on colonialism, Sankar Muthu developed an incisive and influential argument concerning the robustness of Enlightenment anti-colonialism in which equality comes forcefully to the center of Enlightenment debates. In Enlightenment Against Empire, he argues that in the thought of three influential Enlightenment thinkers—Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder—there developed the most robust criticism of colonialism since the beginning of the Columbian exchange. While there had been critics of European colonialism since the early sixteenth century, Muthu shows that these critics focused on the manner in which Christianity and European lifestyles were spread, not on the fundamental injustice of colonial domination itself. An anomalous and short-lived line of thought developed in the mid- to late eighteenth century that postulated that humans are constitutively cultural beings, a view that Muthu calls "humanity as cultural agency." While Muthu's argument is convincing on the whole, it sometimes elides the importance of the development of a natural historical and racialist perspective on humanity in the very thinkers who are central to his analysis, particularly Diderot and Kant. As such, my study extends his argument by confronting the tensions between the inequality that so often accompanied racialist views of humanity and the cross-cultural equality that Muthu demonstrated lies at the basis of Enlightenment anti-colonialism.

One of the most important recent contributions to the history of race and anthropology in the French Enlightenment is Andrew Curran's fine study The Anatomy of Blackness. He presents a very detailed analysis of how and why blackness went from being a "variety" to a "race" in the period from intensified European interactions with sub-Saharan Africa in the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, comparing eighteenth-century anatomy with other fields or modes of inquiry into human diversity. He is acutely aware of the Eurocentric and prejudiced views that underlay much of Enlightenment "scientific" interest in blackness, which conflicted with the nascent and growing secular antislavery movement, and argues that one of the best explanations of this seeming paradox can be found in the different genres that Enlightenment writers engaged with to write about blackness and slavery. Writing about Black people from the perspective of natural history entailed different assumptions and modes of argument than writing in defense of Black peoples' equal rights: "In both of these cases, Diderot's so-called convictions regarding the black African were perhaps less real beliefs than they were the reflection of specific intent, conventions of genre, and competing Enlightenment-era epistemologies." I draw on numerous insights from Curran's rich book throughout this study but, overall, my book complements his important intervention because the full breadth of cross-cultural equality in Enlightenment thought doesn't receive sustained analysis in The Anatomy of Blackness. Curran seems to take it for granted that an egalitarian leaning underpinned Enlightenment thinkers' view of humanity. Such a perspective, I would argue, cannot be taken for granted, and I investigate how and why Enlightenment thinkers put equality to new uses and, thereby, politicized it, a topic to which I now turn.

Equality as a Foundational and an Essentially Contested Concept

The contributors to these three encyclopedias certainly did not agree upon what consequences follow from the natural equality of humankind, but they put the concept to use in novel ways in their discussions of religious toleration, antislavery, and the justice of the society of orders. I argue that in so doing the philosophes transformed equality into both a foundational and an essentially contested concept. Present-day philosophers distinguish between many different kinds of equality: legal, political, social, economic, and moral. I am primarily interested in what Siep Stuurman has called "modern equality," an idea that had to gain traction before the myriad contemporary theories of equality could even become thinkable. In his intellectual biography of the Cartesian thinker François Poulain de la Barre, Stuurman develops the concept of "modern equality" to refer to the simple yet revolutionary move that Poulain made in the second half of the seventeenth century to make equality the basis of his social philosophy. Poulain drew together the languages of equality available to early modern Europeans: natural law, the Christian conception of spiritual equality, the cultural relativism of some travelogues, and the Cartesian vindication of the equality of reason. In bringing these languages together, Poulain also abstracted from all of them, transforming equality into a universalist concept. Equality rather than inequality was given the benefit of the doubt. In this study, I focus on the politicization of basic or moral equality, an idea with ancient roots but one that, when combined with a deepening commitment to the equal right of each adult individual to moral autonomy, would have revolutionary consequences in the eighteenth century.

Chambers's defense of religious toleration and the open, cosmopolitan ethos that undergirds his reflections on cultural diversity demonstrate that equality constitutes a significant subtext in his Cyclopaedia. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that a vindication of equality of rights underpinned early Enlightenment defenses of religious toleration, elements of which we find throughout Chambers's Cyclopaedia. Diderot, De Felice, and their collaborators transformed the concept of equality in fascinating ways at mid-century, as equality went from a subtext in Chambers's work to a concept of explicit reflection and fundamental contestation in both Francophone encyclopedias. We will see that the eighteenth-century encyclopedists I analyze begin from a premise of common humanity and basic equality and then go on to argue how and why inequality within society is either necessary or beneficial. Rather than assuming the naturalness of hierarchy and inequality, such disparities must now be justified. Poulain's egalitarian thought reverberated across the late seventeenth and eighteenth century not only in the work of such major thinkers as John Locke, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau but also in the Francophone encyclopedias I analyze. Stuurman has demonstrated that Louis de Jaucourt, the author of more than a quarter of the Encyclopédie entries, was probably Poulain's student at the collège in Geneva, and Jaucourt's article "Wife" indicates that his teacher's defense of the equality of the sexes certainly influenced his thinking. Regardless of the mixture of arguments for or against women's equality that are to be found in these encyclopedias, one notices that this mixture testifies to the destabilization of gender in the Enlightenment.

Beyond the impact that Poulain's egalitarian social philosophy had on eighteenth-century thinkers, I argue that the transformation of equality into a foundational concept can be understood in the context of the invention of "society" as the ontological frame of our collective existence in the Enlightenment, an invention that the Encyclopédie both reflected and reinforced. Keith Michael Baker and Brian Singer, among others, have demonstrated that rather than being a self-evident truth, the modern concept of society, understood as the fundamental domain of human interdependence, was abstracted from the religious imaginary in the Enlightenment. Rather than having legitimacy through a transcendental principle from without, society became the ground of meaning. And in rejecting the notion of a cosmic moral order that purportedly lay outside of society and gave it its legitimacy, the individual was imbued with an unprecedented level of dignity and respect. As Louis Dumont has shown, accepting the ontological primacy of the individual has important political and philosophical consequences because society is reduced to the interaction between free and equal individuals. Although individualism does not always or even often lead to an egalitarian political philosophy, individualism had unmistakable egalitarian consequences in Enlightenment thought because the philosophes found dependence to be particularly odious. As such, they were primarily concerned with advancing and expanding individual autonomy and viewed the equality and liberty of individuals as interdependent, a standpoint expressed most succinctly by Jaucourt in the Encyclopédie: "Equality is the principle and foundation of liberty." Elements of this new conceptualization of society can be found in Chambers's Cyclopaedia, where the sacral and civil community are separated. But this deeper social and cultural change becomes an element of more conscious reflection in the Francophone encyclopedias.

In the existing historiography on the Enlightenment concept of equality, much is made of the limitations that the philosophes imposed on the concept, as judged by a normative, usually postrevolutionary, egalitarian standard. For example, in an important article on the subject, Harvey Chisick writes of the "conservative intention and use of one of the most potentially radical Enlightenment social values." And Jean-Marie Goulemot argues that the demand for equality remained rare throughout the Enlightenment and appeared "archaic" to most philosophes. I do not propose to go to the opposite extreme and make revolutionaries out of the philosophes, as this would be equally misguided. But I would like to argue that this emphasis on the conservative nature of equality in the Enlightenment overlooks the significance of how Enlightenment thinkers used and transformed the concept. The philosophes politicized equality by putting it to new uses, as they called into question the legitimacy of the society of orders and slavery, to name two of the institutionalized inequalities that many philosophes found particularly troublesome. While we should be aware of the limitations that eighteenth-century thinkers placed on the concept, Lynn Hunt reminds us that perhaps the more pressing and interesting question to ask is: "How did these men, living in societies built on slavery, subordination, and seemingly natural subservience, ever come to imagine men not at all like them and, in some cases, women too, as equals?" Rather than prosecuting eighteenth-century thinkers before a twenty-first century tribunal, I emphasize that analyzing their ideas in context demonstrates the novelty and importance of their discussion of equality and rights.

Where did the force that equality acquired during the Enlightenment originate? Many developments converged in the Enlightenment to produce a politically consequential notion of equality. In addition to the elements Siep Stuurman has brought together in his analysis of modern equality and to Louis Dumont and Keith Michael Baker's sketches of the advent of individualism within a novel understanding of society, I focus on the affective elements of egalitarian thinking. I argue that focusing on the emotional elements of egalitarian thought can help us to make sense of the complex relationship between philosophy, politics, and religion in the Enlightenment. Support for equality did not spring from any single religious or philosophical tradition but evolved in the context of changes in religion and belief. As David Bell has argued, "It was only when the French ceased to see themselves as part of a great hierarchy uniting heaven and earth, the two linked by an apostolic church and a divinely ordained king, that they could start to see themselves as equal members of a distinct, uniform, and sovereign nation." The essentially human order of society, composed of improvable individuals, made equality a real possibility, not just an outmoded feature of an atavistic "golden age."

The language of fellow feeling underpins some of the most important defenses of equality one finds in eighteenth-century texts, including the encyclopedias I analyze. For example, in his abolitionist article "Slave Trade," Jaucourt grounds his argument in an empathic appeal to common humanity: "It is thus an obvious inhumanity on the part of the judges in the free countries where he [the slave] is transported not to immediately emancipate him by declaring him free, because he is their fellow human, having a soul like them." De Felice and his circle intensified the attack on slavery, drawing particularly from the most radical passages of Guillaume Thomas Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes (History of the Two Indies). I thus pay particular attention to the matrix of empathy, equality, and antislavery sentiments in these encyclopedias. In short, the political force that equality acquired in the eighteenth century did not spring from any particular religious or philosophical viewpoint—Christian, materialist, or otherwise. Rather, the force it gained stemmed at least partially from a deeper empathic commitment to a new understanding of humanity as composed of sentient and autonomous moral agents.


Racial Classification and the Natural History of Humanity

Running counter to the expanding purview of equality in Enlightenment thought was the invention of a powerful discourse of inequality: modern racial classification. Scholars continue to debate when and where racial classification and its corollary racism began, variously contending that we must look to antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period, or only the modern era. From the outset, it is important to distinguish between race and racism. "Race" has obscure origins but appeared in many European vernaculars by at least the fifteenth century, originally referring to the lineage of prized animals such as dogs and birds of prey and later to noble families. It maintained its connection to the idea of noble blood well into the Enlightenment. By the eighteenth century, the word had come to incorporate both heredity, or lines of descent, and phenotypic similarity, though eighteenth-century thinkers often did not consistently distinguish it from related concepts like species, variety, nation, or people. Racism, on the other hand, was a nineteenth-century neologism and has influentially been defined as hostility that combines difference and power and that "regards 'them' as different from 'us' in ways that are permanent and unbridgeable." I thus reject Thierry Hoquet's contention that "a history of race [is] also, inextricably, a history of racism." This is of course not to assert that racism really began only when the word was coined, which would be absurd, but simply that it is possible and important to analytically separate race from racism in order to think historically and to recognize that one may believe both that races exist and be committed to a nonracist politics. It should be clear that one can assert that a given peoples has a distinct ancestry from another given peoples without positing fundamental inequalities or unbridgeable differences between them.

Although there is no consensus concerning when racial classification was invented, the eighteenth century occupies a prominent place in much of the scholarship on the subject. Sue Peabody has asserted that "it is a truism that the modern or scientific racism that emerged in the late eighteenth century and flourished throughout Europe, the United States, and much of Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was new and different from the collection of prejudices, myths and attitudes that circulated during the early modern and even earlier periods." In a sense, racial classification fits into the systematizing spirit of the Enlightenment, since using physical features to group humanity into a finite number of categories was a way of reducing the complexity of human diversity. But there is nothing "natural" about using physical features to classify humanity and, given that the so-called races of humanity are not natural kinds, issues of power and social control are intimately bound up with how we conceptualize human difference. Historians generally agree that the salience that physical features gained in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century classificatory systems owes much to slavery. Eric Williams, in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery, wrote that "slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery."

While Seymour Drescher and others have disproved Williams's thesis of the unprofitability of slavery at the time of its abolition, Williams's contention that race, racism, and slavery are connected has largely withstood the test of time. Susan Amussen's investigation of how the English established slavery in seventeenth-century Barbados and Jamaica demonstrates that (White) servitude and (Black) slavery developed in distinct ways in these colonies which contributed to the establishment of racial categories. She has assiduously studied legal changes in these colonies from the 1660s onward, demonstrating that colonial officials began to identify slavery as inherent in bodies and thus collapsed social status into skin color. Cristina Malcolmson has shown that the scientific gaze was bound up with the colonial project from the very origins of the Royal Society and this partially explains the preoccupation of its members with "racial" difference.

Similarly, for the French case, Sue Peabody and others have demonstrated that it was in the second half of the eighteenth century that racial ideology took root and suggests that this was because race served as a justification for the enslavement of Black Africans. These historians have established that the economic and political exigencies of the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans gave skin color and other physical features an unprecedented importance and that these concerns flowed back to Europe from the West Indies. Crucially, the origin of racial theory was intimately tied to economic exploitation and racist social practices. We will see that the social and economic context of slavery in the European colonies is indeed indispensable for understanding the evolution of the concept of race across these encyclopedias.

Yet this is not the only story to be told regarding the development of the race concept in the early modern world, particularly in the Enlightenment. As Silvia Sebastiani has written, "Ideas might have a distinct trajectory from socioeconomic relations." In his polemical essay from the early 1970s, "The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism," Richard Popkin argues that when one looks more closely at some of the Enlightenment's most important thinkers, one is confronted with a "paradox": from the heart of the venerable Enlightenment humanist tradition sprang abhorrent theories of the inferiority of non-Europeans. Following my investigation of the strands of both equality and race in Enlightenment thought, I aim to shed light on Popkin's paradox by suggesting that the physical diversity of humanity was a real intellectual problem to which the Enlightenment philosophes responded and that racial classification as part of a novel natural history of the human species was one of their answers. Because race is a social construction, scholars of the humanities and the social sciences have sought an explanation of the phenomenon in the workings of power alone. I point to the ways in which the matter was more complicated than the creation and maintenance of an allegedly superior white race, even if that is one of the most important stories to be told of the creation of concepts of race.

Moving beyond the intractable issue of when race or racism began, what is undoubtedly the case is that the early modern migration, both forced and voluntary, of an unprecedented number of peoples to new climes called climatic theory in its ancient guise into doubt and this, combined with the overall disintegration of the classical and biblical worldview, placed questions of human origins and diversity on a new intellectual plane. I argue that while we cannot lose sight of the context of European colonialism and exploitation when studying the origins of modern racial classification, we can theoretically separate issues of hierarchy, genealogy, and classification, even if they were intertwined in practice.

The use of such a major Enlightenment philosophe as Montesquieu by administrators whose aim was to reform colonial laws in order to maintain the slave system demonstrates the complexity of the issues at hand and the legitimacy of what has been called a "colonial Enlightenment." Nonetheless, it is important to note the rifts that grew within Enlightenment thought, particularly in the post-1750 period, as the language of human rights gained currency in what David Brion Davis has called a "remarkable shift in moral consciousness." In his study of human diversity in the French Enlightenment, David Allen Harvey remarks, "Certainly, the defenders of the Caribbean plantation complex had no illusions as to which side the 'philosophers of Paris' were on, and their complaints regarding the naïve humanitarianism and utopian egalitarianism of Enlightenment thinkers abound in the French colonial archives." Additionally, the origins of racial prejudice among the French colonial elite toward Amerindians resulted primarily from the failure of francisation in the experience of colonization itself, and such racialist policies predated the publication of the major philosophes' anthropological and natural historical reflections. In his sweeping survey of early modern European attitudes toward non-Europeans, Joan-Pau Rubiés emphasizes the differences between imperial metropolitan attitudes towards racialized others and the attitudes of colonial elites, as the latter were much more concerned with the creation and maintenance of a racial hierarchy. While color prejudice often accompanied racial classificatory schemes, the former does not logically or inevitably follow from the latter.

By analyzing the reflections on human diversity in Chambers's Cyclopaedia and its Francophone successors, I argue that within Enlightenment philosophy, racial classification was not thinkable outside of the framework of natural history. We should understand Enlightenment race thinking as the view that human physical diversity results from natural processes that combine environmental influences and mechanisms of inheritance in a worldview that superseded appeals to divine intervention to explain human physical diversity. Most of the Enlightenment thinkers I analyze understood the "races" or "varieties" of humankind as dynamic entities, making these concepts distinct from the more static and fixed status of many nineteenth-century conceptualizations of race. The so-called races of humanity are not natural kinds, but the eighteenth-century thinkers analyzed here sought to explain humanity's physical diversity through naturalist causes, just as their twenty-first-century heirs continue to do.

Beginning with Chambers's Cyclopaedia, we see that the civilized/savage divide frames his discussion of human diversity more than a racialist perspective. In his dedication to the king of England, Chambers explains: "'Tis by These [the Arts and Sciences], the Parsimony of Nature is supplied, and Life render'd easy and agreeable under its numerous Infirmities. By these the Mind is reclaim'd from its native Wildness; and enrich'd with Sentiments which lead to Virtue and Glory. 'Tis these, in fine, that make the Difference between your Majesty's Subjects, and the Savages of Canada, or the Cape ofGood Hope." Chambers consolidated an idea that was already widespread in seventeenth-century Europe: that societies pass from savagery to civilization over time and that Europe, Great Britain in particular, stands proudly at the apex of this development. As we will see in Chapter 2, Chambers's Cyclopaedia and the Supplement (1753) are particularly interesting because they register the subtle shifts taking place in conceptualizing human sameness and difference at mid-century: older notions of European civilizational superiority are accompanied by the emergent anatomical and natural historical interest in human physical diversity.

When we come to the Francophone encyclopedias, we see a marked difference in the treatment of human physical diversity compared with Chambers's reference work. Namely, humanity is explicitly included in natural history as one species among many that must be described and classified as a life form within the ambit of nature. Diderot and De Felice's encyclopedias appeared in the wake of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's monumental natural histories, the latter in particular looming large in both reference works. In Chapters 3 and 4, I investigate the importance of Buffon for the transformation of the concept of race in the Enlightenment. While we find both discourses of equality and inequality in Buffon's anthropology and in Diderot's appropriation of it, I argue that we can better understand Enlightenment perspectives on human physical diversity as an inchoate combination of various ideas that were not understood as definitive answers but instead constituted the new approaches the philosophes adopted to answer old questions. Many philosophes held that motion inheres in particles of matter, that these particles of matter form a coherent whole—nature—and that our understanding of life, including human life, must be placed within this evolutionary materialist worldview. Race moved from the realm of theology to the realm of biology across the early modern period, and rather than projecting the later history of fixed and hierarchical racial categories back into the eighteenth century, it is more fruitful to view the philosophes' contributions to racial classification as a new method of looking at human diversity.

In Chapters 3 and 4, as well as in the conclusion, I will demonstrate that questions relating to heredity, humanity's deep past, and our place in the natural world were central to the philosophes' understanding of race. My aim is not to exculpate the philosophes from the charge of prejudice (of which we will find much to discuss) but rather to better explain what would otherwise be a confounding historical phenomenon: the fact that some of the most radical Enlightenment critics of European colonialism and naturalized inequalities, such as Diderot, also contributed to racial discourse. Race in Enlightenment thought touched upon broader questions of human origins and relatedness that had been newly raised by advances in the new philosophy and the new science. This is not to vindicate the naturalness of the races of the eighteenth century (or any century, for that matter) but instead to emphasize that understanding humanity as an animal species within the fold of nature rather than as God's special creation between angels and brutes was a significant Enlightenment intellectual revolution and this is one eighteenth-century context into which we can place race.

The discovery of time and its relationship to race in the Enlightenment has been tackled in an important recent study. Silvia Sebastiani has demonstrated that the concept of race in the Scottish Enlightenment was engendered by novel eighteenth-century conjectural histories that described human progress in stages, most often from a monogenist perspective. The idea of the progress of humanity as described in stadial histories made the perceived "stagnation" of some peoples a problem, and she argues that the concept of race served to explain the divergent developmental paths of various peoples by attributing them to physical and moral causes that, depending on the thinker, could be either a "hard" or "soft" conceptualization of racial differences. She demonstrates that stadial history was a form of natural history, and her elegant study stresses the unresolved tensions between universality and hierarchy in the Scottish Enlightenment. My argument differs from Sebastiani's in that she focuses on conjectural history and theories of progress while I concentrate on the introduction of time into debates within Enlightenment life science, particularly theories of inheritance and the effect of climate on species' form. The philosophes' conception of race—the idea that the environment and inheritance act together to produce distinct varieties within the human species—served to firmly place humanity in nature's purview, as a species with a deep history extending across unimaginably vast stretches of time, beyond the confines dictated by Genesis, and susceptible to the effects of climate.

It is nonetheless important to acknowledge that while a hardened racism remains largely absent from the philosophes' writings, paternalistic attitudes toward non-Europeans, as well as to the lower classes within Europe, generally permeate their thought. This paternalism was often couched in the language of philosophical history, in which non-Europeans were viewed as "primitive" and only potentially equal to Europeans because they lay further back on the arrow of time. There is in fact an inequality built into the very concept of Enlightenment, as the philosophes positioned themselves as the enlightened few in contrast to unenlightened others, whether European or non-European. Nonetheless, we see the development of the concept of the human being as a constitutively cultural agent in the Enlightenment, which opened up the space both for new theories of history and culture, as well as for robust anti-colonial arguments—themes to which we will return.

The Enlightenment continues to absorb our attention for a variety of reasons. This attention can sometimes appear excessive, but I hope to demonstrate that given our continued commitment to the value of equality and the persistence of structural inequalities, particularly with regard to race and sex, the Enlightenment has much to teach us. The value of studying race and equality in Enlightenment thought does not lie in looking back to see "how far we've come" in terms of our commitment to equality and our rejection of racism. Although equality and the passions associated with it have been at the center of various crises throughout history, there are no perennial questions in intellectual history; Enlightenment thinkers raised a new set of questions when they put equality to new uses. By looking at this moment in intellectual history, perhaps we can better understand a concept that increasingly holds our attention.

There are also crucial respects in which we must still position ourselves within the legacy of the Enlightenment even regarding race, despite its being "man's most dangerous myth." By this I mean that rather than seeing race as an object "out there" in nature, which it definitively is not, race can also be construed as a method of looking at and understanding human diversity. Our task, as Toni Morrison has memorably stated, is "to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home." The Enlightenment has been called a "double-edged sword," because the intellectual movement made nineteenth-century scientific racism thinkable at the same time that it called into question Jewish ghettoization and Black slavery. We would stay truer to the quintessential esprit de critique of the Enlightenment if we work to sharpen the sword's edge that cuts deepest into the enduring inequalities and injustices that continue to plague our world.

The book is structured as follows. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview of the transformation of early modern European thinking on equality and human diversity in order to better situate the debates into which the encyclopedists entered. Chapter 2 is an analysis of equality and race in Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, demonstrating that equality formed a significant subtext in the reference work, which was primarily linked to defenses of religious toleration, while the civilized/savage divide is the primary frame through which Chambers discusses human diversity. The Supplement to his Cyclopaedia, published in 1753, reveals that the natural history of humanity and the concept of race gained greater importance in the course of the eighteenth century. In Chapter 3, I delve into the world of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, not only highlighting the ambiguities in thinking about human equality and diversity, but also stressing the numerous ways in which the reference work represents a break from what came before. In short, the most radical encyclopedists, such as Diderot, sought naturalist explanations for human diversity and, simultaneously, entrenched the view that inequality is non-natural. In Chapter 4, I analyze the Encyclopédie d'Yverdon and how its contributors' position within what might be called a Protestant Christian Enlightenment impacted their transformation of race and equality. In the conclusion, I offer a framework for making sense of equality and race, human sameness and difference, in Enlightenment thought and reflect on the enduring importance of this framework for understanding many facets of our own world.

Notes
Introduction

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Early Modern Debates on Human Sameness and Difference
Chapter 2. Chambers's Cyclopaedia and Supplement: The Growth of the
Natural History of Humanity
Chapter 3. Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie: A New Human Science
Chapter 4. De Felice's Encyclopédie d'Yverdon: Expanding and Contesting
Human Science
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"In this timely, thoroughly documented, and well-argued book, Devin J. Vartija takes on one of the enduring paradoxes of intellectual history: why is the Enlightenment seen as the origin of modern egalitarianism even as it is understood as a source of scientific racism?...Vartija’s book presents the Enlightenment in its complexity, multiplicity and heterogeneity. The Color of Equality provides an exceptional model for locating the inherent intellectual tensions that the Enlightenment embodies and addressing the problematic interpretive legacies that it leavesin its wake."

Cromohs

"This book is a valuable contribution to the study of Enlightenment thought, valuable partly because it refuses to take a side 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment’s approach to racializing of humans. Vartija has parsed out why the Enlightenment remains a significantly important era for examination. By examining facets of intellectuals’ concerns, Vartija has shown us that any easy tendency to embrace or to dismiss Enlightenment philosophy misses a key point about legacies of Enlightenment...Vartija is to be commended for taking on such a project as this."

The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer

"It is hard to imagine a more timely and significant book. In this compelling study, Devin J. Vartija not only unpacks the complex history of race as a category but also shows its sometimes surprising connection to equality in a century that was crucial to the articulation of both. As a consequence, our modern challenges become more comprehensible and, we can hope, all the more surmountable."

author of Inventing Human Rights: A History Lynn Hunt

"Devin J. Vartija's The Color of Equality is a splendid contribution to Enlightenment studies. Through a careful analysis of three great eighteenth-century encyclopedias, which he sets deftly in the context of the Enlightenment in all its polyphonic diversity, Vartija provides a nuanced and sensitive response to one of the most vexing questions in modern intellectual history. How was it that the intellectual movement that did so much to invent modern notions of equality also saw the origin of theories that would provide the basis for modern racism? Anyone interested in the Enlightenment will find this book consistently illuminating."—David A. Bell, author of Men on Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolution

"Intellectual historians are beginning to devote the kind of fine-grained attention to the history of the concept of equality that they have long bestowed on liberty. Devin Vartija makes a signal contribution to this emergent literature. By focusing on the important source of French-language encyclopedias in the 18th century, he takes a careful and unsparing look at how notions of equality were deployed and put to use in relation to understandings of human diversity, skin color, and race. The result is scholarship that avoids the Enlightenment blackmail. Neither glorifying nor condemning indiscriminately, Vartija shows rather what the Enlightenment era changed and what it didn't, both for better and for worse."—Darrin M. McMahon, author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius

From the Publisher