Q&A: What can historical theories reveal about modern challenges?

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In 2022, Bettina Brandt and Daniel L. Purdy brought an esteemed group of scholars to Penn State for a College of the Liberal Arts-funded conference focused on the historical connections between “scientific” racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the malign effects of colonialism and Nazism more than a century later.

The conference’s resulting conversations led to the book, “Colonialism and Enlightenment: The Legacy of German Race Theories,” published by Oxford University Press. Edited by Brandt, teaching professor of German and Jewish studies, and Purdy, professor of German studies, the volume features 11 essays examining the many ways theories about race posited by 18th century philosophers like Immanuel Kant influenced later forms of racism in the 19th and 20th centuries and even today.

“The topic, from the 18th century to the Nazis, is a reflection of our own contemporary discussions,” Purdy said. “This isn’t just old history. The reason is we’re dealing with our own racial conflicts, and there is the realization that this history is very long and has been here all along. And there’s this kind of rediscovery, which says more about us. The way we look back on things is very much a reflection of how we are today.”

Brandt and Purdy recently discussed some of the book’s key takeaways.

Q: What was the driving impetus behind the book?

Purdy: The central figure of attention is the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He wrote four essays defining four different races of humans based on their physical appearance, particularly skin color, in order to clarify what he considered were misunderstandings in what the term meant. For the last 30 years, there’s been an enormous amount of critical scholarship about his race theory. Most readers are initially shocked to learn that Kant espoused racial classification, because his reputation as a philosopher is based largely on his importance as an ethical thinker.

One of the people most responsible for this renewal in critical scholarship on Kant is Robert Bernasconi, one of our philosophy professors at Penn State. The conference provided an opportunity for scholars to reflect on Robert's scholarly accomplishments, and many German studies professors and students were interested in meeting and working with him. His contribution to the book serves as the foundation for the other essays. He traces the use of racial terms across the 19th century, both in the United States and Germany, making the important point that simply avoiding a biological definition of racism does not solve the problem, because racism is often expressed in cultural terms. His essay complicates our historical understanding of racism by moving the discussion away from the solely biological view Kant espoused.

Bettina had the big idea to move our discussion beyond Kant so that we consider the twists and turns in the long history of racism. There is no straight line about race thinking from 1770 all the way to the Nazi period — it’s a very complicated history.

Brandt: In the volume, we’re bridging both the philosophy and German studies side of things, which generally have not been examined together. In both fields, there has been this diversification over the last 25 years. We’re looking more broadly at cross connections and intermedial relationships, and our contributors do some of that. For instance, Huaping Lu-Adler, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown and a rising star in the field, bores down on Kant’s lectures about geography and anthropology. She’s really the go-to philosopher on that topic. We were glad she decided to join the project.

Q: Can you talk a bit about some of the origins of these racial theories by Enlightenment thinkers like Kant?

Purdy: During the Enlightenment, natural historians and other scientifically minded Europeans thought, “We can classify plants and animals, so why don’t we classify humans?” Kant tried to provide a strictly biological definition of race by organizing humans according to their tendency to pass along skin color and other facial features from one generation to the next. Immediately, a number of German thinkers understood the moral implications of such racial classification, namely that it would be used to justify slavery, and therefore they criticized the project strongly. This Enlightenment debate has resurfaced many times, especially during the 20th century with Nazi race ideology.

Some of our contributors in the book write about the attempt to give race a scientific definition, like the European doctors studying skulls and brain sizes in order to make generalizations about the intellectual capacities of different populations. In her contribution to the volume, Jeannette Eileen Jones shows that there were 19th-century German doctors who strongly maintained that such methods were unscientific. Nevertheless, the Nazis revived this Enlightenment science. All the while, Germans and other European race thinkers were reading the arguments made by defenders of American slavery, so we demonstrate in the volume that that racial thinking on both sides of the Atlantic were closely connected.

Brandt: One of our contributors, Patricia Simpson, writes in her essay that missionaries told Indigenous people that they could turn their skin white like Europeans if they prayed to a specific Catholic shrine. These ideas that dark-skinned humans could be whitewashed were not confined to the distant past but instead carried forward for centuries.

Q: Daniel, can you talk about your essay in the book, which centers on how some of these racial theories had their beginnings in medieval colonialism?

Purdy: One of the big questions that contemporary scholars ask concerns why European philosophers, such Immanuel Kant, didn’t denounce slavery. Slavery was an enormously important topic during the 18th century — anyone who read in Europe would have known about its shocking exploitation and torture of humans. Given how widespread the awareness of slavery's cruelty was, why didn’t more people speak against the institution? I would say that they remained silent about slavery because the economies in Central and Eastern Europe were based on the colonization and exploitation of serfs, who were also owned by their aristocratic masters and were often treated as brutally as slaves. Given that European society depended on abject laborers, any moral criticism of Atlantic slavery would have immediately applied to their own feudal system. I focused on the connections between European serfdom and American slavery largely by discussing the writing of abolitionists in the Baltic states, who drew direct comparisons between the two forms of exploitation.

Brandt: Daniel also discussed the reason why, for some of these philosophers, acceptance of serfdom for political reasons and their own position in society meant they didn’t turn against the local authorities who imposed the serfdom.

Q: Can you talk about some of the ways colonialism factored into these racial theories?

Brandt: German rulers didn’t establish foreign colonies until the last decades of the 19th century, when they seized African territories known today as Cameroon, Tanzania, Namibia and Togo, along with protectorates in China and the Pacific islands. Even before this wave of colonization, German scholars were actively involved in turning the travelogues and political reports from other European colonies into racial and ethnographical systems. As outside observers, they developed theories about all humans based upon the evidence they gathered from slavery in the Caribbean, South America and the United States.

Purdy: In the book, Carl Niekerk writes about how European anthropology begins in the Enlightenment as a way to classify and define humans based on such reports. This intellectual work was not confined to any one nation — German, Dutch, English and French natural historians were all invested in this type of thinking. Once Germany did establish colonies in Africa at the end of the 19th century, their policies had devastating consequences. In his essay for the volume, Adam Blackler writes about colonization in the 19th century and how German public opinion was mobilized to support the idea of colonies in Africa.

Brandt: And the multilingual novelist Patrice Nganang writes in the book about the post-colonial present to show how the colonial history of Cameroon, in which Germans established a colony but then surrendered it to English and French authorities after World War I, continues to define the political conflicts between different language groups, particularly French and English speakers.

Q: Was there opposition to this type of thinking during this period?

Purdy: The philosophical and scientific opposition to Kant's race arguments sprang up almost immediately in the 18th century. One of them was a student of Kant’s, Johann Gottfried Herder, who argued that racial classifications were both inaccurate and immoral. Herder was one of several German critics who recognized that race theories would be used to justify slavery. In our book, John Noyes writes about how these early debates then were used and abused by race theorists in the 19th century, the kind of thinkers who influenced the Nazis. And Jürgen Overhoff's essay examines how German children's textbooks in the 18th century depicted the horrors of slave exploitation, revealing that progressive educators were already teaching young students about the evils of slavery during that era. These historical debates continue to resonate in America today, making it all the more important for contemporary philosophers and literary historians to carefully study the history of racism.