60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

lineages of racism in genocidal contexts 165
cial body becomes unifi ed, with the state as protector of the singular
race. 11 The vocabulary of race struggle, he argues, was taken into the
description of new political struggles between the bourgeoisie and the
aristocracy, and between the aristocracy and the declining monarchy.
The nobility promoted an anti-statist history opposing the principle
of sovereignty as much as the logic of contract and right, general will
and political representation. This counter-history presented itself in
the form of a divided nation: the nobility forming a ‘race’, as distinct,
and irremediably divided, from nations in the State (Foucault [1976]
2003: 134). This is neatly encapsulated in one of the sub-headings of
chapter 6 (‘Race-Thinking Before Racism’) in the ‘Imperialism’ part
of Hannah Arendt’s Totalitarianism book: ‘A “Race” of Aristocrats
Against a “Nation” of Citizens’ (Arendt [1951] 1976: 161). 12
The ‘war of the races’ idea became the foil for a counter-history that
went into the notion of the class struggle. 13 Marx clearly states this
derivation in a letter to Engels in 1882: ‘You know very well where
we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in the work of the
French historians who talked about the race struggle’ (quoted in
Foucault [1976] 2003: 79). In several other instances, Marx and Engels
acknowledge that their conceptualisation of the class struggle
owes a debt to the French Restoration historians (Engels [1894] 1953:
550; and Marx [1852] 1953: 86). In responding to his critics’ attempts
11 Arendt located the transition from ‘race-thinking’ to ‘racism’ with Arthur Comte de
Gobineau. In his Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines (1853), he combines 18th
century doctrines on the divided origins of the French people with the idea of the
fall of civilisations due to degeneration of race by which an Aryan ‘race of princes’
is threatened with being submerged by democratically organised non-Aryan lower
classes (Arendt [1951] 1976: 173).
12 Beatrice Hanssen’s study on ‘Power/Force/War’ castigates Foucault’s exegesis of
Boulainvilliers for elevating the latter’s ‘race’ theory to the source of a ‘counter-discourse’,
while rescuing Hannah Arendt’s Totalitarianism book for assigning to Comte de
Boulainvilliers the role of ‘principal French instigator of racism before the advent of
institutionalized “race thinking”’ (Hanssen 2000: 133). The grounds for such an attempt
to ‘rescue’ Arendt cannot be upheld, as she clearly indicates the distinction between
‘race theory’ of the kind advocated by de Boulainvilliers, and biologically based ‘racism’
institutionalised since the second half of the 19th century – a distinction that, as I will
show below, has further implications for diff erent lineages of racism in Arendt’s analysis.
13 Comte de Boulainvilliers’ articulation of the ‘war of the races’ has earned him the epithets
of both feudal reactionary (as a historian – Buranelli 1957: 488; and as precursor of the
alleged ‘worst institutionalized French racist ideologies of the 19th century’ (Hanssen 2000:
133)), and incipient socialist (as political philosopher – Buranelli 1957: 488, 490, in an ‘unholy
alliance between left- and right-wing [thinking]…’ quoted in Hanssen 2000: 145):
[Boulainvilliers] could have been logical in defending the rights of the nobility – if he
had abandoned his philosophy. He could have been logical in pressing for a completely
remodelled social system – if he had abandoned his history. (Buranelli 1957: 494)