Race and the Enlightenment: a reader

"Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze collects into one convenient and controversial volume the most important and influential writings on race that the European Enlightenment produced." "In Enlightenment thought reason and civilization became associated with "white" people and northern Europe, while unreason and savagery were conveniently located among "blacks" and non-whites outside Europe, in, for example, the "Dark Continent" of Africa." "The writers and thinkers represented here are: Linne, Buffon, Hume, Beattie, Kant, Herder, Blumenbach, Jefferson, Cuvier, and Hegel. In addition there are entries on the Negro from Diderot's Encyclopedie and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All texts are situated within their historical, social, and intellectual contexts. A comprehensive introduction, presuming no prior familiarity with the texts concerned, serves as a guide to the student and general reader."--Jacket.

The God-given order of nature / Carl von Linné, Homo in The system of nature -- The geographical and cultural distribution of mankind / Georges-Louis Leclerc, A natural history, general and particular -- "Negroes ... naturally inferior to the whites" / David Hume, "Of the populousness of ancient nations", "Of national characters" ; A response to Hume / James Beattie -- "This fellow was quite black ... a clear proof that what he said was stupid" / Immanuel Kant, "On the different races of man", "On national characteristics", from Physical geography -- The Kant-Herder controversy, Immanuel Kant, Review of Herder's Ideas on the philosophy of the history of mankind ; "Organization of the peoples of Africa" / Johann Gottfied Herder -- The degeneration of races / Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, "Degeneration of the species" -- Entries in the Encyclopédie and the Encyclopaedia Britannica : "Négre," from the Encyclopédie, "Negro," from Encyclopaedia Britannica -- "The difference is fixed in nature" Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia -- "The race from which we are descended has been called Caucasian ... the handsomest on earth" / Georges Léopold Cuvier, "Varieties of the human s…