Whilst often presented to us as geniuses, the thinkers of the Enlightenment period weren’t as “enlightened” as we’d like to think they were. We’ve all heard names like Voltaire, Kant, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hengel, but do we really know what they actually stood for?
Voltaire and company are, as a lot of people might know, the inspiration behind movements of liberation such as the 1789 French Revolution and the 1775-1783 U.S. War of Independence. Now the trick is, freedom wasn’t actually meant for everybody, and that’s what you probably didn’t learn at school: most Enlightenment thinkers actually supported slavery, colonization and more generally, racism. So let’s explore the work of some of the most famous thinkers of that era and their position towards racism.
Voltaire
In his “Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations” (1756), we can learn about Voltaire’s opinion on Black people: “Their round eyes, their flat noses, their always large lips, their differently figured ears, the wool on their head, the very measure of their intelligence, put great differences between them and the other species of men. And what shows that they do not owe this difference to their climate is that the negroes and negresses transported to the coldest countries always produce animals of their kind there, and that the mulattoes are only one bastard race of a black and a white, or a white and a black.”
He continues with his opinion on Albinos: “They resemble the Lapps by the size, to no nation by the head, since they have different hair, other eyes, other ears; and they are human only by the stature of their body, with the faculty of speech and thought to a degree far remote from ours.”
And finally: “The Samoeds, the Lappons, the inhabitants of northern Siberia, those of Kamshatka, are even less advanced than the peoples of America. Most Negroes, all Caffres, are plunged into the same stupidity, and will languish in it for a long time.”
John Locke
You’ve probably studied him at school, read some of his quotes such as “All mankind… being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” or “To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes.”
Yet, the same John Locke who is admired and thanked for his contribution to the development of liberal Anglo-American political thoughts, was an active partaker in the commerce of slave trade. Locke owned stock in the Royal African Company, which ran the African slave trade for England, and was secretary of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, where slavery was constitutionally permitted.
Friedrich Hegel
Amongst Hegel’s interests was history, which he often wrote and talked about. However, Hegel wasn’t any different from his contemporaries when it comes to his views on Africa and its inhabitants. In fact, he claimed Africa did not have a history, and that nothing major ever happened there: “Africa is not a historical part of the world, it has no movement or development. […] What we actually understand by Africa is that which is unhistorical and uninspired, which is still completely caught up in the natural spirit.”
As to his opinion on its inhabitants, Hegel states: “The negro represents the natural man in all his wildness and unrestrainedness. […] There is nothing human to be found in this character. […] This kind is incapable of development and education, and as we see them today, they have always been.”
Immanuel Kant
Regarded as one of the central Enlightenment thinkers, Kant wrote one of the most blatantly racist things in his notes of 1781: “The white race possesses all incentives and talents in itself… The race of Negroes can be educated, but only as slaves… The [indigenous] Americans cannot be educated, they care about nothing and are lazy.”
He further states that: “Humanity have achieved its greatest perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians already have lesser talent. The Negroes stand far lower, and the peoples of America are lowest.”
“Great minds”: For who?
At school, in literature, in politics, in the media, these men are often referred to as “great minds”. It is worth asking ourselves for who. For who exactly were they great minds? If one thing is clear, it is that they were no great minds for anyone outside of Europe. Their minds and the fruits they bore in fact enabled Europe to pursue its colonial (and criminal) agenda throughout the world. They were great minds for a continent whose ambitions were only fuelled by greed and pride, hidden behind a simulacrum of righteousness and humanitarianism. They weren’t great minds for Africa. They weren’t great minds for America. And the fact that we still present them as positive intellectual figures in the European school system says a lot about Europe’s current positions, priorities, and mentality.
Aude Calloch 