The French Revolution of 1789 is often taken as a key event in the emancipatory trajectory of modernity. But as Losurdo has noted: “Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions [in Holland, England and the United States]. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success.” As always there was also an ideological dimension to this.
V.Y. Mudimbe shows that during the eighteenth century Enlightenment social scientists actively worked to legitimate the ascription of race: “The key is the idea of History with a capital H, which first incorporates St. Augustine’s notion of providentia and later on expresses itself in the evidence of Social Darwinism. Evolution, conquest, and difference become signs of a theological, biological, and anthropological destiny, and assign to things and beings both their natural slots and social mission. Theorists of capitalism, such as Benjamin Kidd and Karl Pearson in England, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu in France, Friedrich Naumann and Friedrich von Bernhard in Germany, as well as philosophers, comment upon two main and complementary paradigms. These are the inherent superiority of the white race, and, as already made explicit in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the necessity for European economies and structures to expand to “virgin areas” of the world.”
The most significant breach against despotism legitimated and organised in the name of race was the revolution, largely fought by Africans from what is now Northern Angola and the Southern Congo, that resulted in the proclamation of the independent black republic of Haiti on the first day of 1804. Toussaint Louverture, the first leader of the rebellion, drew on an explicit commitment to a universal humanism to denounce slavery.
Colonialism defined race as permanent biological destiny. The revolutionaries in Haiti defined it politically. Polish and German mercenaries who had gone over to the side of the slave armies were granted citizenship, as black subjects, in a free and independent Haiti.
But liberal thought sustained its investment in the ascription of race as a fundamental feature of modernity. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, published in 1859, is, arguably, the second great text of the liberal tradition. Mill, who spent most of his adult life, working for British colonialism, began his argument on the question of liberty by asserting, in passing, that: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.”
Mill was no outlier. The accumulation of capital, enabled by racism, meant that certain forms of cultural, academic and scientific power could be concentrated in Western Europe and North America. These forms of power were frequently used to reinscribe the fundamental ideology of modernity. Robinson, writing in 1983 about the silencing of the Haitian Revolution in Europe concluded that: “it was their ideologues, their intellectuals, their academies that succeeded in the larger suppression”. Almost twenty years later he argued that the “corrupt association between American science and race” in the 19th century was sustained by the dismissal and hounding of “those critics whom they could not summarily dispatch.”
In The North African Syndrome, an essay first published in 1952, Fanon gave a characteristically acute account of how academic authority, in this case scientific authority, was enmeshed with racism. He wrote that in the French medical establishment: “(T)he attitude of medical personnel is very often an a priori attitude. The North African does not come with a substratum common to his race, but on a foundation built by the European. In other words, the North African, spontaneously, by the very fact of appearing in the scene, enters into a pre-existing framework. In other words, medical science in colonial France allowed a priori ontological assumptions to prevent it from making rational sense of experience.”
This deception of reason, this collapse into what Lewis Gordon calls “racist rationality”, results in racist societies producing forms of knowledge that, while authorised as the most fully formed instances of reason at work, are fundamentally irrational.
