Blumenbach´s Racial Classification

The book addresses the challenges in historicizing scientific racism and the battle against it. The intellectual biographies of scholars who, like Blumenbach, were uncompromising fighters against the main political embodiment of racism in their time, but whose ideas were employed by overt racists later, bring about the question of the driving forces behind the mutually opposed political affiliations of scientists. The contributors revise approaches to the historical legacy of Enlightenment scholars in terms of nuances to our understanding of intellectual responsibility for the reproduction of race-informed thought. The book transcends the simplistic boundaries between right and left science and revises the internally contradictory impact of racialist/racial thinking on knowledge about humanity. This book deepens our understanding of race as a contributor to various fields of the production of knowledge about humanity and different epistemic platforms. Instead of highlighting the pathos in revealing racism in the stances of the most authoritative thinkers, the editors and authors suggest contemplation of the persistence of epistemologies that promote racially informed views on humanity and their implications. Relying on H. Blumenbergs approach to exploring the complex nexus of pre-modernity modernity and contemporary historicization of whiteness, contributors develop a framework for the immanent critique of race in science. Following the longue durée of Blumenbachs approach to human variation as numerous adaptations provides options for revising the entangled history of race in science. Each of the chapters examines how the elements of Blumenbachs epistemology have been reassembled in different political-social contexts, and how this epistemology has been enriched with new elements that have ensured its reproduction. Through discussing how social reality was transformed due to historical performances such as colonization, migration, urbanization, and other forms of human mobility, contributors examine how the presence of others in different historical and geopolitical contexts was formed by race science, shaping its operation. The recent and current historicization of Blumenbachs legacy is deconstructed as the interplay between reductive contextualism and critical responses to it. The book offers a historical revision of race in science through deconstructing the opposition between racism- informed and racism-free knowledge as a false dichotomy. Contributors discuss the responsibility for atrocities legitimized by race science to intellectual movements like Enlightenment, through more complex historicization, making it of great importance to philosophers, historians of science, and those specialised in racial studies and social sciences.