Changes

By the mid-nineteenth century, the legacies of Enlightenment thought were transferred to what has been called “race science.” The latter was an attempt to concretize and offer empirical support to the philosophical musings of thinkers for whom Enlightenment was their aim. Race science emerged at a moment in time where colonialism, dispossession, and enslavement were emerging to prop up the empires of Western Europe. These philosophical musings and empirical studies—if they can be called that—were utilized in order to offer rationales for European conquest. So the argument went, that civilization was the preserve of rational and enlightened men, and these were not found among the “savages” beyond European shores.

Race science has been largely discredited. The Enlightenment, however, continues to resonate among partisans of Western thought. It remains the lodestar for how to reason, how to arrive at knowledge. Intellectual historians like Jonathan Israel have recently argued that Enlightenment was radical and responsible for advances in human relationships and societal changes. For instance, what has become known as positive liberalism, following the famous split envisaged by Isaiah Berlin, is considered part of the same Enlightenment project as negative liberalism. Israel has advanced an argument that claims an Enlightenment that makes possible everything from the abolition of enslavement to modern notions of human rights. These newer works have not been able to see how race and racial thinking were co-articulated with Enlightenment conceptions of human nature. And thus, they have not been able to see racism as one of its products, as one of its continued legacies. Alternative intellectual histories have offered important responses.

===Anti-Racist Thought===