Racism in the History of Political Thought: Real or Incoherent?

Political theorists have mostly been slower than philosophers to address the centrality of racism in canonical authors such as Locke, Hume, Jefferson and Kant. Yet these writers’ racism is arguably fairly central to their system of ideas, as argued by philosophers such as Robert Bernasconi and Charles Mills. To take one example, Kant’s cosmopolitanism was actually a racist cosmopolitanism – a white cosmopolitanism where the other races would either die out or become like whites. Yet ‘Kantian’ cosmopolitanism is still typically discussed in non-racial terms. While it is legitimate and desirable to take Kant’s ideas and remove the racism, the result is no longer Kant’s own theory, and we lose something important if we depict the ‘real’ Kant in non-racist terms. Why have most political theorists been relatively slow to address these matters? One contributing factor may be the mythology of coherence, the fallacy rightly criticised by Quentin Skinner in his classic essay ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ (1969). Skinner rightly warns us not to assume that historical authors’ ideas are coherent, within and between texts. However, trying to avoid the mythology of coherence makes it easier to present a historical author’s racism as incidental to their ‘real’ project. Rather than racism being part and parcel of their central concerns, it is often depicted merely as a prejudice, or a philosophical mistake which does not accord with the central features of their philosophy and thus as something that we can usually sidestep. As just noted, though, such assumptions may be deeply misleading. Political theorists should thus benefit by taking more seriously the possibility that a historical author’s racist ideas may be more central than is usually thought.