Thread by @mccormick_ted

Thread of passages from "Race Thinking Before Racism", ch. 6 of Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (pp.158-60). A lot seems pertinent today, on the mainstreaming of racism as a legitimate opinion, its connection to scientistic boosterism, and its significance as an ideology.

"Hitlerism exercised its strong international... appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere....

"The historical truth of the matter is that race-thinking, with its roots deep in the eighteenth century, emerged simultaneously in all Western countries during the nineteenth century. ...

"Until the fateful days of the 'scramble for Africa,' race-thinking had been one of the many free opinions which, within the general framework of liberalism, argued and fought each other to win the consent of public opinion. Only a few of them became full-fledged ideologies....

"For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution to all the 'riddles of the universe,' or the intimate knowledge of hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.

"Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have...defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races.

"... Persuasion is not possible without appeal to either experiences or desires, in other words to immediate political needs. Plausibility in these matters comes neither from scientific facts, as the various brands of Darwinists would like us to believe,

"nor from historical laws.... Every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine. ... Their scientific aspect is secondary and arises first from the desire to provide watertight arguments,

"and second because their persuasive power also got hold of scientists, who were no longer interested in the result of their research but left their laboratories and hurried off to preach to the multitude their new interpretations of life and world.

"We owe it to these 'scientific' preachers rather than to any scientific findings that today no single science is left into whose categorical system race-thinking has not deeply penetrated. ...

"The blame is not to be laid on any science as such, but rather on certain scientists who were no less hypnotized by ideologies than their fellow-citizens."

Some stray thoughts on the above:

1. Many/most historians would now push the origins of racism back to the 17th century at least; some *much* earlier, depending on criteria. But Arendt has her eye on Enlightenment discussions that are even now simply ignored by some "centrists".

2. While "Hitlerism" was exceptional in the way it made these ideas into a program, the ideas themselves by no means exceptional. One might say (Arendt virtually does) that they were common currency in the marketplace of ideas; they competed, and they won.

3. Treating Nazism as sui generis obscures its roots in ground shared with other movements around the world. It is bad history. Despite Pinker's claims (chronicle.com/article/The-In…), making these links does not "let Nazis off the hook". Hiding them lets related racisms off the hook.

4. It is no accident that Pinker's and the IDW's attacks on history come in the form of a boosterish defence of "science". In general, the present moment is marked by scientistic promises to explain the secrets of the universe and the laws of history (theverge.com/2018/10/5/1794…).

5. Many of these come from evo-psych and neuroscience directions, and in general they betray little familiarity with either history or historiography. The focus is less on success in actually explaining any specific bit of the past than on the *potential* to explain *everything*.

6. Hence they tend to deal less in particular cases then in broad generalizations or causal claims, and they virtually never ground arguments in primary sources, the basis of historical research. "There was no wealth before capitalism." "The Enlightenment caused progress."

7. If no there is little historical empiricism to this, there is a strong emphasis on "watertight arguments" (as Arendt puts it). The vocabulary of logical argumentation, allied to axiomatic assumptions -- including about race -- replaces the analysis of concrete evidence.

8. It is as if logic were all one needed to reconstruct the past, as if one could argue one's way out of looking at sources in detail. As if logicking one's way to history with a handful of "scientific" truths provided a more satisfying account. Which is exactly what it does.

9. And the prominent exponents of this tendency are a mishmash of scientists-at-large, quasi-scientific academics-turned-public intellectuals, and scientistic media boosters, all flogging generically similar keys-to-all-history as vital ideas in urgent need of airtime.

10. My methodological training and my disposition as a historian make me think Arendt's division of science from scientists a tad too neat. But her recognition of scientists as no less subject to the sway of ideologies than anyone else, as obvious as it should be, is invaluable.

11. Perhaps more contentiously, I'll also say that *some* of the same concerns give me pause about "Big History", where -- again -- so much emphasis seems to fall on totalizing explanatory potential, and so much stress on "sources" or claims that historians can't easily question.

12. And about the "Big Ideas" industry in popular history and popular science alike, where the promise of unlocking the secrets of the universe for all time with one simple key is a marketing tool. This has become the way we're told to talk (down) to publics. It needn't be.

*than

*were