The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern
egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How
should we make sense of this paradox? The Color of Equality is the
first book to investigate both the inclusive language of common humanity
and the hierarchical language of race in Enlightenment thought, seeking
to understand how eighteenth-century thinkers themselves made sense of
these tensions. Using three major Enlightenment encyclopedias from
England, France, and Switzerland, the book provides a rich
contextualization of the conflicting ideas of equality and race in
eighteenth-century thought.
Enlightenment thinkers used physical features to categorize humanity
into novel racial groups in a discourse that was imbued with Eurocentric
aesthetic and moral judgments. Simultaneously, however, these very same
thinkers politicized equality by putting it to new uses, such as a
vitriolic denunciation of slavery and inhumane treatment that was
grounded in the nascent philosophy of human rights. Vartija contends
that the tension between Enlightenment ideas of race and equality can
best be explained by these thinkers' attempt to provide a naturalistic
account of humanity, including both our physical and moral attributes.
Enlightenment racial classification fits into the novel inclusion of
humanity in histories of nature, while the search for the origins of
morality in social experience alone lent equality a normative authority
it had not previously possessed.
Eschewing straightforward approbation or blame of the Enlightenment,
The Color of Equality demonstrates that our present-day thinking about
human physical and cultural diversity continues to be deeply informed by
an eighteenth-century European intellectual revolution with global
ramifications.
