Racialising Civilisation: Phrenology, Scientific Naturalism and the Colonist's Dilemma

Philippe Xing, Department of International History, LSE

Recent revelations of the entanglement between international thought and the race question notwithstanding, historical IR has surprisingly little to say on the making of “race” in the first place. Drawing on phrenological scientists from 1820-1840 as international thinkers in their own rights, I argue that a significant, yet understudied history of international thought was the racialisation of the 19th-century international discourse of “civilisation”. Countering the enlightenment civilisationist worldviews which posited human as universally amenable to civilisation, phrenologists played a crucial role in constructing civilisation as racially/biologically determined. Epistemologically, this involved a shift from the enlightenment assumption of human exceptionalism to the new phrenological doctrine of scientific naturalism. While the former assumption posited humans as universally capable of transcending nature, and by definition, reaching civilisation, the new phrenologically-based doctrine aspired to render human and her moral qualities as fundamentally a product of the organic natural laws. The racialisation of civilisation by phrenologists was constructed in significant ways as a response to an inter-societal dilemma, to reconcile the old civilisationist world-making model with the enduring failure of civilising mission in the colonies. Apart from their global fame and success, with Combe’s landmark work Constitution of Man as one of the most popular books throughout the 19th century selling over 350,000 copies, phrenological thinkers, including Franz Josef Gall, Paul Spurzheim and in particular, George Combe left an impact that is impossible to overstate on canonical thinkers in social sciences today, not least Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. As founders of the modern discipline of social sciences, these two thinkers were profoundly shaped by their encounters with phrenology. The legacy of phrenology was decisive for the emergence of a racialised worldview in the latter half of the 19th century, and far reaching in terms of their legacy on modern social sciences, including IR.

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 Presented in Session 106. Theoretical Perspectives on Race