UDC

94(4)+323.14

DOI

10.17238/issn2227-6564.2019.2.5

Authors

Nikolay V. Lepetukhin
Ivanovo State Polytechnic University;
Sheremetevskiy prosp. 21, Ivanovo, 153000, Russian Federation;
e-mail: lepetukhin5@mail.ru

Abstract

This article considers two racial theories that were formulated in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. Their authors – French aristocrat Joseph Arthur Gobineau and British-born German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain – used a similar conceptual apparatus and method of identifying the fundamental forces that determine the course of human history, but differed in the purposes (meanings) of the dynamics of society. Racism, in our opinion, is a conscious life stance, a strong belief in the superiority of one race over another. This way of thinking and acting lacks true scientific basis, but is useful for certain political ideologies and politicians proclaiming their conservative views and messianism. In Germany, racism received firm state support during the country’s struggle for world supremacy, from the moment of the unified state creation to World War II. Gobineau’s racial theory presented in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races shocked the German reader of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, evoking pessimistic and even apocalyptic moods in the public as the book forebode the death of human civilization caused by continual and uncontrolled mixing of unequal races. This racist motif was picked up by Chamberlain, whose The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century offered precise answers to the questions posed by Gobineauism and gave the “pure” and “chosen” Germans hope for the future and optimism, provided that they abide by certain racial laws. Both these theories were actively employed in the propaganda of Pan-Germanism and nationalism in Germany during that period, borrowing their pessimistic and optimistic messages. This article combines the traditional for historical science methods of narrative analysis of written sources with the phenomenological interpretation of the origins of political ideology, which can be viewed as a conglomerate of symbols (including pseudoscientific) convenient and useful for state propaganda.

Keywords

racism, optimism in racism, pessimism in racism, political ideology, J.A. Gobineau, H.S. Chamberlain

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