The Color of Equality - (Intellectual History of the Modern Age) by Devin J Vartija (Hardcover)

About the Book

As our understanding of the Enlightenment has become more capacious, it makes it difficult to disentangle the messy history of Enlightenment, equality, and racial classification. This book aims to make sense of this complicated history by searching for the ways in which equality and race, human sameness and difference, may have been linked in Enlightenment thought. How was the tension between these ideas dealt with and possibly resolved? And what do transformations in thinking about equality and race tell us about the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement? To address these questions, Vartija has chosen three influential Enlightenment encyclopedias as his main corpus of primary sources: Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (London, 1728), Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopâedie (Paris, 1751-1765), and Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice's Encyclopâedie d'Yverdon (Yverdon, 1770-1775) --

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"This book is a valuable contribution to the study of Enlightenment thought, valuable partly because it refuses to take a side 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment's approach to racializing of humans. Vartija has parsed out why the Enlightenment remains a significantly important era for examination. By examining facets of intellectuals' concerns, Vartija has shown us that any easy tendency to embrace or to dismiss Enlightenment philosophy misses a key point about legacies of Enlightenment...Vartija is to be commended for taking on such a project as this."-- "The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer"

"In this timely, thoroughly documented, and well-argued book, Devin J. Vartija takes on one of the enduring paradoxes of intellectual history: why is the Enlightenment seen as the origin of modern egalitarianism even as it is understood as a source of scientific racism?...Vartija's book presents the Enlightenment in its complexity, multiplicity and heterogeneity. The Color of Equality provides an exceptional model for locating the inherent intellectual tensions that the Enlightenment embodies and addressing the problematic interpretive legacies that it leavesin its wake."-- "Cromohs"

"It is hard to imagine a more timely and significant book. In this compelling study, Devin J. Vartija not only unpacks the complex history of race as a category but also shows its sometimes surprising connection to equality in a century that was crucial to the articulation of both. As a consequence, our modern challenges become more comprehensible and, we can hope, all the more surmountable."-- "Lynn Hunt, author of Inventing Human Rights: A History"

About the Author

Devin J. Vartija is Assistant Professor of History at Utrecht University.