Arthur de Gobineau begins publication of his…
1853 CE
Gobineau has come to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions among the three races—"black", "white", and "yellow"—are natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos.
Of the three races, Gobineau argues that blacks are physically very strong, but incapable of intelligent thought.
Regarding the "yellows" as Gobineau called Asians, he claims that they are physically and intellectually mediocre, but have an extremely strong materialism that allows them to achieve certain results.
Finally, Gobineau writes that whites are the best and greatest of the three races as whites and whites alone are the only ones capable of intelligent thought, are physically the most beautiful and are the only ones capable of creating beauty.
Gobineau writes that "The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength" and that whatever of the positive qualities the Asians and blacks possess is due to subsequent miscegenation.
Within the white race, there is a further subdivision between the Aryans, who are the epitome of all that was great about the white race, and non-Aryans.
Gobineau takes the term Aryan ("light one" or "noble one") from Hindu legend and mythology, which describes how the Indian subcontinent was conquered at some time in the distant past by the Aryans.
This is generally believed to have reflected folk memories of the arrival of the Indo-European peoples into the Indian subcontinent.
In the nineteenth century, there has been much public interest in the discovery by Orientalists like William Jones of the Indo-European family of languages, and that apparently unrelated languages such as English, Irish, Albanian, Italian, Greek, Russian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Kurdish, Farsi and so forth are all part of the same family of languages spoken across a wide swath of Eurasia from Ireland to India.
The ancient Hindu scriptures with their tales of Aryan heroes are of major interest to scholars attempting to trace the origins of the Indo-European peoples.
Gobineau equates language with race, and mistakenly believes that the Indo-European peoples are a racial group rather than a linguistic group.
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