Product Description
Title : RAZZISMO. UN’ORIGINE ILLUMINISTA
The essay thoroughly investigates the origins and reasons for the myth of race in occidental culture.
Maker of product: Marco Marsilio
Format: 17X24
n° pages: 192
gennaio 2006
For more than two centuries, racism has represented the most dangerous infection of the spirit in western culture. The trauma of Nazism has generated an almost monothematic reflection centred on the Shoa. This essay attempts to reconstruct the history of the myth of race more thoroughly, identifying the roots of a new attitude towards humankind in the philosophers who founded modern thought. It has often been pointed out how in seeking to reject racism, western culture has claimed to never have been racist, passing all responsibility on Nazism in particular, as though it were an accident of history. Looking back over the philosophical premises of biological racism, however, we on the contrary find robust origins in Enlightenment thought: man’s insertion into the sphere of natural history, the classification of the species, the criticism of biblical doctrine of the common origin of humanity. On this ground grew and developed positivism, anthropometric measuring, and the birth of new disciplines which were to give scientific dignity to racism. Man’s reduction to a solely material and quantifiable dimension, the deification of reason, the technological paradigm taken as criterion of truth, against the backdrop of a constant antichristian polemic, are the guiding thread of racist culture which with the discovery of the laws of genetics associated with evolutionism, were to produce the most tragic outcomes of eugenics.