Arthur de Gobineau

Life

• 1816: Born in Ville-d'Avray, France, into a royalist family.
• 1840s: Begins his literary career and works as a journalist.
• 1849: Appointed as a secretary to the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville.
• 1853-1855: Publishes his most famous work, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races).
• 1855-1877: Serves as a French diplomat in various posts, including Persia, Greece, and Brazil.
• 1882: Dies in Turin, Italy.

People Who Influenced Their Thought

• Georges Cuvier: Influenced by Cuvier's scientific classifications and theories of separate species origins.
• Alexis de Tocqueville: His employer and intellectual mentor, though Gobineau rejected Tocqueville's democratic ideals.
• Friedrich Schlegel: Drew upon German Romantic ideas about national spirit and cultural uniqueness.
• Orientalists of his era: His diplomatic postings, particularly in Persia, shaped his views on the distinctiveness and hierarchy of civilizations.

Main Ideas and Publications

• Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853-1855): His seminal four-volume work arguing that race is the primary driver of human history and civilization.
• Aryan Master Race Theory: Proposed that the "Aryan" race (embodied by Germanic peoples) was the sole founder of all great civilizations and that racial mixing leads to civilizational decay.
• Racial Determinism: Argued that the rise and fall of civilizations are determined by the purity or degeneration of their racial stock, not by economic, political, or environmental factors.
• Pessimistic Historicism: Held a fatalistic view that the degeneration of the "Aryan" race through mixing made civilizational decline inevitable.

Controversies around his main work or thought

• Scientific Racism: His work is considered a foundational text of modern scientific racism, using a pseudo-scientific framework to justify racial hierarchy.
• Rejection by Contemporaries: His theories were largely rejected by the French intellectual establishment of his time, including by his mentor Tocqueville, who criticized his deterministic and anti-liberal conclusions.
• Misappropriation by Later Movements: Although Gobineau was not explicitly antisemitic and was a monarchist rather than a nationalist, his "Aryan" theory was later adopted and twisted by pan-Germanists, völkisch movements, and ultimately the Nazis to justify their ideologies and policies.

Key People Influenced by Their Thought

• Richard Wagner: The composer became a fervent admirer, and Gobineau's ideas became central to the Bayreuth Circle.
• Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Directly expanded upon Gobineau's racial theories, adding a more explicit antisemitic dimension in his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.
• Friedrich Nietzsche: Engaged critically with Gobineau's ideas, rejecting his racial determinism but was associated with him through his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, a prominent Gobineauist.
• The Nazi Ideologues: Figures like Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler used distorted versions of his "Aryan" master race theory as a core component of Nazi racial policy.

Legacy

He is remembered as the "father of racial demography" whose pessimistic theories, while largely ignored in his native France, became a cornerstone of later racialist and nationalist ideologies, most infamously providing a pseudo-intellectual basis for Nazism.