Anglo-Saxonism was a racial ideology framing English liberties as biologically inherited
Evidence
- For a rather succinct treatment of Anglo-Saxonism as an ideology, see L. P. Curtis, Jr., op. cit., pp. 10–14. Briefly Curtis identifies the ideology with “1. an identifiable and historically authenticated race or people known as the Anglo-Saxons who shared common ties of blood, language, geographical origin, and culture … traced right back to the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons … between the Baltic and the Black Forest. 2. Civil and religious liberties enjoyed … in predominantly Anglo-Saxon societies … attributable to the peculiar genius of the Anglo-Saxons in political affairs. 3. a combination of virtues and talents which made them superior in all important respects to any other comparable racial or cultural group in the world. 4. Such specifically Anglo-Saxon attributes as reason, restraint, self control, love of freedom and hatred of anarchy, respect for law and distrust of enthusiasm were actually transmissible from one generation … to the next in a kind of biologically determined entailed inheritance. 5. threats … of racial deterioration through the strains and pressures of a highly urbanized and industrialized society, or of ‘race suicide’ through a deliberate limitation of family size, or of the adulteration and contamination of Anglo-Saxon blood by mixture with ‘foreign’ blood, whether that of the Irish, Jews, Italians, French, and so on” (pp. 11–12). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1580
Categorization
- DEFINE: Provides Curtis’s five-part definition of Anglo-Saxonism as an ideology: genealogical race claim, liberty attributed to racial genius, superiority, biological transmission of character, and fears of deterioration.