Buffon’s assimilationism held the French Enlightenment’s moderate mainstream

Evidence

Voltaire was intellectually at odds with naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, who adopted the name Buffon. Buffon headed the moderate mainstream of the French Enlightenment through his encyclopedic Histoire naturelle (Natural history), which appeared in forty-five volumes over fifty-five years beginning in 1749. Nearly every European intellectual read them. And while Voltaire promoted segregationist thinking, Buffon remained committed to assimilationist ideas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 210

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Enlightenment abolitionist thinkers were not antiracist or anticolonial
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Enlightenment abolitionist thinkers were not antiracist or anticolonial

Broader Connections

• Enlightenment abolitionist thinkers were not antiracist or anticolonial #complicates (0.72)