Early race science was naive speculation, not deliberate ideology

Evidence

Such opinions, in themselves harmless, were advanced by the early anthropologists as starting points of their investigations. A typical instance is the naive hypothesis of Paul Broca, noted French anthropologist of the middle of the last century, who assumed that “the brain has something to do with race and the measured shape of the skull is the best way to get at the contents of the brain” (quoted after Jacques Barzun, op. cit., p. 162). It is obvious that this assertion, without the support of a conception of the nature of man, is simply ridiculous. As for the philologists of the early nineteenth century, whose concept of “Aryanism” has seduced almost every student of racism to count them among the propagandists or even inventors of race-thinking, they are as innocent as innocent can be. When they overstepped the limits of pure research it was because they wanted to include in the same cultural brotherhood as many nations as possible. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2243

Categorization

• XREF: Distinguishes the ‘harmless hypothesis of race’ from racial ideology as an instrument of domination — the exact distinction the field needs before reading Orientalism; connects to the intellectual-history method of the Islamophobia module. — connects to: Pre-Civil War race-thinking was vague and non-biological — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 69; Enlightenment race science was contradictory, not uniformly racist
• DEEPTHINKING: Arendt’s distinction between naive race-talk as mere hypothesis vs. race-thinking as ideology is a genuine conceptual tool — the boundary that separates pre-ideological curiosity from systematic exclusion.