Eighteenth-century thinkers believed racial variety coexisted with human unity.

Evidence

In France, where the problem of black tribes had been met with the desire to assimilate and educate, the great scientist Leclerc de Buffon had given a first classification of races which, based upon the European peoples and classifying all others by their differences, had taught equality by strict juxtaposition. The eighteenth century, to use Tocqueville’s admirably precise phrase, “believed in the variety of races but in the unity of the human species.” In Germany, Herder had refused to apply the “ignoble word” race to men, and even the first cultural historian of mankind to make use of the classification of different species, Gustav Klemm, still respected the idea of mankind as the general framework for his investigations. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 469

Categorization

• XREF: Directly frames the pre-race-thinking baseline that later Islamophobia-era constructions of the Other depart from.
• CANDY: Tocqueville’s phrase ‘believed in the variety of races but in the unity of the human species’ and Herder refusing the ‘ignoble word’ race are compact, quotable historical tidbits.