Gobineau’s actual racial pessimism contradicts his Nazi appropriation

Evidence

Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (2 volumes, 1853–5) is much cited, especially by those who have not read it. However, though the Nazi theorists presented a triumphalist version of history in which the superior Aryan was predestined to dominate inferior races, Gobineau’s own view was different. He believed that the Aryans were doomed by centuries of miscegenation and that ‘Humanity’s best days are already behind us.’ Though Gobineau and Renan were both racists, they were at opposite poles of a racist spectrum, for, while Renan thought that racial admixture was not a bad thing, Gobineau thought it to be the source of all evil. Unlike the proto-Nazis and Nazis, Gobineau actually admired the Jews for, among other things, their racial exclusiveness. Furthermore, unlike most racists, including British and French racists, he was anticolonialist, as he regarded colonialism as just another symptom of racial and cultural decay. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 302

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the general historiographic problem of how ideas get repurposed — cf. Said’s careless genealogy of Orientalism mentioned in the same chapter.
• SHARE: Send to anyone who casually cites ‘Gobineau the Nazi precursor’ — the real text is an anti-progress, anti-colonial jeremiad.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Gobineau’s pessimist, even pro-Jewish text become cited as proto-Nazi triumphalism? The reception history is a study in misreading.

Related

• Gobineau invented racism by projecting his caste’s decline onto civilization’s fate. (similarity 0.80)
• Some nineteenth-century racists predicted non-white domination (similarity 0.78)