Gobineau predated Darwinism by reducing history to natural scientific law

Evidence

Gobineau demonstrated precisely such a law. Without Darwinism or any other evolutionist theory to influence him, this historian boasted of having introduced history into the family of natural sciences, detected the natural law of all courses of events, reduced all spiritual utterances or cultural phenomena to something “that by virtue of exact science our eyes can see, our ears can hear, our hands can touch.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 457

Categorization

• XREF: Race-thinking based on ‘natural’ laws of history precedes biological/scientific racism — relevant because Islamophobia field distinguishes culturalist racism (inherent ways of life) from scientific racism. — connects to: Gilded Age social Darwinism and ‘network effects’ both excuse capitalist concentration as fate — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 340
• QUESTION: Gobineau’s reduction of culture to what ‘science can see and touch’ — the claim that race reduces cultural/spiritual phenomena to natural materiality — deserves a closer read as a mechanism for how race-thinking naturalizes culture.