Philology’s elite esotericism served as a vehicle for racial hierarchies

Evidence

That he should choose to fashion such a relationship on the basis of the least immediate of all intellectual disciplines (philology), the one with the least degree of apparent popular relevance, the most conservative and the most traditional, suggests the extreme deliberateness of Renan’s position. For he did not really speak as one man to all men but rather as a reflective, specialized voice that took, as he put it in the 1890 preface, the inequality of races and the necessary domination of the many by the few for granted as an antidemocratic law of nature and society. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 355

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s broader Orientalism argument about knowledge-production masking power; also to Gramsci’s hegemony insofar as a specialized learned class naturalizes domination.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Renan’s ‘antidemocratic law of nature and society’ prefigure later race science and its institutional carriers?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 355