Polygenism destroyed natural law as the bond uniting all peoples
Evidence
The first of these was represented by the polygenists who, challenging the Bible as a book of pious lies, denied any relationship between human “races”; their main achievement was the destruction of the idea of the natural law as the uniting link between all men and all peoples. Although it did not stipulate predestined racial superiority, polygenism arbitrarily isolated all peoples from one another by the deep abyss of the physical impossibility of human understanding and communication. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 471
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines polygenism as the doctrine denying common human descent and instead isolating races as separate species — a core vocabulary term for the field.
- XREF: Connects to later race-thinking readings that build on the collapse of a shared natural-law humanity as groundwork for exclusion. — connects to: Polygenism justified colonial intermarriage bans and mixed-race discrimination; Abandoning humanity’s common origin makes natural war between races plausible
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 471