Renan’s exceptionalism located man’s freedom precisely in his scholarly-imposed chains

Evidence

Note how productivity and dissemination are not the functions aided, but rather internal change, and a subsidiary one at that. … “Man,” he says at the end of the same essay, “belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself before all, since before all he is a free being and a moral one.” Man was free and moral, but enchained by race, history, and science as Renan saw them, conditions imposed by the scholar on man. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 378

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the coercion-through-nominal-freedom pattern the reader will meet in later Orientalism critiques and in Foucault’s discipline.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 378