Scientists absorbed ideology and became preachers, not a cause of race-thinking

Evidence

Their scientific aspect is secondary and arises first from the desire to provide watertight arguments, and second because their persuasive power also got hold of scientists, who no longer were interested in the result of their research but left their laboratories and hurried off to preach to the multitude their new interpretations of life and world. We owe it to these “scientific” preachers rather than to any scientific findings that today no single science is left into whose categorical system race-thinking has not deeply penetrated. This again has made historians, some of whom have been tempted to hold science responsible for race-thinking, mistake certain either philological or biological research results for causes instead of consequences of race-thinking. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 433

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the causation historians assume — race-thinking causes scientific findings rather than vice versa — a genealogical move echoing Foucault’s genealogy of race discourse.