Hereditarian ideology and European constructions of race
Hereditary statuses versus the rise of individualism
Inheritance as the basis of individual social position is an ancient tenet of human history, extending to some point after the beginnings of agriculture (about 10,000 bce). Expressions of it are found throughout the world in kinship-based societies where genealogical links determine an individual’s status, rights, and obligations. Wills and testaments capture this principle, and caste systems, such as that of India, reflect the expression of another form of this principle, buttressed by religious beliefs. Arguments for the divine right of kings and succession laws in European societies mirrored deep values of hereditary status.
But many trends in European cultural history over the 18th and 19th centuries contradicted the idea of social placement by kinship fiat. Ever since the enclosure movement in England in the 15th century, the transformation to wage labour, the rise of merchant capitalism, and the entry into public consciousness of the significance of private property, Europeans have been conditioned to the values of individualism and of progress through prosperity. Wage labour strengthened ideas of individual freedom and advancement. The philosophy of autonomous individualism took root in western European societies, beginning first in England, and became the engine of social mobility in these rapidly changing areas. For their descendants in America, the limitations of hereditary status were antithetical to the values of individual freedom, at least freedom for those of European descent.
Reflecting and promoting these values were the works of some of the Enlightenment writers and philosophers, including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Montesquieu. Their writings had a greater impact on Americans than on their compatriots. Their advocacy of human freedom and the minimal intrusion of government was uniquely interpreted by Americans.
European societies had long been structured into class divisions that had a strong hereditary basis, but the gulf between those who benefited from overseas trade and the impoverished masses who competed for low-paying jobs or survived without work in the gutters of towns and cities widened dramatically during the age of empire building. In France the dissatisfaction of the masses erupted periodically, reaching a peak in the French Revolution of 1789, which overthrew the Bourbon monarch and brought Napoleon I to power.
As early as the turn of the 18th century, some intellectuals were concerned with these seething class conflicts that occasionally burst forth into violence in France. Henri de Boulainvilliers, a French count whose works were published in the 1720s and ’30s, put forth an argument designed to justify the dominance of the aristocratic classes in France. He maintained that the noble classes were originally Germanic Franks who conquered the inferior Gauls, Romans, and others and established themselves as the ruling class. The Franks derived their superiority from German forebears, who were a proud, freedom-loving people with democratic institutions, pure laws, and monogamous marriage. They were great warriors, disciplined and courageous, and they ruled by the right of might. According to Boulainvilliers, they carried and preserved their superiority in their blood. With this argument, hereditarian ideology intruded into the consciousness of France’s elite class and synthesized with a growing belief in “race” as the causal explanation for historical events.