Alexander von Humboldt on race: Beyond the Kantian frame

This article concerns the question of race in late Enlightenment German philosophy and makes the case for why we in that context should reconsider the writings of Alexander von Humboldt in the philosophical canon. Contrary to many other authors who wrote on both natural history and politics in the late Enlightenment, Humboldt produced both a scientific and a political critique of then-contemporaneous natural historical conceptions of race. I give an account of these by analysing his reflections on the concepts of race and species in the first volume of the popular scientific work Cosmos (1845). I also show how Humboldt combined a critique of the pseudo-scientific concepts of race that sustain biological racialism with a diagnostic of the juridical and political reality of racial divides that came to be instituted by the colonial systems of governance and slave-labour in plantation economies. This latter aspect is found in the demographic discussions in his so-called political essays on the Kingdom of New Spain and Cuba (1808–10, 1825–26). The dual perspective onto race theory on the one hand and practices of racialisation on the other makes Humboldt a particularly interesting case to consider in a moment where critical histories of philosophy are re-examining both effects of racialisation and conceptions of race in the history of philosophy. I argue that attending to authors like Humboldt offers one fruitful way to counter two distinct problems that arise from what I call the ‘Kantian frame’ within discussions of Enlightenment race theory and racism: on the one hand that of an overly individualist conception of racism and on the other that of the absence within Kant’s own corpus of expressed links between the theory of race and the practices of racial domination.