Gobino, Joseph Arthur de

Joseph Arthur de Gobino came from a noble family ^[7] . In 1830 he began his studies at the Biel gymnasium (Switzerland, the canton of Bern ), where he mastered the German language and became interested in Persian. In 1835 he arrived in Paris . He worked as an employee in the French gas lighting company, then in the post office, at the same time moonlighting as a journalist and literary worker. In 1843 he met Alexis de Tocqueville , with whom he had friendly relations, which lasted until the death of the latter in 1859. In 1849, Tocqueville, who briefly held the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, takes him into the service as the head of his office. At the same time, he is the founder and editor of the monarchical journal Provincial Review and publishes his poem Amandina, which first laid down the foundations of his elitist racial theory ^[8] . After the resignation of Tocqueville, Gobino is in the diplomatic service, being the first secretary and then head of diplomatic missions in Bern , Hanover , Frankfurt , Tehran , Athens , Rio de Janeiro and Stockholm . However, he did not become an ambassador and was forced to resign prematurely.

The activity of Gobino was not limited to the field of diplomacy: he was a talented writer who spoke in various genres: short stories, novels, poems, dramas ^[9] . He wrote works on the history of the East and left the linguistic "Treatise on cuneiforms." Gobino's journalistic activity was also active. He was fond of sculpture. His main work, the four-volume Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of human races, 1853, 1855), was not successful during his lifetime. Contemporaries hardly noticed his work ^[10] .

In 1876 he met with the composer R. Wagner (father-in-law of H. S. Chamberlain ), who approved his ideas and contributed to their dissemination ^{[11] [12]} . So, in the early 1880s. Wagner stated that their visions of the past and the future are completely compatible, for the scientific work of Gobino gave a scientific explanation of his own racial ideas. Despite criticism, his works were generally welcomed by F. Nietzsche ^{[13] [14]} . Romain Rolland noted in Gobino "the giftedness of the thinker and artist" ^[15] .

His last published work was the Amadis tragedy, partially published in 1876, and published in its entirety in 1887, devoted to the eschatological conflict between the “white” and “yellow” races.

Joseph Arthur de Gobino died on October 13, 1882 in the city of Turin .

Joseph-Arthur de Gobino left a mark on the history of social thought as one of the founders of modern racist ideology . Gobino was essentially the first in the 19th century to formulate in an expanded form the objective thesis of racial inequality as an explanatory principle for historical development, thus reflecting the subjective spiritual assessment of equality as an idea humiliating for a person. Gobino identified equality with the triumph of mediocrity, averaging, sameness, grayness. Thus, racism in Gobino is an integral part of his elitist worldview. All forms of equality can cause disgust, but racial inequality seems to be the most fundamental, initial and primary, from it, according to Gobino, all other hierarchies flow.

The central problem that Gobino poses and seeks to solve in his main work is the problem of the decline and death of various civilizations. Initially, the concept of Gobino as the main subject of consideration and the main subject of the historical process is the race , or, which is a synonym for Gobino, an ethnic group . In his opinion, not social institutions determine the vital activity of races (ethnic groups), but, on the contrary, races determine social institutions. Institutions that are not consistent with the underlying tendencies of race are not vaccinated unless racial mixing occurs. As a result, Gobino denies the civilizing role of world religions, for example, Christianity , which, being perceived by a variety of peoples, cannot by itself shake their deep characteristics and inclinations.

In interpreting the origin of human races, Gobino gravitates to a polygenetic concept , according to which different races have different origins. However, he expresses his commitment to the polygenetic concept very carefully.

The skin color serves as the basis for Gobino to distinguish three main races: white , yellow and black . Gobino considers these races as a three-level hierarchical ladder with a white race at the top and a black one at the bottom. Inside the white race, the highest place is occupied, according to Gobino, by the “ Aryans ”. Races, in his opinion, are distinguished by the constancy and indestructibility of physical and spiritual traits; the white race surpasses the rest in physical strength, beauty, perseverance, etc. But the most important criterion for a place in the racial hierarchy is intelligence .

The real existence of the three "pure" racial types of Gobino relates to the distant past. Thus, “pure” primordial races have long ceased to exist, and in the modern era there are racial types mixed countless times among themselves. The concept of "race" in Gobino comes from narrow anthropological definitions, getting a symbolic meaning.

Gobino seeks to discover internal, "natural laws governing the social world" that are unchanged. These two laws, according to Gobino, are the laws of repulsion and attraction between the human races. The fatal phenomenon of mixing separated races and their innumerable combinations acts as a concretization of these "laws". Mixing is a necessary source of the emergence and development of civilizations (with the obligatory participation of the "white" race), but in the future it is the cause of their degeneration.

The thesis of the pernicious nature of racial mixtures determines the anti-colonialist position of Gobino, since the colonial seizures, in his opinion, contribute to mixtures and, consequently, the degeneration of European civilization.

In interpreting the fate of civilizations, the fatalism of Gobino is closely connected with pessimism . He states the degeneration of European civilization and prophesies its near end. Gobino denies the existence of social progress and believes that European civilization is largely moving along the path of regression.

Fatalism and pessimism of Gobino excluded the practical use of racist postulates, for which he criticized Houston Chamberlain .

Slavs

According to Gobino, the Slavs, who were once in ancient times a white Aryan people, "went to the north-east of our continent and entered into a destructive neighborhood with the Finns"; “The Slavic language, which has common tribal features of the Aryan languages, was subjected to strong Finnish influence. As for the external signs, they also approached the Finnish type. ” Gobino attributed the Slavs passivity “as a result of a large proportion of yellow blood”, and compared the Slavic and Semitic peoples ^[16] :

In Eastern Europe, the Slavs performed the same function of long and silent, but inevitable influence, which the Semites took on in Asia. Like the latter, they created a standing swamp, in which, after short victories, more and more developed ethnic groups drowned.

Joseph de Gobino also held his views in fiction , emphasizing sharply depicting the class struggle, while taking the side of the aristocracy. Being an orientalist on hobbies, Gobino transmits “couleur locale” in “Asian Short Stories”, his “Tifen Abbey”, “Renaissance”. Gobino is a student of Stendhal and Merime .

Fame and recognition came to Gobino only after his death and at first not in his homeland, but in Germany . The “Gobino Society” was founded in Germany in 1894 , the number of members in which reached 360 in 1914. The founder of this society, Ludwig Sheman, played a particularly active role in spreading gobinism in Germany, having published a number of Gobino's writings and studies about it ^[17] . In 1897-1900, for the first time, he published the Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in German , and also wrote a two-volume biography of Gobino (1913-1916). National Socialist theorists rated this work so highly that specially selected fragments from it were published in the 30s in popular anthologies about races and even cited in school textbooks. Thus, the ideas of Gobino came in handy in the ideology of the Third Reich and served to form a Nazi racial policy , although he was not, like XC Chamberlain , elevated to the rank of “national thinker”.

The Gobino theory in the German version was known to some influential politicians and ideologists of Japan and became an integral part of the Japanese imperialist worldview. Gobino's ideas were spread in Japan, where he was introduced to by a writer from Mori , a student in Germany who noted that studying his theory was very useful to know more about the thinking of a Western opponent, and criticized Gobino for excessive ethnocentrism and reducing human culture to the influence of heredity. In November 1903, he gave a lecture at Waseda University on Western views on the “yellow threat”, in which, in particular, he said: “Whether we like it or not, we are doomed to confront the white race” ^[18] .

• Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the inequality of human races, 1853 , 1855 )
• Abbaye des Typhaines (Tifen Abbey, from the era of the uprising of the communes of the XII century , 1867 ).
• Les Pléiades (Pleiades, 1878 );
• Nouvelles Asiatiques, 1876 .
• Histoire d'Ottar Jarl, 1879 .
• La Renaissance (Savonarole, César Borgia), 1877 .
• Alexandre (Alexander the Great).
• Amadis, 1876.
• Etudes critiques ( 1844 - 1848 ), P., Sim. Kra, 1927 .
• Kandahar lovers, translated by I. Mandelstam, ed. The Book Corner, P., 1923 .
• Lovers from Kandahar, Guise, M., 1926 .
• The Great Sorcerer, translation by R. Ivnev , Guise, M., 1926 .
• Kretzer E., A. Graf v. Gobineau, Lpz., 1902 .
• The magazine "Europe" from 1 / X- 1923 (article and detailed bibliography).
• Schemann CL, Quellen und Untersuchungen zum Leben Gobineaus, 2 Bde, 1919 .
• Lange M., Le comte A. de Gobineau, étude biographique et critique, 1924 .

• Hoffman A. B. Elitism and racism (criticism of the philosophical and historical views of A. de Gobino) // Races and peoples. - 1977. - Vol. 7 . - S. 128-142 .
• Lepetukhin N.V. Theories of racism in the social and political life of Western Europe in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries: J.-A. Gobino, G. Lebon, H.-S. Chamberlain. - Ivanovo: PresSto, 2013 .-- 148 p. - ISBN 978-5-905908-36-1 .
• Tagieff P.-A. . Color and blood. French Theories of Racism = La couleur et le sang doctrines racistes a la francaise. - M .: Ladomir , 2009 .-- 240 p. - ISBN 978-5-86218-473-0 .

• Polina Fedotova. Racial dialectics of Arthur Gobino // Website of the Movement for the Revival of Russian Science. 02/05/2009.
• Gobineau works in the Gutenberg project
• Works by or about Arthur de Gobineau at Internet Archive
• Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de: Encyclopædia Iranica
• Joseph-Arthur (Comte de) Gobineau: UQAC

The article uses the text of A. Shabad , which passed into the public domain . The article is based on the materials of the Literary Encyclopedia of 1929-1939 .