Where Did Hegel Go Wrong on Race?

Abstract

Where exactly did Hegel go wrong on race? Moellendorf helpfully tells us that Hegel's treatment of race begins systematically in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and that he went wrong philosophically in the use of the biological category of race. This is basically correct but requires precisification. This article considers why Hegel's category of race is not unambiguously biological. Race's biological status can be problematized from the standpoint of contemporary biology and from the standpoint of Hegel's system. The textual placement of Hegel's systematic discussion of race in the philosophy of spirit makes clear that Hegel conceived of race in spiritual terms. Hegel took race to be a biospiritual category. Hegel was clearly committed to the now-controversial proposition that there is such a thing as human biological race, that there is a plurality of biological human races. He regarded race as a robust natural kind. His preferred list of races includes Caucasians, Negros, Mongolian, Malaysians and Americans. One noteworthy feature of his understanding of race's physical aspect was his focus on the formation of the skull and the face. At the same time, he clearly held that there were other deeper physical differences that accounted for the spiritual differences of race. Hegel was perfectly clear that race has a spiritual as well as physical aspect. He held that that the members of racial groups essentially shared certain fundamental, heritable, moral, intellectual and cultural characteristics with one another that they did not share with members of any other race and that these differences were such as to support an objective ranking. This shows that Hegel took the category of race to be the sort of category we today would characterize as ‘racialist’. Hegel's concept of race was the racialist concept of race.

I. Introduction

That Hegel held abominable views about race is uncontroversial (Bernasconi 1998, 2000, 2003, 2010; Hoffheimer 2001; James and Knappik 2023). That Hegel himself was a racist ought not to be controversial.¹ But where exactly did Hegel go wrong on race? In asking this question, we might mean (1) Where in his philosophical system did Hegel go wrong? Or we might mean (2) Where philosophically did Hegel go wrong? What fundamental philosophical mistake did Hegel make in connection with race? Moellendorf helpfully suggests a plausible answer to both questions. With respect to (1), he tells us that Hegel's systematic treatment of the ‘biological category of race’ begins in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (Moellendorf 1992: 243).² Provided what Moellendorf means by his reference to ‘the biological category of race’ is that Hegel's category of race is one that we (in the twentieth or twenty-first century) would regard as biological, this is correct. The specific place in the system where Hegel began to go wrong on race was in Section 1 of the third volume of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences.³ That is by no means the only place where he went awry. Hegel also expressed—and elaborated—wrongheaded views on race in his lectures on the Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Right and History of Philosophy.⁴ The degree to which Hegel's views on race infect the rest of his philosophy is a matter of intense scholarly debate.⁵

With respect to (2), where philosophically Hegel went wrong, Moellendorf suggests that it was in his use of the ‘biological category of race’. This, too, is correct, but potentially misleading and less than maximally precise. It could mislead us into thinking that Hegel's category of race can be thought to be unambiguously biological. And it could leave us wondering whether Hegel went wrong (a) in the specific use he made of a category of race that can be regarded as biological or (b) simply in using a race category that can be understood to be biological. The contemporary popularity of scepticism about biological race, the view that there are no human biological races, makes (b) an especially tempting option. I will suggest in Section IV that (b) is incorrect. But, before we can consider which, if either, of these two possibilities is correct, we need to interrogate the for us natural assumption that the category of race with which Hegel operated can be understood to be biological. I say this assumption is natural ‘for us’ because the notion that the category of race is biological is the ‘default’ position today. The current popularity of social constructionist conceptions of race notwithstanding (cf. Haslanger 2019), we (in the early twenty-first century) are at least initially disposed to think of race as a (putative) biological category. It must also be borne in mind that Moellendorf himself was writing some thirty years ago—before the most recent problematization of the idea of (human) race as a biological category had become widespread.⁶ But, however ‘natural’ it might be, the idea that the race category with which Hegel operated can be construed as ‘biological’ must be critically interrogated.

Section II explains why Hegel's concept of race cannot be taken to be unambiguously biological. Section III reconstructs Hegel's understanding of the biology of race. Section IV turns to the philosophy of race to consider where Hegel went wrong on race from a contemporary perspective. It introduces two non-racialist (non-essentialist and non-hierarchical) biological concepts of race as a way of showing that it is possible to reject Hegel's racialism without rejecting the idea of biological race as such. The discussion concludes in Section V.

II. Why Hegel's category of race is not unambiguously biological

One angle from which it is possible to question the idea that Hegel's category of race can be understood to be biological is provided by contemporary biology. It has been observed that, since the mid-twentieth century, no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category (Smith 2015). The biological—or, in any case, ‘natural’—credentials of the race concept, although not unquestioned in Hegel's time (see e.g., Herder (1784) and Forster (1786)), were more secure then than they are now.⁷ It is sometimes said that race today is an obsolete biological category; that race is to biology as phlogiston is to chemistry (Montagu 1962). This would suggest that Hegel went wrong on race in applying a biological category that is obsolete. But philosophers discussing the topic of race in human beings tend to forget that the concept of race has not been expunged from the vocabulary of contemporary biology. The notion is still thought to have application to various non-human biological species such as chimpanzees (Templeton 2013). So, the biological category of race as such is not obsolete. More plausible is the contention that what is obsolete is the idea that the category of biological race applies to human beings. This would suggest that Hegel's fundamental philosophical error in connection with race was applying an otherwise valid biological category to a species (Homo sapiens) to which it cannot be applied. On this view, Hegel's treatment of race as natural shipwrecks against the (putative) biological fact that the human race is not subdivided into biological races. (We will return to this idea below in Section IV.)

The biological status of the category of race can also be problematized from the standpoint of Hegel's system. A quick glance at the location of Hegel's initial systematic discussion of race makes clear that Hegel did not think of race as a biological-rather-than-spiritual category. Its placement in the Philosophy of Spirit (rather than the Philosophy of Nature) indicates that Hegel conceived of race in expressly spiritual (geistig) terms. The fact that the word ‘Rasse’ appears as (what we might call) a philosophically weight-bearing term in the discussion of spirit suggests that Hegel regarded ‘race’ as having an essential mental, spiritual or cultural dimension. Moreover, the specific use Hegel made of ‘Rasse’ makes it clear that he thought of race as a determination of Geist. This can be seen in his characterization of ‘racial variety’ (Rassenverschiedenheit) as an expression of the particularization of the ‘universal planetary life of the natural spirit’ (Enz.: §393; my emphasis).⁸ This remark indicates that Hegel took the diversity of the races in humankind—the putative fact that the species is divided into natural races—as an aspect of the life of what he called ‘natural spirit’ (Naturgeist). Hegel thought that human races were ‘natural spirits’, determinate natural ways in which spirit (singular) particularizes itself. Indeed, the precise context in the Encyclopaedia in which Hegel began his discussion of race, namely in the first subdivision (Natural Qualities) of the first division (The Natural Soul) of the first subsection (Anthropology) of the first section (Subjective Spirit) of the Philosophy of Spirit indicates that Hegel thought of race as the most basic ‘natural’ way in which spirit is divided.⁹ Hegel seems to have held that, philosophically speaking, spirit was subdivided into races from the start. This may help explain his otherwise puzzling indifference to what he called the merely ‘historical’ (historische) question concerning whether monogenesis (human beings descended from a single pair) or polygenesis (human beings were the result of several local creations) is true (GW 25.1: 33–34). Hegel appears to have been committed to the striking philosophical view that there is no spirit without natural racial differentiation, that spirit is (in this sense) essentially divided into biological or natural races.

Hegel referred explicitly to the ‘spiritual characteristics of the races [Characteristische des Geistigen der Racen]’ (GW 25.1: 35). He held that racial membership bears directly on straightforwardly spiritual traits such as the possession (or non-possession) of an ‘inner impulse [innern Trieb]’ toward culture (GW 25.1: 35), the presence or lack of ‘consciousness of personality [Bewußtsein von Persönlichkeit]’ (GW 25.1: 35), the grasp of the ‘universal’ [das Allgemeine]’ (GW 25.1: 35), and the attainment of ‘individual freedom [individuelle Freiheit]’ (GW 25.2: 612). Hegel contended that these and other spiritual traits are differentially distributed across racial groups. He seems to have assumed that the race to which you belong is very likely to determine your capacity for education and religion, your grasp of the universal, your attainment or non-attainment of true freedom, and so forth. He would likely have said that, if you belong to what he took to be the ‘Negro’ race, you will in all likelihood be immersed in uninterested and indifferent naiveté. You will be exceedingly unlikely to display an inner impulse to culture. Spirit will most probably be ‘entirely dormant’ in you. If, on the other hand, you belong to what he took to be the Caucasian race, it may be possible for you to achieve self-determination and self-development, to produce world-history and enjoy true freedom. Even if Hegel were to allow that there could be exceptional individual Negros who were philosophers (a biographical question about which I am unclear), he surely would have denied that this possibility was open to Negros in general.

A quick qualification. To say that Hegel took the category race to have a ‘spiritual dimension’ is not to say that he took the category to be straightforwardly spiritual. Race differs from straightforwardly spiritual categories which appear later in the system. Take, for example, ‘person’, a category that first appears in subsection A (Right) of Section II (Objective Spirit) of the Philosophy of Spirit (after spirit has placed itself into complete opposition to nature). ‘Person’ is a clear case of a category that is spiritual-and-not-biological. On the other hand, Persönlichkeit—personality—is not altogether free of conditioning by biological race. It is, to the contrary, inflected by race's biology.¹⁰ This can be seen in Hegel's view that race figures in the explanation of the degree to which different populations have attained the ‘consciousness of personality’ (Bewußtsein von Persönlichkeit). He held that the reason Negros had not attained this exalted level of consciousness lies in the limitations imposed by the natural determinations—what we today would call the ‘biology’—of their race.

But, if it would be a mistake to say that Hegel's category of race is best understood as a biological-rather-than-spiritual category, it would be no less of a mistake to think it is best understood as spiritual-rather-than-biological. Hegel did not, for example, think of races as identity groups constituted on ethno-linguistic rather than biological grounds (cf. Smith 2015). He did not think of race as exclusively cultural. The natural/organic connotations of the word ‘Rasse’ in German (both ordinary and philosophical) were fully present to him. So, we are entitled say that the category of race with which Hegel operated can be thought of as biological, provided we understand it to be a biological category with a spiritual aspect. Race, as found in Hegel could be more precisely characterized as a biospiritual (or biocultural) category—at least in human beings.¹¹ Hegel's category of race is philosophically amphibious. It has a life in the domain of nature (from which it was drawn) and in the domain of spirit (in which it unfolds). It straddles the two domains. This is not to say that the distinction between the natural and the spiritual is annulled when it comes to race. Nor is it to deny that there is a conceptual distinction to be made between some natural aspects and some spiritual aspects that are built into Hegel's concept of race. The metaphor is that race stands with one leg on the nature side of that distinction and with the other leg on the spirit side of that distinction. The image of straddling between X and Y preserves the basic distinction between them.¹²

III. Hegel on the biology of race

I do not think it overly anachronistic to say that Hegel was at least implicitly committed to the now-controversial proposition that there is such a thing as human biological race. That, indeed, is precisely the force of his Enz. §393 use of the term ‘Rassenverschiedenheit’. But about the details of the biology of race Hegel has remarkably little to say. This may reflect the circumstance that his discussion of race falls under the aegis of spirit rather than nature. It may well indicate that he was less interested in the details of what we would regard as the biology of race than we might expect him to be. His dismissal of the polygenesis/monogenesis debate as unphilosophical (GW 25.1: 33–34) appears to indicate that he regarded a detailed understanding of what we would regard as the biology of race to be unnecessary for a grasp of race's spiritual role. Nonetheless, to see where Hegel went wrong on race, we need some understanding of how he conceived of what we would regard as its biology. It will be necessary to piece together this understanding from scattered remarks.

First, Hegel took the circumstance that the human species could be objectively subdivided into a small number of well-defined, highly discrete smaller biologically or naturally defined groups that could properly be called ‘Rassen’ to be so obvious as to require no explicit statement. His considered position that natural racial differentiation results in profound spiritual differentiation indicates he took race to be what we would regard as a biologically significant category.

Hegel's preferred list of races is traditional. It includes the group that he, following Blumenbach, called the Caucasian (kaukasische) race (roughly Western Eurasians) (GW 25.1: 232). He also referred to this group as the European (europäische) and Germanic (germanische) race (GW 25.1: 612). He held that this group could be further subdivided into two smaller races, which he called ‘Near Asian’ (Vorder-Asiaten) (roughly Western Eurasians living to the east of Europe) and ‘European’ (Europäer) (roughly Western Eurasians living in Europe) (GW 25.1: 37). His list of races also included the group he variously referred to as the Ethiopian race (die aethiopische), the Negro race (Neger) and the African race (Afrikaner) (roughly, sub-Saharan Africans) (GW 25.1: 232). And it included the group he called the ‘Mongolian race’ (die Mongolische) (‘middle’ and ‘north’ Asians), also called Asian (Asiaten). Hegel appears to have taken this triad to constitute the races that most adequately embody and express the Concept in being fully determinate, that is, in having clearly defined boundaries. He also counted as races the less determinant group he called the ‘Malaysian race’ (malaische) (roughly, Oceanians) and the group he calls the ‘American race’ (die americanische) (roughly Amerindians) (GW 25.1: 232). It is clear that this list of (putative) races is recognizable as a list of races (that is, groups that can plausibly be regarded as races) from a contemporary point of view. Hegel's list corresponds quite well to contemporary commonsense specifications of which groups are races. Nor is this a chance correspondence. This classical way of dividing races, which Hegel takes over from Blumenbach, has helped to shape modern perceptions of race.¹³

Hegel thought that the division of the races (at least those of the old world) was necessary rather than contingent (James and Knappik 2023: 99, 100, 109, 110). He also presumably thought that the division of the human species into races was ‘complete’ in the sense that every individual human being could be properly counted as a member of exactly one of these five races or, perhaps, as some admixture of the same.

With respect to Hegel's understanding of the physical aspect of race, one noteworthy feature is the following: although Hegel recognized skin colour and hair as visible physical respects in which races differed and although he was undoubtably aware that racial groups were distinguished by a number of additional visible physical features, the specific physical differences on which he focused were differences in the formation of the skull and the face (GW 25.1: 35; 25.2: 608–10).¹⁴ In this he followed Blumenbach. This may have been a reflection of the anthropologist's authority. It may also have been that Hegel took such differences to be biologically or naturally more significant than differences of skin colour. In one place he said that ‘the osteological has a relation to the spiritual’ (SG: 610), suggesting that ‘the spiritual’ is prefigured or can be seen in ‘the osteological’. Hegel appears to have thought that the formation of the skull and the face were the most important physical features on the basis of which we distinguish racial groups. This focus may also have been a way of indicating that, biologically (or naturally) speaking, race is more than ‘skin deep’.

From what has been said, it is clear that Hegel attributed to race a spiritual as well as physical aspect. He maintained, for example, that the character of the African race is different from the European race in both physiological (physiologischer) and spiritual (das Geistige) respects (GW 25.2: 611; my emphasis). Hegel operated with the racialist concept of race.¹⁵ There was, incidentally, nothing idiosyncratic about this. At the time Hegel wrote, the racialist concept of race was widely taken to be the concept of race. Thus Moellendorf is correct in his assertion that ‘[t]he source of [Hegel's] racism can be traced to the general ideology of the nineteenth century’ (Moellendorf 1992). This is not to suggest, however, that Hegel did no more than ‘passively absorb’ the prejudices of his times.¹⁶ Bernasconi (1998) argues convincingly that Hegel wilfully misconstrues his sources in ways that exaggerated the negative characteristics of Africans. The same point can be made with respect to Hegel's treatment of Blumenbach's view of skulls.¹⁷ This behaviour suggests racial ill-will on his part. Racial ill-will is a form of racism.¹⁸

A crucially important spiritual respect in which races differed on Hegel's view was in their capacity to participate in world history (Weltgeschichte), the process through which spirit attains knowledge of its own nature.¹⁹ Although this idea is developed much more fully in the lectures on world history, its seeds are fully evident in the Philosophy of Spirit lectures. Thus, for example, Hegel writes:

[t]he Africans retain a pure inwardness that never proceeds to development. The Africans are now as they have been for the last thousand years. They have never gone out of themselves, but always remain within themselves in a childlike manner. They have remained in the condition of particularity, of individuality, of desire, and have not developed the oppositions of the understanding, of law and particular instances (SG: 43; LPS: 91).

He tells us that:

in the Asians the universal emerges. They have an objective God, an all-encompassing, all-dominating laws, right and state. The universal emerges there, but with the qualification that the subjective is submerged in it, so that individuality is wiped out. (SG: 44; LPS: 91)

And, finally, ‘[t]he Caucasian, European, Germanic, races validates both the substantial and the subjective, the principles of morals and conscience. There concrete freedom exists, the harmony of freedom as content and freedom as formal principle’ (SG :44; LPS: 91).

Hegel rejected the view that the correspondence between the overt physical features of race and spiritual differences of race was contingent. He regarded the correspondence between the two sorts of features as necessary—as in accordance with the concept.²⁰ This essentialist understanding of the spiritual dimension of race commits him to the position that the biology of race must include underlying organic structures that would account for these fundamental differences. It is true that Hegel nowhere refers to such structures explicitly. Nor does he characterize them as ‘essences’. But the biological structures his account of race implicitly called for are such that they can be aptly called ‘biological essences’ in as much as they purport to explain for example why a person with a particular skin colour, hair type and skull formation has or is likely to have the spiritual capacity she does. So Hegel appears to have been committed to the view that races have biological essences, even if he did not use the term ‘essence’. This makes him a racialist.

Now, one possible complicating consideration is the following: Hegel said that the origin of the physical and spiritual differences between the races can be traced back—somehow—to differences in the geographical regions of the earth the races inhabited (Enz.: §393; GW 25.2: 231–34, 605–607).²¹ I say ‘somehow’ because his discussion leaves obscure the precise nature of the mechanisms connecting the physical and spiritual differences between race to differences in geography. This linkage of race and geography might lead one to wonder whether Hegel could have thought that the differences in the spiritual characteristics between the races were due solely to differences in the geography of the regions in which the races were found. This, in turn, might lead one to ask whether, if members of one racial group R_1, which found itself in a geographical environment E_1, marked by a particular geographic orientation (e.g., north-south), were to be transplanted to a different geographical environment E₂, marked by a different geographic orientation (e.g., east-west), the members of R₁ would come to exhibit spiritual characteristics much like members of the racial group R₂, who inhabited E₂. The view just sketched would amount to a kind of ‘environmental determinism’.²² The explanation of the spiritual differences between the races would be ‘situational’ rather than ‘dispositional’. It would lie in the difference in the ‘situations’ (the structure of the geography) in which members of different races found themselves rather than innate biological features internal to those individuals. Geographer and historian Jared Diamond suggests just such an explanation of the differences in the level of material development between racialized groups (Diamond 1997). In this vein, McCarney attributes to Hegel ‘a species of geographical materialism’, holding that Hegel's position could be advanced without assuming ‘any inherent natural, and, hence, any racial, inadequacy’ (McCarney 2000: 144). But reflection on Hegel's overall view makes clear that this was not Hegel's considered position. Confirmation can be found in James and Knappik's observation that Hegel explicitly considered what we might call the ‘natural experiment’ in colonial America in which indigenous Americans and Africans were exposed to European culture and education (James and Knappik 2023: 107). As James and Knappik point out, Hegel wrote that the missionaries were not able to ‘bring any drives and excitation into’ the Americans (W: 611), owing to the Americans’ ‘weakness and stupor [Stumpfsinn]’ (W: 823). Forestalling any doubt that Hegel thought spiritual traits were biologically inherited, James and Knappik note that he held that Creoles—a group that exhibited an admixture of American or African and European ‘blood’—were able to reach ‘the higher-feelings of self, the upward-striving to autonomy, independence’ (W: 510), presumably because of the portion of European ‘blood’ they possessed—which is to say: because of their biological ancestry. Hegel's treatment of this case makes clear that he thought that mental traits of the races were biologically inherited, and that this inheritance was invariant in the face of geographical/cultural transposition. It is clear, then, that Hegel thought (or was committed to the idea) that the inner biological constitutions of the different races were very different.

We are now in a position to revisit the question posed at the outset of this essay: Did Hegel go wrong in the specific use he made of the category of race, or did he go wrong simply in using the category of race? That Hegel went wrong in the specific use he made of the category is plain. It is well documented that the particular ways in which he characterized the spiritual traits of the groups he called Negros, Mongolians and Americans were straightforwardly and unambiguously racist (Bernasconi 2000, 2003, 2010; Hoffheimer 2001; Moellendorf 1992). But in addition to this, the specific concept of race with which he operated—the racialist concept of race—is itself racist. It counts as racist, first of all, because it is the race concept that social theorists dubbed ‘racist’ in the 1930s, when the term first entered into general circulation. ‘Racism’ was originally a name for this conception of race (Miles 1989). Should a more principled reason for labelling it ‘racist’ be sought, one could say that it counts as such because it is essentialist and hierarchical, because it stigmatizes racialized groups deemed inferior, and because it served to legitimate colonialism, slavery and genocide. If that is not enough to make a concept racist, nothing is.

But to say that Hegel went wrong in deploying the specific category of race with which he operated is not, however, to say, as many would maintain today, that his fundamental philosophical error was in operating with the biological category of race as such. It is here that the philosophy of race becomes relevant. To develop this point, I will draw on Hardimon 2017 in the hope that this can bring some of the philosophical issues concerning where Hegel went wrong on race into a sharper light. In that book I argue that the racialist concept of race (i.e. the category of race with which Hegel operated) should not be identified with the concept of race as such and that it is possible to conceive of biological race in at least two non-racialist ways. To be sure neither of these concepts were available to Hegel and it would be crudely anachronistic to blame him for not using them, but they can nonetheless shed light on where philosophically Hegel went wrong on race.

IV. Two non-racialist biological concepts of race

To begin with, one can conceive of the biological category of race using what I have dubbed the minimalist concept of race. The minimalist concept of race says that a race is a group of human beings

1. (M1) that, as group, is distinguished from other groups of human beings by patterns of visible physical features;

2. (M2) whose members are linked by common ancestry peculiar to members of the group;

3. (M3) that originates from distinctive geographic locations (Hardimon 2017).

The ‘visible physical features’ referred to in (M1) include skin pigmentation, nose shape and head form. They are innate biological characters that correspond to differences in geographical ancestry and trace back to the distinctive geographic locations from which minimalist races originate.

The minimalist concept of race does not posit a racial essence. It does not say that minimalist races differ with respect to honesty, courage, or intelligence, and so forth. It makes no reference whatsoever to normatively important features. It does not posit a correlation between visible physical features and normatively important traits. It neither ranks races on a scale of inferiority and superiority nor specifies features on the basis of which they could be ranked. It is a non-essentialist and non-hierarchical race concept.

The minimalist concept of race allows that skin pigmentation and other visible physical features can vary as much within a minimalist race as between minimalist races. It also allows that genes can vary as much within a minimalist race as between minimalist races. So, too, it allows that the genetic differences within minimalist races are greater than the genetic differences between them. It recognizes that determining whether a given individual belongs to minimalist race MR₁ or minimalist race MR₂ may be difficult. It allows that a given individual may belong to more than one minimalist race and that the boundaries between minimalist races may be blurry.

The minimalist concept of race is ‘biological’ in the basic sense in that it characterizes its referent in biological terms. The visible physical features that figure in its definition, such as skin pigmentation, nose shape and head form are biological properties. The ancestry referred to in (M2) is biological ancestry. The minimalist concept of race is also ‘biological’ in the more robust sense of being biologically respectable because it can survive the argument from human population genetics (Hardimon 2017: 65–66). It is compatible with the principles and findings of modern biology.

It is plausible to suppose that there are human groups to which the minimalist concept of race applies. Examples include Western Eurasians (the group formerly known as Caucasians), sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians and Amerindians. Each is an ancestry group that has its own distinctive pattern of visible physical features that corresponds to its geographical origin. Each is what Quayshawn Spencer calls a ‘human continental population’ (Spencer 2019). Aboriginal Australians very likely also constitute a minimalist race. Contrary to Hardimon (2017), I no longer think that Pacific Islanders constitute a single minimalist race, since this group includes both Melanesians and Polynesians, groups that exhibit markedly different patterns of visible physical features.

The minimalist concept of race represents the barest, most stripped-down characterization of biological race possible. It is a maximally thin, maximally deflationary conception of what it is to be a race. It captures the ‘logical core’ of the ordinary concept of race. It is not itself a scientific race concept (in as much as it is not formulated in scientific terminology) but it has a scientific counterpart, the populationist concept of race. The populationist concept of race says that

a race is a subdivision of Homo sapiens—a group of populations that exhibits a distinctive pattern of genetically transmitted phenotypic characters that corresponds to the group's geographical ancestry and belongs to a biological line of descent initiated by a geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding population. (Hardimon 2017: 99)

The populationist concept of race is a ‘scientization’ of the minimalist concept of race. It ‘scientizes’ the minimalist concept of race using the scientific vocabulary of ‘phenotype’,genetic transmission’, and reproductive isolation. It locates the category of race in the framework of population thinking and identifies reproductive isolation as race's biological basis. It counts as a candidate scientific concept in biology in that: it is formulated in a scientific biological vocabulary; it is framed in terms of an accepted biological outlook (population thinking); it is suitable for deployment in an accepted branch of biological inquiry (ethology, ecology and evolutionary biology); and it presents the scientific ground of the phenomenon it represents (reproductive isolation).

Like the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race does not posit a racial essence. It does not say that populationist races differ with respect to honesty, courage or intelligence, and so forth. It, too, makes no reference whatsoever to normatively important features. It does not posit a correlation between visible physical features and normatively important traits. It neither ranks races on a scale of inferiority and superiority nor specifies features on the basis of which they could be ranked. It, too, is a non-essentialist and non-hierarchical race concept.

Like the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race can survive familiar objections that undercut the empirically refuted racialist concept of race. It, too, can withstand the argument from human population genetics because it, too, does not require that the percentage of genetic variation between minimalist races be larger than the percentage of genetic variation within minimalist races.

Now, the further details of these concepts are not terribly important for our purposes. My point in introducing them is simply to show that there are now biologically respectable ways of conceiving of human beings as exhibiting biological race. If this is correct—and this is the payoff of our excursion from Hegel scholarship to the philosophy of race—then the popular view that Hegel went wrong in his supposition that the human species is subdivided into groups that can properly be called ‘races’ is mistaken.

Hegel's error lay rather in thinking that there is some kind of intrinsic, essential correlation between the outward biological features of human races (for example, bone structures and facial features) and the mental or spiritual properties of members of human races. He went wrong in operating with a racialist concept of race. The racialist concept of race is false.²³ The human species is not divided into racialist races; there are no racialist races. It is just a mistake to think that differences in the biology of race account for differences in the possession (or non-possession) of an inner impulse toward culture, the attainment of the consciousness of personality, the degree of awakening as spirit, or the grasp of the ‘universal’ or the attainment of freedom. The biological category of race that is respectable by our lights is not a biospiritual category.²⁴ It does not straddle the domains of nature and spirit but, instead, remains firmly within the natural.²⁵ Bonetto is quite right to say that ‘[s]imply having a concept of race does not a racist make (Bonetto 2006). But use of the racialist concept of race does make one a racist.

V. Conclusion

One advantage of a proper biological understanding of race is that it facilitates grasping the spiritual unimportance of the biology of race and reveals the sheer contingency of the relation between biological race and culture (or biology and culture).²⁶ This is perhaps the most important lesson we can learn about biological race. To put the point in a nutshell: there is no biological reason why someone who is, for example, a member of the sub-Saharan African minimalist race could not be fully acculturated in, say, an East Asian culture—a full cultural citizen of that culture.²⁷ And conversely, any child can in principle learn any language (Chomsky 1965); likewise, any child can in principle acquire any culture. This is not a new or original idea but it is, I think, important.

I have been suggesting that there is a legitimate biological category of race (indeed there are at least two) to which Hegel could have appealed had they been available to him. But ironically and importantly neither category plays an essential role in the development of spirit—other than to provide the superficial biological differences that figured as objects of racist attitudes, which arguably did play an essential role in spirit's development.²⁸ There is no possibility of using a legitimate biological category of race in anything like the way Hegel deployed his race concept in the Philosophies of Spirit and History.

These reflections prompt a basic question: Is there room in Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit for the recognition of the spiritual unimportance of what we regard as biological race and the contingency of what we understand as the biology-culture relation? This question goes well beyond the scope of the present essay but nonetheless merits brief discussion here.

One familiar strategy for contending that there is room for these ideas is to note that Hegel's racialist remarks in the Philosophy of Spirit are found in the lectures and to deny that the things he is alleged to have said there are representative of his systematic view. But the scholarly reception of the recent publication of critical editions of Hegel's lectures makes clear that the racialist views Hegel expressed in the lectures do express his considered philosophical judgments and systematic view (Bernasconi MS; James and Knappik 2023: 100–102).²⁹ Furthermore, in as much as Hegel's reference to Rassenverschiedenheit in §393 of the Encyclopaedia refers to a specifically racialist form of Rassenverschiedenheit, his commitment to racialism is unquestionably part of his official, systematic view.

Another line of defence would be to argue that race is a merely ‘natural’ aspect that is overcome by the spiritual development of freedom.³⁰ Such a view is difficult to square with the degree to which the modern social world that Hegel describes is marked by racial inequality. So, the question becomes: Is it possible to reconstruct Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit in such a way as to abstract from—that is, ditch—Hegel's racialism? I am not prepared to say this is impossible, but I suspect that doing so will be extraordinarily difficult; for what we have seen in this essay is that some of Hegel's fundamental claims about spirit are racialist.³¹ Accordingly, developing a Hegelian account that abstracts from his racialism would require a massive revision of his position. It would, for example, require a radical rethinking of his entire Philosophy of History. It is not immediately clear how such a throughgoing revision would go.³² It would certainly require a deep transformation of his understanding of spiritual formations such as nations, traditions and forms of ethical life.³³ The worry is that such a transformation would amount to what Mills calls ‘sanitizing’ (Mills 2017: 111). This leaves us with the unhappy thought that the stain of racialism in Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit may be indelible. For my own part, I am left with ambivalence. Nothing presented in this essay undercuts Hegel's claim to be a great philosopher. The project of trying to disentangle his insights from his racialism may well be worth trying. But before undertaking this project—if indeed we want to undertake it—we must fully register its difficulty.³⁴