Book review symposium : Anderson, K. 2006 : Race and the crisis of humanism. London : Routledge : Author’s response

The argument of Race and the crisis of humanism – amply summarized by Catherine Nash – is that the idea of ‘race’ emerged from the much longer-standing premise of human distinction from other life forms on earth. Substantially, the concern of this work is to understand race and racism as quite specifi c ideas about human difference and inequality, rather than merely as vehicles for expressing an impulse to superiority over denigrated other people. The language of race/racism has frequently invoked a conception of ‘the human’. For example, the attribution of a ‘subhuman’ or a ‘more or less human’ character to certain races is, as Peter Wade points out, well known. So is the fact that this conception of the human is often bound to an idea of civilization as a measure of the proximity (or otherwise) of certain peoples to ‘nature’. This is clear enough, for example, in the idea of savagery that was elaborated in social contract and stadial theory. The question, and it is one that has barely been raised, much less addressed, is how the entanglement of these terms – race/human/nature – is to be understood.