Abstract

The discovery of hitherto unknown peoples in the Americas and South Pacific, in addition to the growing trade, missionary work, and colonial activities in Africa and Asia, led to a plethora of increasingly popular ethnographic reports about non-European peoples. This study details the significant impact of such travel literature on Enlightenment philosophical debates about human nature and its relationship to cultural diversity. It also explains how such anthropological debates influenced political arguments about the proper relationship between European and non-European peoples. My primary, though not exclusive, emphasis is on two sets of influential thinkers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot; Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder. This is the period, I contend, when political thinkers started to subvert earlier, pejorative characterizations of foreign peoples, thereby enabling the development of genuinely humanitarian and anti-imperialist political theories. I thus explore the close and often neglected links between emerging theories of cultural pluralism and the development of humanitarianism in modern political thought. In contrast to standard depictions of Enlightenment political theory, I contend that its conceptions of a universal human dignity did not always come at the price of effacing human diversity, since cultural differences began to be viewed as manifestations of humans' shared capacity for freedom, rather than as inferior deviations from a universally prescribed norm. ;I explain that a number of eighteenth-century innovations on issues of imperialism and human diversity--humane and incisive, yet always marked by ambivalences and internal tensions--were neglected or mutated in the nineteenth century as the biological concept of race took on a political cast and dominated most discussions of non-European peoples, while a fairly exclusive and ethnically homogenous understanding of the nation increasingly characterized theorizations of intra-European diversity. Thus, I conclude by noting that contemporary debates over pluralism , which so often suggest that the legacy of the Enlightenment impedes our ability to attend to such issues in a sophisticated manner, are in fact enriched by an engagement with the most innovative strands of Enlightenment era political thought