Arthur de Gobineau
Also known as Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Ariel des Feux, Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Gobineau
French diplomat and writer known for racial theories (1816–1882)
AI overview
Arthur de Gobineau was a 19th-century French diplomat and author who developed influential racial theories that categorized humanity into hierarchies based on supposed biological differences. His ideas became historically significant because they were later adopted and distorted to justify racial discrimination and colonialism, making him a controversial figure in the history of scientific racism.
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Person · Open Library
- Works
- 14
Top works
- Nouvelles Asiatiques
- Asiatische Novellen
- Essai Sur l'inégalité des Races Humaines, Tome Quatrième
- Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races with Particular Reference to Their Respective Influence in the Civil and Political History of Mankind A. de Gobineau
- Essai Sur l'inégalité des Races Humaines, Tome Premier
via Open Library + Wikidata
Wikidata facts
- Image
- Arthur de Gobineau.jpg
Works in European collections
34 objects attributed to Arthur de Gobineau, held across European museums, libraries & archives · via Europeana
Article
Arthur de Gobineau, Count de Gobineau ( French: [ɡɔbino]; Joseph Arthur de Gobineau; 14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882) was a French writer and diplomat who is best known for helping introduce scientific race theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race and Nordicism. He was an elitist who, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, wrote An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. In it he argued that aristocrats were superior to commoners and that aristocrats possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less interbreeding with inferior races.
Gobineau was born to an aristocratic family of counts under the Ancien Régime. He was ideologically a Legitimist who supported royalist rule by the House of Bourbon and opposed the French Revolution, democracy, and rule by the House of Orléans which came to power after the 1830 July Revolution. He began his diplomatic career in the late 1840s, and beginning in 1861, variously served as minister to Persia, Brazil, Greece, and Sweden. As a writer, Gobineau authored novels and short stories, as well as non-fiction travel writings, polemical essays and other philological and anthropological works, including his Essai. His Essai is widely discredited as pseudoscience by modern scholarship. Gobineau himself never had any qualifications in anthropology.
