AN UNDERSIDE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The great Enlightenment thinkers weren't always tolerant, as John Gray in Black Mass points out on pages 60-61. In fact, they can be considered proto neo-cons:

A number of Enlightenment luminaries were explicit in expressing their belief in natural inequality, with some claiming that humanity actually comprised several different species. Voltaire subscribed to a secular version of the pre-Adamite theory advanced by some Christian theologians that suggested that Jews were pre-Adamites, remnants of an older species that existed before Adam was created. It was Immanuel Kant — who more than any other thinker gave intellectual legitimacy to the concept of race. Kant was in the forefront of the science of anthropology that was emerging in Europe and maintained that there are innate differences between the races. While he judged whites to have all the attributes required for progress towards perfection, he represents Africans as being predisposed to slavery, observing in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), 'The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.'" Asians, on the other hand, he viewed as civilized but static — a view that John Stuart Mill endorsed when in On Liberty (18 59) he referred to China as a stagnant civilization, declaring: `. . . they have become stationary — have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be improved it must be by foreigners'. Here Mill echoed the view of India held by his father, James Mill, who argued in his History of British India that the inhabitants of the sub-continent could only achieve progress by abandoning their languages and religions. A similar picture of India was presented by Marx, who defended colonial rule as a means of overcoming the torpor of village life. Whether the disabilities of other peoples were innate (as was believed in the case of Africans) or due to cultural backwardness (as was supposed to be true of Asians), the remedy was the same. All had to be turned into Europeans, if necessary by force.