The Invention of Racism in Classical AntiquityThere was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. |
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... ideas rather than acts , al- though the next theme traces the impact such ideas may have had in the sphere of action . The third major theme in this work is the relationship between such ideas and patterns of thinking and ancient ...
... ideas , nor was there systematic persecution of any ethnic group by another . However , I shall argue that it is justified to speak of " proto - racism . " 10 Modern racism has , by now , quite a long history of development . In its ...
... idea of raising infants in total isolation in order to gain essential information goes back to classical antiquity . Herodotus 2.2 tells of an experiment carried out by the Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus who ordered two infants to be ...
... ideas of beauty and ugliness are narrowly ethnocentric and dictated largely by skin color . 18 In principle Buffon ... idea of environmental determinism : Franklin Thomas , The Environmental Basis of Society : A Study in the History of ...
... ideas and modes of thinking developed and accepted in the ancient world . It will be argued here that this continuity is sufficient to allow us to speak of Graeco - Roman forms of proto - racism . It should be noted that the examples ...