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. |
From inside the book
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... results of the Botha - Smuts government are the abolition of racial- ism and the construction of roads . 3 See George M. Fredrickson , Racism : A Short History ( Princeton , 2002 ) , 17 : " It is the dominant view among scholars who ...
... result of the human tendency to generalize and simplify , so that whole nations are treated as a single individual with a single personality . Contemporary west- ern society is marked by a substantial degree of sensitivity to such ...
... result in clarifying only part of the spectrum of attitudes , for the work cannot and should not provide all the favorable or neutral judgments made by Greeks and Romans of other peoples . This study considers how Greeks and Romans ...
... result is not the topic of this book , but it will be useful to see how observers at the center of the empire related to such peoples during the various stages of this develop- ment . The descendants of those vanished peoples who had ...
... result of the continuous actions of the same causes that produce individual differences , but he was not very consistent in his usage . " Note that this represents a combination of external influence ( climate ) and he- redity . It has ...