Race against Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Racism and racial “science” emerged in Europe as an elite response to a worldwide wave of rural insurgencies that began in the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions and continues, in its own way, to this day. In his dialectic of lord and bondsman, g.w.f. Hegel formulated political, economic, and biopolitical ideas from the uprisings occurring in his world, creating a now long-standing dialogue between dialectical theory, including Marxism, and rural insurgency. Racism was part of a biopolitical counterrevolution that sought to maintain the power of elites over insurgent populations. Here Prussia played a central role, as its struggle against the autonomy of migrant agricultural labors took the form of campaigns against the “Polonization” of Prussia. The social scientist Max Weber theorized this struggle in a series of essays on race and rural labor that produced a racism based on culture rather than biology. This cultural racism, like the insurgent discourses it opposes, persists in many forms in Central Europe and around the world.