Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de (1816–82)

Although best remembered as the author of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, Gobineau’s main literary activity was as a novelist and writer on Asia. Even though his thesis that racial mixing was the main cause of the decline of civilizations came to be widely accepted, as did his conviction that the White race alone was capable of civilization, his cultural pessimism was not so widely shared. Gobineau understood his work as an answer to the philosophies of progress because it established that the fall of civilizations was inevitable. However, subsequent generations invoked his name in their attempt to justify radical social programmes designed, for example, to restore a racial purity that Gobineau himself believed to be neither possible nor desirable in the sense in which they understood it.