August 7, 1866, Marx wrote Engels about an exciting discovery he had made. The find was a pompous and preposterous book by a French ethnologist and racist crackpot named Pierre Tremaux which anyone well versed in science and scientific method would have dismissed as rubbish.
Marx, however, hailed Tremaux’s work as marking “a very significant advance over Darwin.” Marx’s infatuation with Tremaux’s race theories will be discussed in considerably more detail in chapter twelve. Here, suffice it to say that Marx wrote Engels that Tremaux had “proved that the common Negro type is the degenerate form of a much higher one...”
Actually, Tremaux had proved nothing. He had made the extraordinary and, of course, unsubstantiated, assertion that the Negro race was not a product of evolution, but of human degeneration. His actual words were: “The backward negro is not an evolved ape, but a degenerate man,” a finding that, in Marx’s opinion, made Tremaux superior to Darwin.”
August 7, 1866, Marx wrote Engels about an exciting discovery he had made. The find was a pompous and preposterous book by a French ethnologist and racist crackpot named Pierre Tremaux which anyone well versed in science and scientific method would have dismissed as rubbish.
Marx, however, hailed Tremaux’s work as marking “a very significant advance over Darwin.” Marx’s infatuation with Tremaux’s race theories will be discussed in considerably more detail in chapter twelve. Here, suffice it to say that Marx wrote Engels that Tremaux had “proved that the common Negro type is the degenerate form of a much higher one...”
Actually, Tremaux had proved nothing. He had made the extraordinary and, of course, unsubstantiated, assertion that the Negro race was not a product of evolution, but of human degeneration. His actual words were: “The backward negro is not an evolved ape, but a degenerate man,” a finding that, in Marx’s opinion, made Tremaux superior to Darwin.”