(Count) Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853), extracts
Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816 – 1882) was a French count, whose work lay many of the foundations for modenr racial theory
The fall of civilizations is at once the most striking and obscure of all historical phenomena. Inspiring the
mind with terror, it is a calamity so majestic and inscrutable that the
thinker never tires of it. ... When we perceive that, after a period of
strength and glory, all human societies come to decline and fall, all of
them, I say, without exception; when we become aware with what fearful
silence the earth displays upon its surface the debris of the
civilizations that preceded our own... when the mind, reverting to our
modern states, takes the measure of their extreme youth and recognizes
that some, having arisen but yesterday, are already in a state of
decrepitude; then we acknowledge, not without a shudder ... how
rigorously the word of the prophets on the instability of all things
applies to peoples--to peoples no less than to states, to states no less
than to individuals..Peoples perish because they are degenerate and for no other reason.... No longer able to withstand blows or to pick themselves up after suffering them, they place before us the spectacle of their death throes. If they die, it is because they no longer possess the vigor that their ancestors had in passing through the dangers of life. ... How and why is that vigor lost? That is what we need to know. How does a people degenerate? That is what we must explain...
The word degenerate, when applied to a people, means (as it ought to mean) that the people has no longer the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood. In other words, though the nation bears the name given by its founders, the name no longer connotes the same race ; in fact, the man of a decadent time, the degenerate man properly so called, is a different being, from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages. I agree that he still keeps something of their essence; but the more he degenerates, the thinner does this "something " become. ...He is only a very distant kinsman of those he still calls his ancestors. He, and his civilization with him, will certainly die on the day when the primordial race-unit is so broken up and swamped by the influx of foreign elements, that its effective qualities no longer exercise sufficient influence. [In this book, I will show by examples] that great peoples, at the moment of their death, share only a very small and insignificant amount of the blood of their founders and... thereby have explained clearly enough how it is possible for civilizations to fall—the reason being that they are no longer in the same hands.