Henri Hubert Undoes Aryanist Political Myths
How to Do Things with Myths - A Performative Theory of Myths and How We Got There - Ivan Strenski
Ivan Strenski [+]
University of California Riverside (retired)
Author of 15 books and more than 100 academic articles on religion and political issues
like gift, sacrifice, freedom of religion/religious freedom, religious nationalism, French
Catholic integralism, post-revolutionary French Jewry, divine right of kings, Ivan Strenski
is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. His most recent books are Muslims, Islams, and Occidental Anxieties:
Conversations about Islamophobia (2022), a history of the study of religion from the
Renaissance to the present-day, Understanding Theories of Religion (2014) and Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power and Politics (2009), Arabic translation (2016).
Description
French Aryanist racists in Durkheim’s Third Republic sought a scientific defense of their anti-Semitism in the myth of the Aryan origins of Europeans. Hubert saw through their thinly disguised anti-Semitic ideological efforts, presented as the pseudo-science of “Anthroposociology.” In the heat of 20th -century French politics, he published a series historically-informed articles discrediting the Aryanist theories of racial superiority, by undermining their mythical bases.