Liberalism and racism: an ‘elective affinity’?

Joppke, Christian Georg (2015). Liberalism and racism: an ‘elective affinity’? Ethnic and racial studies, 38(8), pp. 1298-1304. Routledge & Kegan Paul 10.1080/01419870.2015.1016072

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This appraisal of David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín's Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas argues that there is no ‘elective affinity’ between liberalism and racism, which is the core argument of the book. The notion of ‘elective affinity’, which the authors borrow from Max Weber, requires a structural homology between the ‘electively’ related elements that just does not exist in this case. The relationship between both is entirely contingent, ‘racism’ being a doctrine of inter-group relations while ‘liberalism’ is a doctrine of intra-group relations, with no consideration of how the boundaries of the group are constituted.

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