2 See his ‘Of National Characters,’ Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (London: Longmans, Green 1870). ‘I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the White’ (123). Indeed, some have argued that the empiricism of Locke and Hume helped to justify racism, while the essentialism of Cartesian dualism makes it conceptually more difficult. See Bracken, Harry ‘Essence, Accident and Race,’ Hermathena 116 (1973)Google Scholar and ‘Philosophy and Racism,’ Philosophia 8 (1978); Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon 1973), ch. 7.

3 The words ‘natures’ and ‘natural’ are extraordinarily slippery and sloppy. In this context, however, ‘natures’ is usually used synonymously with essences and that is how I will be using it: to mean something fixed, universal, and natural (today understood to mean biologically based), that determines the cognitive, moral, and emotional traits of the group.

4 In this context, the question of how to understand and whether to accept the concept of a human nature is part of a larger debate, humanism vs. anti-humanism, which is about whether history must be understood (at least partially) in terms of human purposes, and if so, whether they are collective or individual; or instead, understood solely in terms of the structures, the social relations, in which people act. Although the issues and positions overlap considerably, I will be concentrating on the narrower, more fundamental question. See Soper, KateHumanism and Anti-Humanism (LaSalle, IL: Hutchinson 1986)Google Scholar for a history of the debate.

5 Bleier, RuthScience and Gender (New York: Pergamon 1984)Google Scholar. Bleier uses a capital ‘S’ for the Wilsonian version to distinguish it from the general study of the social behavior of animals.

6 Though great admirers of Darwin, nevertheless, they held that ‘the whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’ doctrine of helium omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’ theory of population. When this conjurer’s trick has been performed ... the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it’ (Friedrich Engels, ‘Letter to Lavrov’ (12-17 November 1875).

7 See, among others, Jay Gould, StephenEver Since Darwin (New York: Norton 1977)Google Scholar; Caplan, Arthur ed., The Sociobiology Debate (New York: Harper and Row 1978)Google Scholar; Lewontin, Richard C.Rose, StevenKamin, Leon J.Not in Our Genes (New York: Penguin 1984)Google Scholar.

8 Richard A. Schweder, reviewing Carl Degler’s In Search of Human Nature in The New York Times Book Review (March 17,1991), writes: ‘[Degler] argues that the Darwinian concepts of instinct, heredity, and biological explanations of behavior are back — this time without the racism, without the sexism, without the eugenics and without recourse to the legend of the inherent inferiority of the uncivilized and the poor. I suspect Mr. Degler is half right — biology is back.’

9 Everyone conceded he accepted a notion of human nature in his discussions of alienation in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, but many, most famously Louis Althusser, claimed there was an ‘epistemological break’ between Marx’s earlier humanistic, philosophical writings and his mature scientific work, noting the absence of ‘humanistic’ language in Capital. This view lost all credibility with the publication in English of the notebooks for Capital, known as The Grundrisse, in which all the early language reappears.

10 Some of those taking this position are Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: A. Lane 1969); Althusser, Louis and Balibar, EtienneReading Capital (London: New Left Books 1970)Google Scholar; Tucker, RobertPhilosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1961)Google Scholar, Venable, VernonHuman Nature: The Marxian View (New York: Knopf 1945)Google Scholar; Hook, SidneyFrom Hegel to Marx (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 1962)Google Scholar; Suchting, Wal ‘Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: Notes Toward a Commentary’ in Mepham, John and Hillel-Ruben, David eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol. 2 (Brighton: Harvester 1979)Google Scholar; Seve, LucienMan in Marxist Theory and the Psychology of Personality (Brighton: Harvester 1978)Google Scholar.

11 Geras, NormanMarx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso 1983)Google Scholar. Some others who take this position are Andrew Collier, ‘Materialism and Explanation in the Human Sciences’ in John Mepham and David Hillel-Ruben, eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy; G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Oxford: Clarendon 1978); Heller, AgnesThe Theory of Need in Marx (London: Allison and Busby 1976)Google Scholar; Oilman, BerteliAlienation: Marx’s Concept of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1971)Google Scholar; Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism. They do not all agree about the precise content or its role in Marx’s theories; G.A. Cohen, for example, gives it a larger explanatory role in historical materialism than some others.

12 In an earlier statement of this position, Sidney Hook said, ‘If one must speak of “the essence of man,” one must find it in man’s civilization, material, and ideal, and not in biology’ {From Hegel to Marx, 297-8).

13 See, e.g., Mepham, John ‘Who Makes History?’ Radical Philosophy 6 (1973)Google Scholar; and Kate Soper, ‘Marxism, Materialism and Biology,’ in John Mepham and David Hillel-Ruben, eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy. In my ‘A Marxist Theory of Women’s Nature,’ Ethics 94 (1984) 456-73, I argued that Marx rejected the idea of a transhistorical human nature, but accepted the idea of historically specific forms of human nature (what I am calling here ‘the nature of human beings’). What appears to be a substantive difference between that paper and this one is more a difference of terminology and emphasis, since I accepted the idea that human beings had a nature qua biological beings, but used ‘human nature’ to refer to their nature qua social beings.

14 Consider the following remarks by the distinguished biologists Richard Levins and R.L. Lewontin, who also happen to be Marxists: ‘If ideas of human nature have any value, they must be able to cope with such biologically basic functions as eating.... Eating is obviously related to nutrition, but in humans this physiological necessity is embedded in a complex matrix: within which what is eaten, whom you eat with, how often you eat, who prepares the food, which foods are necessary for a sense of well-being, who goes hungry and who overeats have all been torn loose from the requirements of nutrition or the availability of food.... A study of the physical act itself, its biological preconditions, its evolution, its similarity to that behavior in other animals, or the regions of brain that influence it will simply be irrelevant to the human phenomenon’ (The Dialectical Biologist [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985], 260-3). The example brings to mind Marx’s statement that ‘Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail, and tooth’ (The Grundrisse, D. McLellan, trans. [New York: Harper Torchbooks 1972], 92).

15 Soper’s Humanism and Anti-Humanism shows how often political debates have been played on this philosophical terrain.

16 See Steven Rose, ‘From Causation to Translation: A Dialectical Solution to a Reductionist Dilemma,’ and other selections in Bressanone Papers, Steven Rose, ed. (London: Allison and Busby 1981). A sympathetic critique and alternative is given by Martin Barker in ‘Human Biology and the Possibility of Socialism,’ in Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol. 4, John Mepham and David Hillel-Ruben, eds. (Brighton: Harvester 1981). See also Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: Humanities Press 1970), on the importance oí biology for Marxism.

17 He says in Capital, ‘By ... acting on the external world and changing it, [man] at the same time changes his own nature’ (177). Engels suggested labor was key not only to the development of human beings, but also to the development to human beings. See ‘The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man.’

18 ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,’ in Bottomore, T.B. trans, and ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: Prentice-Hall 1964), 161Google Scholar

19 This characterization of human labor comes from Capital, I (New York: Penguin 1972), 178.

20 Marx says, ‘Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization’ (The German Ideology, in Tucker, R. ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton 1978), 150Google Scholar; my emphasis.

21 Jay Gould, StephenThe Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton 1981), 326Google Scholar; 331

22 See Grundrisse, 611; also Elster, Jon ‘Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life,’ in Alternatives to Capitalism, Elster, Jon and Ove Moene, Karl eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989)Google Scholar.

23 Included in the concept of human needs are both things necessary for survival and things necessary for satisfaction, such as varied and challenging work. Note that this does not correspond to the distinction between biological and non-biological needs; sex is not necessary for survival at the level of the individual.

24 This is the theme of Martin Barker’s ‘Human Biology and the Possibility of Socialism,’ cited above.

25 Judith Butler interprets her as making the more radical claim that sex is socially constructed as well, thereby collapsing the sex/gender distinction. See ‘Sex and Gender in Beauvoir’s Second Sex,’ in Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, Yale French Studies 72 (1986). Butler and other postmodern thinkers take de Beauvoir as an inspiration for their claim that gender is something of a performance, something one does as opposed to something one is. This is surely a false counterposition, unless one restricts what one is to biologically based essences. See also Butler’s Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge 1990).

26 Seee.g. Midgeley, Mary ‘On Not Being Afraid of Natural Differences,’ in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, Griffiths, Morwenna and Whitford, Margaret eds. (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1988)Google Scholar. Similar arguments are made regarding racial differences.

27 I take John Stuart Mill to be offering this sort of argument in The Subjection of Women (New York: Stokes 1911), when he says ‘I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another’ (45), although he can also be interpreted as taking an agnostic position.

28 This perspective is variously known as equity, humanist, scientific, and minimizing feminism, depending on the details of the theory, the context, and who is doing the naming.

29 Depending on the details of their theories, the context and who is describing them, feminists on this side of the divide are known as maximizers, gynocentric, cultural, romantic, and difference feminists.

30 Similarly, social purity feminists of the nineteenth century had quite similar theories and politics to today’s Women Against Pornography. See Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘Male Vice and Female Virtue: Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Britain,’ in Powers of Desire, Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press 1983).

31 Daly, MaryGyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon 1978)Google Scholar

32 Rich, AdrienneOf Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton 1986)Google Scholar

33 O’Brien, MaryThe Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981)Google Scholar

34 Brownmiller, SusanAgainst Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster 1981)Google Scholar

35 “The ultimate goal of liberation movements ... is ... to dismantle these structures [of domination] and so release the energies of each individual for the work of active (as opposed to reactive) self-definition. In this sense a universalist politics, far from leading to “essentialism,” calls into question every “essence” arising from social arrangements which could be amended through collective choice’ (Lovibond, Sabina ‘Feminism and Pragmatism: A Reply to Richard Rorty,’ New Left Review 193 [1992]Google Scholar). On questions of universalism and difference as well as postmodernism in general, see also Lovibond’s ‘Feminism and Postmodernism,’ New Left Review 178 (1989) 5-28. Rorty replied in ‘Feminism and Pragmatism,’ Michigan Quarterly Review 30 (1991) 231-58.

36 This, however, can only be determined within a theoretical framework. For more of these explorations and a somewhat different point of view, see my ‘Do Women Have a Distinct Nature?’ The Philosophical Forum 14 (1982) 25-42, reprinted in Women and Values: Readings in Recent Feminist Philosophy, Marjorie Pearsall, ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 1986).

37 Ladner, JoyceTomorrow’s Tomorrow (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1972)Google Scholar. A report of a recent survey regarding girls’ self esteem says ‘Girls emerge from adolescence with a poor self-image, relatively low expectations from life and much less confidence in themselves and their abilities than boys...’ (New York Times [January 9,1991], my emphasis), but the report reveals this is less true of black girls. No class differences are reported (or studied?). The article also reports recent work by Carol Gilligan showing that girls begin to doubt themselves at adolescence, but her sample is almost entirely white and middle class. Although her new book includes a sample of black medical students, this does not eliminate the problem because the gender difference in self confidence is not just relative to racial groups, but to class as well (Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990]).

38 C.B. Thoy, ‘Status, Race, and Aspirations: A Study of the Desire of High School Students to Enter a Profession or a Technical Occupation’ (PhD diss., 1969).

39 Weston, P. and Mednick, M. ‘Race, Social Class and the Motive to Avoid Success in Women,’ Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 1 (1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Even a woman who does not have children may have substantial responsibilities for the care of other dependents. And she has probably been raised (primarily) by a woman and knows that she is expected to be a mother.

41 Certainly many feminist and other psychoanalytic theorists have thought so. See Chodorow, NancyThe Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978)Google Scholar and Dinnerstein, DorothyThe Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper and Row 1976)Google Scholar and the vast literature, both critical and supportive, their work has spawned.

42 I explore this possibility in the articles cited in nn. 11 and 36.

43 As Jerry Fodor wrote recently in a very different context, ‘Good taxonomy is about not missing generalizations,’ Journal of Philosophy 88,25.

44 Cf., e.g., Hooks, BellAin’t I a Woman? (Boston: South End Press 1981)Google Scholar; Feminist Theory From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press 1984); Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table — Women of Color Press 1983); Hull, Gloria T.Bell Scott, Patricia and Smith, Barbara eds., But Some of Us Are Brave (New York: Feminist Press 1982)Google Scholar.

45 I am thinking particularly of Elizabeth V. Spelman’s very valuable book The Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon 1988). Of the (mostly non-academic) writings by Marxists and women of color, some simply rejected feminism as a bourgeois and/or white perspective; others were more sympathetic, but critiqued what they saw as a white and/or middle-class bias and called for a greater recognition, integration, and focus on the needs of working class women and women of color — which largely overlap.

46 Dworkin, AndreaWoman-Hating (New York: Dutton 1974)Google Scholar; Monique Wittig, ‘One is Not Born a Woman,’ Feminist Issues 1 (1981) 47-54, “The Category of Sex,’ Feminist Issues 2 (1982) 63-8, ‘On the Social Contract,’ Feminist Issues 9 (1989) 3-12, and other articles in the same journal. Christine Delphy, also associated with Feminist Issues, takes the same line in her writings.

47 The Category of Sex,’144

48 Ibid., 175

49 Ibid.

50 ‘The Social Contract,’ 10

51 It should be clear that this in no way implies that the division of people into mutually exclusive categories of heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual is a natural or biological one. This is sexuality, not sex.

52 Cf. Hartmann, Heidi “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism,’ in Sargent, Lydia ed., Women and Revolution (Boston: South End Press 1981)Google Scholar, and ‘Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex,’ in Eisenstein, Zillah ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press 1979)Google Scholar; Brenner, Johanna and Ramas, Maria ‘Rethinking Women’s Oppression,’ New Left Review 144 (1984)Google Scholar. Joan Scott, Historian in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar has recently argued that this division of labor was not inevitable even in that period and that assumptions about women’s natural and proper role played a critical determining role, pointing out that in certain locales in France there were full time childcare facilities. However, I do not believe this refutes Brenner’s argument. By Scott’s own account, the areas with childcare facilities had serious labor shortages. In the absence of such special circumstances that would give employers and the government an interest in increasing women’s labor force participation, the reproductive differences between men and women would be — in that historical context — a critical determinant of gender roles. Cf. also Denise Riley, War in the Nursery (London: Virago 1983) for an important and integrative perspective on the biological and social aspects of women’s lives.

53 Rape is not strictly a biological matter, as is the ability to become pregnant. Rape is not found in all societies and men can be raped. Though it is connected to the level of misogyny and violence of given societies, I see rape nevertheless as more related to women’s biology than are the above-mentioned aspects of sex discrimination. The anatomical differences between the sexes make women unable to rape men, less able to prevent being raped and, of course, liable to become pregnant if they are raped.

54 An excellent discussion of what this perspective would entail organizationally/politically is found in ‘A Black Feminist’s Statement’ by the Combahee River Statement, in But Some of Us Are Brave.

55 The shameful history of science’s role in propagating racism (not entirely a fact of the past) is documented, among other places, in Jay Gould’s, StephenThe Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton 1981)Google Scholar; Stepan, NancyThe Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1950 (London: Macmillan 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barker, MartinThe New Racism (London: Junction Books 1981)Google Scholar.

56 A recent survey by the National Opinion Research Center found that the majority of white people in the United States consider black people inferior and a substantial minority of black people agree. E.g., 62% of whites thought blacks less likely to be hard working; 53% of whites and 30% of blacks thought blacks less intelligent. The study, however, did not ask whether respondents believed these traits to be innate or socially acquired (New York Times [January 10,1991]).

57 R.C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes, 120

58 Cf. e.g. Singer, Marcus ‘Some Thoughts on “Race” and “Racism”,’ Philosophia 8 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 According to Marvin r larris, more than forty racial categories are distinguished on the basis of appearance; combinations of these are expressed by more than one hundred racial terms, and socio-economic status also plays a role in the classification of an individual’s race. (See ‘Race,’ in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.)

60 Not in Our Genes, 127

61 Anthony Appiah, Kwame ‘Racisms’ in Theo Goldberg, David ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1990)Google Scholar, ‘The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race’ in H.L. Gates Jr., ed., ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986), ‘The Conservation of Race,’ and ‘Social Forces, “Natural” Kinds’ (unpublished mss). The principal scientific source Appiah cites is Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury, ‘Genetic Relationships and Evolution of Human Races,’ Evolutionary Biologi/14 (1983); see also Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘Critical Remarks,’ in Goldberg, Anatomy of Racism, and the Introduction to his ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference.

62 Houston Baker, ‘Caliban’s Triple Play,’ in ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference.

63 One of the more interesting writers to try to synthesize Marxism and nationalism isC.L.R.James. Cf. The Future in the Present: Selected WritingsofC.L.R. ¡ames (London: AllLson and Busby 1980) and Selected Writings ofC.l.R. ¡ames (New York 1977).

64 Fanon, FranzBlack Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove 1967)Google Scholar.

65 For a discussion of essentialist theories of race that are strikingly similar to feminist essentialist theories, see Sandra Harding’s ‘The Curious Coincidence of Feminine and African Moralities: Challenges for Feminist Theory,’ in Kittay, Eva and Meyers, Diana eds., Women and Moral Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield 1987)Google Scholar. Pointing out that these commonalities refute biological determinisi explanations of race and gender differences, Harding suggests they show that the real differences are between Western men and ‘the rest of us.’

66 The use of ‘African-American,’ which Jesse Jackson has recommended, reflects this analysis. But the way the terms have changed indicates that the naming is part of a political struggle. Certainly the adoption of the term ‘black’ over ‘Negro’ was a powerful political statement.

67 Some scientists still use the term ‘race’ for a population in this sense, though it is agreed that populations do not differ genetically as races were defined as doing.

68 Thus a seemingly more ‘neutral’ criterion which defines Hawaiians as those of 50% or more Hawaiian blood is bitterly resented by Hawaiians because it was decided by whites and has the effect of excluding many who see themselves as Hawaiian from the few benefits guaranteed to Hawaiians.

69 Although African Americans are the most extreme example, they are not the only ‘unmeltable ethnics.’ For a humorous discussion of the experience of Chinese Americans, including a debate on what they should be called, see the final chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey (New York: Knopf 1989).

70 For example, some people defined as black in the United States would count as ‘mextizo’ (mixed) or mulatto in Cuba. But even in the United States, more heterogeneous and liberal communities would probably have a more inclusive definition of white.

71 By and large, group membership is more important to an individual’s subjective identity when that group is subordinated. On a psychological scale in which one selects categories that are central to one’s identity, African Americans are more likely to choose ‘black’ than people of European ancestry to choose ‘white,’ just as women are more likely to choose ‘women’ than men to choose ‘man’ and homosexuals to choose their sexuality than are heterosexuals. The one exception to this is class, truly the last taboo in United States society.

72 Cf. Rawick, George P.From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood 1972)Google Scholar, for the early period; cf. Roediger, David R.The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso 1992)Google Scholar for the nineteenth century.

73 Despite these profound differences, I don’t believe there is a sufficiently distinct role that African Americans play, regardless of their class and gender, to justify a hypothesis analogous to the one I offered regarding gender, viz. that women’s role (in all race/class groups) taking care of children and others, might generate important psychological/behavioral commonalities (i.e., gender).

74 Cornel West, ‘Learning to Talk of Race,’ New York Times Magazine (August 2, 1992), 26