Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau was a French philosopher, historian, novelist, and diplomat. Gobineau's diplomatic duties during the Second Empire carried him to Switzerland, Persia, Greece, and Brazil, where he produced a number of historical and ethnographic works of considerable merit. He is best known for his Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (4 vols., Paris, 1853–1855; Vol. 1 translated into English by Adrian Collins as The Inequality of Human Races, London, 1915). This work is usually considered an important contribution to nineteenth-century racist thought; but Gobineau's racism was a by-product of his attempt to account for the decline of the European aristocracy in terms of the more general problem of the decline and fall of civilizations.

Gobineau presented his work as an essay in positivistic social theory; in the preface to the second edition (1884), he argued that Henry Thomas Buckle...