Between Real and Ideal: F. D. E. Schleiermacher's Philosophy of Race*

Efforts to evaluate F. D. E. Schleiermacher's relationship to race have attempted to situate him within genealogies of modern racism by focusing on fragments of an early project on Australian colonization without considering his reflections on race in his mature ethical and political philosophy. Drawing on the Ethik and the Staatslehre , this article offers a preliminary examination of Schleiermacher's treatment of race, the status of persons, and inequality in the state, arguing that Schleiermacher understood race to operate as a political construct that both relativizes and bounds the idea of a nation. He saw the overcoming of racial inequality as one of the key challenges facing the “North American Free States.” The challenge that Schleiermacher's philosophy of race presents to standard liberal understandings of personhood and the adequacy of legal advocacy for non‐discrimination calls for further evaluation of his usefulness as a theorist of race for antiracist scholarship and praxis.