Politics & Power Quote by Franz Boas

For a scientist best known for dismantling the supposed “laws” of race, Boas lands this line like a cold instrument reading: modernity has not cured prejudice; it has simply given it new infrastructure. France, in the liberal imagination, is the poster child for emancipation and citizenship - the Revolution “let down the barriers” and legally reclassified Jews as equals. Boas’s sting is that a century of formal equality can coexist with a political market for hatred. Rights, he implies, are not the same thing as social acceptance, and the gap between the two is where ideology breeds.

The phrasing does quiet but deliberate work. “Still strong enough” treats antisemitism not as a passing mood but as a durable force, something that can be measured by its ability to do real-world labor: “sustain” an organized party. That verb matters. Prejudice isn’t merely expressed; it bankrolls, votes, recruits, and legitimizes. Boas is mapping emotion into institutions.

The context is late-19th/early-20th-century Europe, where the Dreyfus Affair exposed how quickly the rhetoric of the Republic could curdle into conspiracy and ethnic scapegoating, and where mass politics made identity-based parties viable. Boas’s subtext is a warning to anyone who treats enlightened constitutions as finish lines. The barriers of law can fall; the barriers in the mind can regroup as platforms, pamphlets, and ballots.