There has been a common presumption in debates surrounding social construction that to catch out some entity or category as so constructed is at the same time to condemn it. Thus Ian Hacking notes that “a primary use of ‘social construction’ is for consciousness raising;” it is “critical of the status quo.” Social constructionists generally move, Hacking argues, from the argument that a given entity or category X “need not have existed,” to the view that “{w}e would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed” (Hacking 1999, p. 6). On this line of thinking, every entity or category is expected either to be a real feature of the world, something left over when the world is carved at its joints, or it is to be exposed as constructed and by the same measure to be relegated to the scrap-heap along with phlogiston, the ether, and so on. But the category of ‘race’ seems to defy this dichotomy. Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that ‘negroid’, ‘caucasoid’ and so on represent real natural kinds, carve nature at its joints, and so on. For several decades it has been well established that there is as much genetic variation between two members of any supposed race, as between two members of supposedly distinct races (see in particular Lewontin 1972). This is not to say that there are no real differences, some of which are externally observable, between different human populations; it is only to say, in Lawrence Hirschfeld's words, that “races as socially defined do not (even loosely) capture interesting clusters of these differences” (Hirschfeld 1998, p. 4). And yet the category of race continues to be deployed in a vast number of contexts, and certainly not just by racists, but by ardent anti-racists as well, and by everyone in between. The history of race, then, is not like the history of phlogiston: an entity that is shown not to exist and that accordingly proceeds to go away. How are we to explain this difference? This is the principal question I would like to consider in the present article.

Much recent scholarly treatment of the theoretical and practical underpinnings of biological taxonomy from the 16 th to the 18 th centuries has failed to adequately consider the importance of the mode of generation of some living entity in the determination of its species membership, as well as in the determination of the ontological profile of the species itself. In this article, I show how a unique set of considerations was brought to bear in the classification of creatures whose species membership was thought to be entirely determined by descent from parents of the same kind, in contrast with creatures whose generation could proceed spontaneously or through budding. Concretely, the relevance of mode of generation to the practice of taxonomy means that we must rethink the role of the early modern botanists in the development of a universal science of applied taxonomy. I argue that the task of classifying ‘higher’ biological kinds—those united, in Kant's language, through their generative power—is one with its unique set of problems, arising as much from classical anthropology as from natural philosophy, and that the conception of zoological species that emerged in the early modern period was a consequence of these problems, and not primarily of the ‘applied metaphysics’ of classificatory practice.