What is Essentialism?

Essentialism is a way of thinking that argues that people have some innate, unchanging nature that is important in explaining why they behave in the way they do. It can be used to distinguish between men and women (‘women are from Venus and men from Mars’), between people of different characteristics (‘left-handed people are more creative’) or between people of different cultural or ethnic backgrounds (‘Northern Chinese work harder than Southern Chinese’).

Although essentialism as a means of thinking is very commonly witnessed, it should be criticized on several grounds. First, it is reductive: that is, it reduces people (in all their complexity, their differing loyalties and identities) can be explained by recourse to one simple, often biological categorization. Second, by dividing people into different categories, it places some people in an unwarranted position of superiority over others: for example, when it is argued that adherents of one religion or another are deficient in some element, it elevates adherents of other religions above them. Third, it denies the possibility of change. As the eminent development economist Ha-Joon Chang pointed out in his book Bad Samaritans, one hundred years ago, both Germans and Japanese were frequently written about as being terminally disorganized, lazy, incapable of discipline or creative endeavour. Today, of course, the peoples of those countries are lauded for almost exactly the opposite qualities. Similarly, the people of Southeast Asia have been regularly described as ‘lazy’ and ‘unable to work’ but as soon as manufacturing factories were established and the opportunities for earning income revealed, they were filled with extraordinarily diligent workers.  

One opposing way of thinking to essentialism is constructivism, which argues that people are not born as a specific type of person but become such a person through a variety of social processes and expectations. This concept is often associated with feminist thinkers, especially Simone de Beauvoir, who have shown that women are obliged to occupy certain familial and social categories (‘domestic worker,’ ‘home person’ and so forth) because of the way that they are obliged to do so by society, family, church and other institutions and not because they have any innate reason, predisposition or talent for doing so.

In the political world, essentialism is often used to promote a sense of nationalism and this leads, one way or another, to the instillation of a sense of superiority over other people. This may lead to apparent justification for using force against those other people. Hence, the Nazi party propagandized the essence of Jews prior to using violence against them, while the idea that some people are unable to rule themselves has been an argument deployed by would-be imperialists for centuries.