Racial and social dimensions of antiziganism: the representation of Gypsies in the political theory

Abstract

Within antiziganism research, the relation of racial and social connotations in the us-age of the term gypsy is subject of an ongoing debate. Especially in the context of police work, historians suggest that until the 1920s the image of gypsies mainly referred to a social status, whereas today the image of the gypsy is highly racialized. This article challenges the idea of a strict separation of the social and racial dimensions and takes a closer look at the different argumentations of how to rule the interrelated groups of gypsies and vagabonds in the history of ideas. For this reason, it exam-ines Kant s statements on gypsies in the context of his problematic race theory as well as Marx s treatment of vagabondage as a social issue, arising with the beginning of manufacturing. With this, the article connects two major discourses in political the-ory and the history of ideas, one on barbarism/civilization and another on poverty, with the topic of antiziganism and explores the connection of an antiziganist raciali-zation with socioeconomic structures. Moreover, it examines the empirical side of an-tiziganism in the context of policing until the eighteenth century, looking at English and German legislative sources, and provides an outlook on the underlying social and racial argumentation in current debates on so-called poverty migration .