and also notes at length that Nazi Germany, when embedding their distorted ideologies into law, drew on legal concepts from prevailing United States legislation. Summary of select works The Meaning of Race The Meaning of Race examines the historical development, and philosophical and political roots, of the idea of race. It also explores the relationship between the idea of race and contemporary theories of multiculturalism and pluralism. Malik argues that racial discourse and theories of racial difference arose in opposition to the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment, and gained their plausibility from "the persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the concept of equality." (page 70) As the nineteenth century unfolded, the politically dominant classes appropriated science (particularly evolutionary theory) to support the idea of a natural order underlying social and economic inequalities, though nothing about the dynamic of science itself necessitated racial conclusions. Thus, "the discourse of race did not arise out of the categories of Enlightenment discourse but out of the relationship between Enlightenment thought and the social organisation of capitalism." (page 225) The idea of race applied initially to class differences within European society, but was later applied to differences between Europeans and others, "and hence became marked by colour differences." (p. 8) In the twentieth century, racial theory was largely discredited by its association with Nazism, and the word "racism" entered the political vocabulary as a term of criticism, but the defeat of the Nazis led only to a recasting, not the destruction, of a belief in immutable differences among groups of human beings. This belief has been transferred to contemporary notions of culture. As depicted by Malik, twentieth-century anthropological thought mistakenly divided humanity into integrated, holistic cultures that must be understood as static; such cultures must not be tampered with, since the nature of their harmonious functioning requires that they must "survive intact." (page 156). Malik sees this tendency in anthropology as another expression, along with the idea of race, of "a particularist, relativist, and anti-humanist philosophy" that has rejected Enlightenment universalism. (page 7) He opposes the "politics of difference" – the identification of competing social groups based on shared history and a sense of identity – believing it sets back the struggle for political and economic equality. The final chapters of The Meaning of Race contain a critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, including the views of