Why is diversity a value? A history.

New session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" online talk series, with the participation of Lorraine Datson, Director Emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Visiting Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Research Fellow in writing residency at the Paris IAS for the month of November 2025.

The "Paris IAS Ideas" online talk series features short and stimulating presentations from fellows of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, marking the beginning of 1-month writing residencies.

Online only and in English.
Free event but registration required. 
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Presentation

It is startling to realize how quickly and thoroughly the value of diversity, until a few decades ago a value largely confined to the aesthetic and organic realms, has acquired deep political and moral significance. Diversity as a value has a long history, but not in the moral and political realm. Until the nineteenth century, its home was in aesthetics. The Roman encyclopedist Pliny admired the variety of flowers and gemstones; medieval Christian writers praised the abundance and diversity of God’s creation; Renaissance orators elevated the qualities of copia and varia in speeches; early modern princes vyed with one another to assemble Kunst-und Wunderkammern that showcased the diversity of all the products of art and nature (including the diversity of human beings). In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, diversity became associated first with political economy and the principle of the division of labor and then with the specialization of organisms to ecological niches.

Once an aesthetic value of extravagance, diversity mutated into an economic value of efficiency. In the twentieth century, values of biodiversity and cultural diversity became intertwined. All of these past traditions, the aesthetic, the economic, and the biological, are still subliminally present and in part responsible for the recent rise of diversity as a moral and political value. Universalism has become an object of suspicion, either as the interests of a particular privileged group masquerading as the interests of humanity, or as simply a failure to appreciate the riches of diversity. How did this sea change in value come about, and come about so swiftly?