Ethnic and Racial Diversity

Hans F. Sennholz, “Ethnic and Racial Diversity” (1997)

This file is a short single-author political essay. Sennholz’s scope is broad but tightly argumentative: he uses historical examples—the Roman Empire, the Hapsburg monarchy, the Soviet collapse, and contemporary America—to argue that ethnic and racial diversity is not inherently destabilizing. It becomes dangerous, in his account, when political institutions abandon equal liberty and turn toward group favoritism, redistribution, or cultural fragmentation.

The essay’s central thesis is that diversity can coexist with peace only under a shared legal and moral order. Sennholz begins by rejecting the assumption that plurality itself is the problem. Diverse societies, he argues, can flourish when government confines itself to protecting persons and property rather than distributing privileges among ethnic, racial, or class groups.

Diversity in freedom makes for social peace, economic productivity, and great prosperity.

This is the essay’s governing formula: freedom converts diversity into strength, while politicized difference converts it into conflict. The conceptual move is classical-liberal and moral-cultural at once. Sennholz does not defend diversity through pluralist celebration, but through restraint: the state must not divide citizens into competing beneficiary and victim groups.

But they began to disintegrate as soon as they abandoned the ways of freedom and engaged in ethnic, racial, or class discrimination.

The historical middle section supports this claim. Rome serves as the first case: despite military conquest, Sennholz emphasizes toleration, citizenship, law, and the civilizing effects of the Pax Romana. Its decline is explained not by ethnic heterogeneity but by coercive political-economic centralization.

In the end, the Empire perished when military socialism turned it into a vast garrison and economic concentration camp.

The Hapsburg Empire functions similarly. Sennholz presents it as a long-lived “polyglot dynasty” that sustained multiple peoples through reforms such as abolition of serfdom, criminal-law moderation, religious toleration, and ethnic impartiality. Its collapse is attributed to nationalism and the failure to defend its own supranational legitimacy. These examples prepare his warning that modern multinational states can disintegrate when political identity becomes organized around nationality, race, or class.

The essay then turns sharply to the United States. Sennholz argues that Americans lack the ethnic unity of older nations and therefore depend on a shared “American system” rather than common ancestry. That system consists of Judeo-Christian moral premises, equality before law, individual liberty, and economic opportunity.

What brought them together was a set of Judeo-Christian values, a body of thought and a system of law that promised individual freedom, equality before the law, and the possibility of economic improvement.

For Sennholz, multiculturalism threatens this shared order by teaching Americans to understand themselves primarily through separate group histories and grievances. He treats public institutions—especially schools, universities, courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies—as agents of fragmentation when they replace common moral and legal principles with redistributionist politics and cultural separatism.

The ties that bind Americans are under heavy attack.

His critique is polemical but conceptually consistent: diversity requires a unifying civic-moral framework, and that framework cannot survive if public education disparages the American system while accentuating inherited differences. He therefore interprets multicultural education not as inclusion but as a political force that “build[s] walls” between groups and weakens the conditions of national cohesion.

Indeed, public education together with public policy are the primary forces that are tearing us apart.

The closing passage makes the essay’s relevance explicit. Increased immigration and demographic diversity, Sennholz argues, heighten the need for common instruction in the American system rather than reduce it. His final prescription is uncompromising: if public institutions cannot teach the moral and legal foundations that unite Americans, they have forfeited their justification.

The danger of disintegration must be our permanent reminder that ethnic and racial diversity requires Judeo-Christian values and a system of law which unites us.

The essay is thus less a sociological study of ethnicity than a warning about political order. Its core argument is that diversity is sustainable only when law is impartial, government is limited, and citizens share a moral vocabulary strong enough to resist group-based redistribution and resentment.