Biography of a Dangerous Idea - by Andrew S Curran (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An engaging investigation of how thirteen key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment natural historians and classifiers redefined what it meant to be human. By 1800, they had recast the very idea of humankind, sorting the world's peoples into rigid biological categories for the first time in history. Prize-winning biographer Andrew S. Curran retraces this often-misunderstood story by plunging into the lives and ideas of the most influential individuals behind this reconceptualization, among them Louis XIV, Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson.

Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, Biography of a Dangerous Idea not only reveals the Enlightenment's entanglement with empire and oppression--it offers a bold reassessment of the era's most celebrated luminaries.

Review Quotes

"Biography of a Dangerous Idea further cements Andrew S. Curran as one of our greatest scholars of the terrible history of race. In this vitally important, beautifully crafted book, Curran gives us biographies of the Enlightenment-era thinkers who created 'races' and also ensured that only people of European descent would benefit from these new divisions. This book, which reads more like a novel than most works of history, is essential reading for our own fraught times." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race

"Brilliant...a thorough and eminently readable dissection of a pernicious lie." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The story of an idea as dangerous as race is one that few are brave enough to tell. In thirteen sparkling biographical cameos, Andrew Curran--sharp-eyed intellectual historian and large-hearted storyteller--takes us on a journey to the dark side of the Enlightenment, introducing us to the men whose ideas contributed to unimaginable suffering, but whose ideals still infuse our hope for change." --Janice P. Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell, Pulitzer Prize finalist

"In this immensely informative and highly readable inquiry into the origins of Enlightenment thinking about race, Curran demonstrates that ideas cannot be understood apart from the people who produced them. This is intellectual biography performed at the very highest level." --Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University and author of Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair

"Biography of a Dangerous Idea is a deeply researched and accessible study of the origins, evolution, and persistence of the modern concept of race. This new history shows us how Bernier, Buffon, Linnaeus, Blumenbach, Voltaire, Kant, Jefferson, and others--among the most influential intellectuals of the Enlightenment--invented the concept of race that is still with us in the twenty-first century. This is an invaluable work because, in showing us how race was made, it also demonstrates how this most dangerous idea can be unmade." --Evelynn M. Hammonds, coauthor of The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics

"Cleverly crafted and well executed. Curran provides a collection of unflinching portraits of complex figures from the 'Enlightenment Era' who have contributed to the troubling and troublesome concept of race. Readers are treated to a careful recounting and reconstruction of the contexts and contingencies that shaped each figure's life, as well as candid assessments of their investment into systems that oppressed and denied the humanity of so many. This is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived at our present understanding of race. It is sweeping, it is stunning, and hard to put down." --Rana A. Hogarth, author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840

"Andrew Curran, one of the foremost authorities on this subject, offers a necessary and illuminating exploration of eighteenth-century debates on race. Composed of a series of insightful biographies, this highly readable work uncovers the complexities and contradictions that shaped the views of the Enlightenment's major thinkers. A clear-eyed book that challenges caricatures on all sides." --Antoine Lilti, author of The Legacy of the Enlightenment: Ambivalences of Modernity

"As wonderfully accessible as it is meticulously researched, Andrew Curran's Biography of a Dangerous Idea relates the birth of the modern concept of race through the personal stories of the Enlightenment figures who helped shape it. The book is a true gift for readers who seek to understand this complicated story." --Robert Bernasconi, author of The Critical Philosophy of Race

"In this penetrating and elegant study, Andrew Curran goes beyond the world of disembodied ideas, delving into the lives of the flesh-and-blood men whose actions and writings forged modern racial thought. Following thirteen race makers across Europe and its American colonies, this first and much-needed biographical history of race reveals the Enlightenment's deepest contradictions and enduring legacies." --Silvia Sebastiani, coauthor of Race et histoire dans les sociétés occidentales

About the Author

Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. A scholar and biographer, his writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, TIME, the Paris Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author or editor of five books. His most recent, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Who's Black and Why? His previous book was the prize-winning biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019).