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

Book Synopsis

An engaging investigation of how 13 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 18th century, Christianity began to loosen its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological speculation were not cast aside. Instead, this raw material was increasingly reworked by secularly minded thinkers intent on redefining what it meant to be human. By 1800, Enlightenment naturalists and classifiers had sorted humanity into rigid racial categories for the first time in history.

Prize-winning biographer Andrew S. Curran retraces this misunderstood history through the lives and ideas of 13 pivotal figures. 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 Jefferson's Monticello, this sweeping narrative reveals how the Enlightenment's audacious quest for knowledge became entangled with systems of empire and oppression--while offering a bold new reassessment of the era's most celebrated luminaries.

Review Quotes

"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

Praise for Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

"Engrossing...a narrative sustained with appealing clarity and energy...readers of this biography are likely to be impressed by the scope of Diderot's thought and by his courage." --Washington Post

"Making sense of these mercurial works is not easy, and situating them in such a life as Diderot's is even more challenging, so it is remarkable that...Curran succeeds admirably in both regards...the most accessible version of the life and work of this protean figure...excellent." --New York Review of Books

"Curran does a terrific job of sorting through the crazily complicated history of the Encyclopédie's publication...[a] revivifying new book." --The New Yorker

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).