Biography of a Dangerous Idea
A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The notion of race and racial hierarchy "came about in large part because of the institutions and methods invented by the Enlightenment," argues historian Curran (Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely) in this brilliant study. While "proto-biological notions related to race" can be found in Western thought going back to antiquity, it wasn't until the Enlightenment that the xenophobic bigotries of Europe were codified into "seemingly scientific... taxonomies." By 1800, these ideas had infiltrated everything from school curricula to women's magazines. In fact, Curran asserts, "the more progressive a country's educational policies," the more people were exposed to doctrines of racial hierarchy. He sheds light on how this proliferation occurred through short biographies of 13 individuals who "contributed in specific ways to the birth of race as a concept." They include figures well-known for their racist theorizing, like Thomas Jefferson and Carl Linnaeus, who "divided humankind into six major categories" in his groundbreaking classification system. Others' contributions are less well-known or obvious; they include Louis XIV, who commissioned a set of slave laws for his Caribbean colonies in 1685 that reified racial hierarchy, and Immanuel Kant, who propagated crude beliefs about white racial superiority. Curran concludes by spotlighting Black intellectuals of the era, including Ignatius Sancho and Phillis Wheatley, in a fascinating counter-history that presents them as the "true heirs to the era's aspirations." It amounts to a thorough and eminently readable dissection of a pernicious lie.
