Overview

Over the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly 'processed' by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the human. By century's end, naturalists and classifiers had divided the human species into racial categories using methods that we now associate with the Enlightenment era. In Biography of a Dangerous Idea, prize-winning biographer and Enlightenment specialist Andrew S. Curran retells this story through the medium of group biography. Written more like a detective story than traditional history, the book traces the emergence of race through the lives of 14 pivotal figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant, and 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, this sweeping narrative not only reveals how the Enlightenment's ultimate Promethean quest intertwined with systems of oppression and empire, but also offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the era's most famous luminaries.

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9781635422245

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Reviews

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

“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

Author Information

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).

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