Biography of a Dangerous Idea: Andrew Curran on How the Enlightenment Invented Race

“The Enlightenment may have produced race, but it also produced what we might call anti-racism.” — Andrew Curran

 

Most of us imagine the eighteenth century Enlightenment positively. As the victory of reason, science and individual rights over superstition and intolerance. But Andrew Curran, who has spent his career interpreting the Enlightenment, has a more nuanced view. Indeed, his new book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, suggests that the age of reason was also what he calls the first “anthropological century.” Which meant that in sorting humankind into fixed biological categories for the first time in history, the Enlightenment invented the dangerous idea of “race.”

 

Before the eighteenth century, Curran says, Europeans spoke of nations and peoples using the botanical metaphor of varieties. Variety implies hybridization. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Race, in contrast, separates species into fixed categories. As biblical authority weakened, the European mind was freed to play new tricks. To classify people by skin samples and anatomical designs. Thus the “dangerous idea” of race embraced by every Enlightenment philosopher, from the tyrannical Catherine the Great to the slave owning Thomas Jefferson. With “enlightened” friends like these, who needs enemies?

 

Further Reading:

 

•       Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson by Andrew S. Curran (Other Press, 2026) — a group biography of thirteen figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant and Jefferson.

•       Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race, edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr. — the 1739 Bordeaux essay contest on the source of Black skin. Nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

•       Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely and The Anatomy of Blackness — his earlier books, the first a prize-winning biography, the second a traditional intellectual history.

•       Earlier this month on Keen On: Dennis Rasmussen on Frederick Douglass — Curran’s co-author on a forthcoming book, Good Beyond Belief, about the eighteenth-century atheists who argued one could be good without God.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Before Race. Curran resists the current rush to find race everywhere in the past. Xenophobia is ancient — humanity ends at the frontiers of one’s own tribe, as Lévi-Strauss put it — and the dehumanization of Jews, Muslims, Roma and West Africans was enormous. But the specifically biological version, in which your physical makeup makes you inferior, doesn’t take off until the eighteenth century, and you can watch it happen in the vocabulary. People spoke of nations, peoples and varieties; Buffon and Linnaeus both used variety, a botanical metaphor implying hybridization and continuity within a category. Race implies fixity and standalone categories; species implies no biological link at all. All three were in circulation, and the shift between them is the story. Context mattered too: in Nantes or Liverpool you would hear proto-racist talk from returning slave traders, while in central France you would hear something else entirely, in a society where literacy ran at perhaps