Andrew S. Curran — Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race
Scholar examines how 13 Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race during the shift from religious to secular understanding.
Why we picked this
Where did modern racial categories come from? Curran traces them to specific thinkers and specific moments in Enlightenment thought.
Andrew Curran’s “Biography of a Dangerous Idea” asks a deceptively simple question: who invented race? Not as a social phenomenon — that’s ancient — but as a pseudo-scientific taxonomy. The answer, Curran argues, lies in the Enlightenment, when 13 specific thinkers — from Louis XIV to Voltaire to Kant to Jefferson — built the intellectual framework that sorted humans into rigid racial categories.
What makes the book distinctive is its focus on the mechanics of idea-formation. These weren’t inevitable developments. They were choices made by specific people in specific contexts, and Curran traces each one with the precision of an intellectual historian.
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