Biography of a dangerous idea : a new history of race : from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson
Publication Information
New York : Other Press, [2026]
Physical Description
502 pages : black and white illustrations, portraits, maps ; 24 cm
Summary
"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" --
Contents
- Part one : Race before the advent of race
- Louis XIV : king of the slaves
- Jean-Baptiste Labat : the priestly ethnographer
- Part two : The new animal : man
- François Bernier : the first classifier
- Carl Linnaeus : the botanist who transformed man into an animal
- Part three : Race gets a history
- Buffon : the man who put humans in time
- Voltaire : the philosophe who made racism drôle
- The Scots and stage theory : David, Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and William Robertson
- Part four : Race and the enlightenment
- Kant and Blumenbach and the German definition of race
- Thomas Jefferson : nation builder, race builder
- Epilogue : Enter the antiracists.