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

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Most people seem to think that the Enlightenment, or the age of Enlightenment, the age of reason was a good moment in history. It happened during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, and it emphasized, at least according to, Gemini, reason, science, and individual rights over tradition and blind faith. But my guest today, who is one of the most prominent historians of the Enlightenment, Andrew Curran, seems to have a more complicated view of the Enlightenment. He's the author of a number of very influential books, many of which deal with the Enlightenment, deals with, at least according to his take, not just its brilliance and its dangerous ideas, but also its blind spots. And when it comes to blind spots, perhaps the blindest of blind spots in the history of the Enlightenment is race. It's the subject of Andrew's new book. It came out earlier this year, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson. And Andrew is joining us from Middletown, Connecticut, where he lives. He's a professor of Romance Languages at Wesleyan University. Andrew, congratulations on the new book.

00:02:02 Andrew Curran: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:02:04 Andrew Keen: So did I get that right? I mean, you're clearly a historian of the Enlightenment. There's no doubt about that. But are you a little bit more ambivalent than others, particularly progressives?

00:02:18 Andrew Curran: Well, it's, I loved your introduction because you do get to the heart of this question, and that is the legacy of the Enlightenment. And, I think that there have been two major historiographical traditions related to the Enlightenment. There have been, what some people call the censors of the Enlightenment, the people who are really interested in castigating it completely. And then there are the apologist, the people who just love the Enlightenment and all those things you talked about, progress and empiricism and a victory over occultism and superstition. And, I think that there's a path to be created for people interested in thinking about the Enlightenment that allows both things to exist simultaneously. So I wouldn't say that I am interested in kind of getting rid of the Enlightenment or castigating the Enlightenment completely, but I'm certainly interested in a deeper understanding of it that is much more open minded about some of the blind spots as you, cited. So, I think that most of the thinkers who are, you flipped up on your screen there for a second, people like Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson, David Hume, Voltaire. They all were very complex people, and they lived at a time, other than Kant, where the notion of Enlightenment was, really a description of people the way people would think as opposed to a time period. In the same way that right now, we don't have a name for our century. So when we look back at our century, are we gonna say our century is guilty or innocent? I think probably we'll try to come up with a complex answer to that question too.

00:04:08 Andrew Keen: Maybe we can think of our century as a kind of court, a moral court, which other centuries haven't imagined themselves as. So coming back to this question of the Enlightenment, and I'm quoting from your site. It says, Andrew Curran writes about the Enlightenment, its brilliance, its blind spots, and the dangerous ideas it handed down to us. Is the issue of race you've spent so much of your life writing about race. Your book before, Biography of a Dangerous Idea [as spoken: Who's Black and Why?], that you wrote with Henry Louis Gates, very distinguished African American scholar, was awarded, an NAACP, literary, award for its brilliance is the greatest blind spot, Andrew, of the Enlightenment race. Maybe we could maybe before we even get to that question, maybe you can define in your mind as a historian, someone who's written extensively on the history of the Enlightenment. I mean, I just quoted from Gemini, which I guess in a weird way is a product of the Enlightenment in a very long term view. What for you is the Enlightenment? What does it mean, that word?

00:05:22 Andrew Curran: Well, certainly the Enlightenment, you know, by the nineteenth century was associated with a gigantic intellectual movement that brought people out of a time period. This is a kind of traditional notion, brought out of a time period of superstition, of, blindness to, the reality of life in many ways. And, that the church dominated the day to day life of people tremendously and throughout the eighteenth century as well. And there's an emancipatory side of the Enlightenment intellectually, but I think there's also an emancipatory side of the Enlightenment when it comes to people's personal freedom and liberty. One of the nice things about the Enlightenment, I think that one of the best parts is the universalism. And I think that's where, you know, the greatest part of the Enlightenment is the idea that all men are created equal, that there's a universal human condition, that there should be some inalienable rights. The blind spot is that if we're to sum up Enlightenment, if you take Thomas Jefferson's famous declaration from the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, then you also have this idea of are they, which is part of it. So there's a couple things here I could maybe, do some wordplay. The, Enlightenment is associated with anthropocentrism, the idea that, humans are putting humans at the center of their preoccupations, and they are putting humans at the center of this gigantic quest to produce knowledge. That is something that's linked to an idea of this new emancipation of the human, of the individual. And it is anthropocentric, and it's also humanist, and it belongs to everybody, at least theoretically. The problem is that the, Enlightenment is also the first anthropological century as well. And so there are a lot of people who are qualifying this universalism in a lot of different ways, both through anatomical discoveries and discussions about different kinds of people, skin samples and, big treatises about how different types of people have different physiological makeups, classification schemes, which put people into a hierarchical structure for the first time in history, new genealogical notions of the human, which talked about something that seems almost like proto evolution where we kind of look at, people moving through time and some of them degenerating. And also the idea that some people are perhaps more primitive than others and that there's a certain kind of society, which is commercial society, European society, which is at the pinnacle of European civilization. So these things are all associated with the new anthropology that's happening. Anthropologists would say their anthropology just didn't exist at this time, but certainly the anthropos and a logicus [as spoken], I mean, the kind of the logic of the human is taking place in the eighteenth century in a way that had never happened before.

00:08:46 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's fascinating, and so many of the period's writers from, I don't know, Defoe to Montesquieu were skeptical but also wrote about the supposed primitiveness of different kinds of man. The irony and you talk, I guess, what you're implying, Andrew, is that the blind spot perhaps or the unintended blind spot or consequence of the Enlightenment was the development of scientific racism. And I wanna as I said, your latest book is, the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, a new history of race that brings together your interest in the Enlightenment and in race, and in theories of race. Before we get to the Enlightenment theory of race, if there's such a thing, how was race imagined in the pre-Enlightenment period. I mean, maybe there were many pre-Enlightenment periods, but the moment before the Enlightenment, when perhaps the world emphasized or had much less of an emphasis on reason, science, and individual rights. The world of Louis the fourteenth, the last king of the of France before the revolution [ed.: the last king of France before the Revolution was Louis XVI; Louis XIV died in 1715]. Is it possible to argue, Andrew, you're a historian, I know this is a rather silly question, that before the Enlightenment, people didn't think in terms of race. So if they saw somebody in their mind of a different skin color, it wouldn't occur to them? Or is that wrong? Or maybe they just didn't see because everyone lived in villages where genealogy was shared. They just didn't see people of different skin tints.

00:10:37 Andrew Curran: The question of what people thought of, say, in 1650 is incredibly difficult to, answer in that way. I've gotta close my eyes and think. I like think I like conjuring up specific context. So imagine you're living in Nantes or in Liverpool in major slave trading cities. You'd be hearing about different kinds of people, from West Africa because of the slave trade traders coming back. And, certainly, horrific, xenophobic, proto racist ideas would be bandied about in town. I think if you live in the center of France, really, really far away from the coast, you would have different kinds of information. Literacy rates at the time were very, very low, sometimes 15%, and we may be just talking about people able to sign their name. So that's one thing that's really important about the way people are thinking at that time. And the second thing is that, the terminology shifts dramatically. Even if people would think that, people of different religions, skin colors, ethnicities, so on and so forth, were not like them. There's a, anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss, said that, humanity ends at the frontiers of one's own tribe always. But the kind of biological dehumanization that takes place in the eighteenth century based on the idea that your physical makeup is somehow truly inferior really didn't take off until the eighteenth century. You can see that on the level of terminology. People talked about other types of people in terms of nations, peoples, or varieties. And I love thinking about the notion of variety compared to race. So Buffon, who is one of my main characters, and Linnaeus both talk about varieties of people.

00:12:38 Andrew Keen: And these were Enlightenment scientists.

00:12:40 Andrew Curran: Right. And Linnaeus is, his notion of variety is probably closer to race in some ways. But variety is a botanical metaphor that implies hybridization and continuity within a certain category, And it makes sense. You think about flowers that hybridize and, you know, a thousand different kinds of lilies looking out of my garden. But race really implies much more fixity. And when the term race is being applied to humans, it really, emphasized the fact that there are standalone separate categories. And eventually, during the eighteenth century and even during the seventeenth century, for some people, there was an the idea that different groups of people are actually different species. Terminology is very important. Variety, continuity, race, kind of fixity, species, no biological link between races. All those ideas were circulating in the eighteenth century. So to go back to your original question, I would say that by the seventh—during the seventeenth century, generally the notion of race didn't exist in the same way, although some of the notions the proto the kind of the proto-racial notions are certainly out there. I think these days very quickly everybody is trying to claim race. People—classicists, medievalists, people in the Renaissance, seventeenth century, they're all looking for the antecedents of race. But for me, it really takes off in the eighteenth century, not only because of the ideas, but because of literacy.

00:14:22 Andrew Keen: So, yeah, it's a sensitive subject. It's such an important one, particularly given our modern preoccupation, our twenty first century preoccupation with race and racism, if people Andrew, and I'm trying to phrase this question correctly so I don't get into too much trouble. If people thought of themselves in the pre-Enlightenment age in terms of different species, does that make the concept of racism redundant? Do we need to invent new language, new terms to think about what today we define as racism?

00:15:02 Andrew Curran: Yeah. Big question here. So let's start with a race racism question. I mean, there's that kind of the Bishop Berkeley idea if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? And if someone is racist in his or her own house, is that really racism? The idea of race is around, but I like to think of racism as the, ideological kind of deployment of racial ideas to oppress other people. And I think that's it's interesting to think about the notion of race and the concept of race and then how race functions politically. And that's how I define the difference between race and racism. As to, you know, regarding what people thought in the seventeenth century, there was a very, very small and heretical group of people who talked about different species of men, and they did so for a very important reason, because they were, they, of course, we, Europeans had discovered Native Americans, and Native Americans weren't in the Bible. And one of the ways to explain the existence of Native Americans was by talking about pre-Adamites, a different species of people, that came about at a different time from during the creation. This was an incredibly heretical idea that was bandied about.

00:16:22 Andrew Keen: Heretical in terms of the Enlightenment or in terms of the church?

00:16:27 Andrew Curran: The church. So, we have to go back to the Old Testament and the story of Noah and his three sons who land in the Caucasus, and that's why we have the term Caucasian. We can get back to that if you want. So Noah's ark lands in the Caucasus and his three sons and their wives set out around the world and are fruitful, and they multiply, creating a huge, group and varieties of humans that are found all over the Earth. This idea is called monogenesis, and it was the reigning idea in Christian Europe, for a very, very long time. And so to say that there was kind of different types of humans would be a heretical, notion. By the eighteenth century, the Bible is no longer what we might call biblical anthropology is no longer as nearly as effective or accepted, and that frees the, quote, unquote, European mind to do a lot of new tricks having to do with, the way they see humans both, as I said, anatomically, genealogically, and in terms of classification. It pulls away from that original monogenetic idea of the original, group of three, kind of tribes setting out over the Earth.

00:17:54 Andrew Keen: It's fascinating. I actually didn't realize that was the origins of Caucasian. Of course, it was the Caucasians who also invented wine. Andrew, I wonder whether race, I mean, in terms of your Biography of a Dangerous Idea, it's all a question of how we look at one another. I'm not a neuroscientist, but maybe our brains aren't capable of enabling us to look at each other in more than a few ways. So when you and I look at one another, some things come to mind. You're wearing glasses. You're obviously white, and you're wearing a shirt. In the pre-Enlightenment, in the traditional world, which was riven in Europe, at least, by these massively violent and ongoing religious divisions, particularly between Protestants and Catholics. In the pre-Enlightenment age, the way age you talk about in Liverpool, for example, or in Central France, when people looked at each other, would they see differently from us moderns? Would they be much less race skin centric and maybe wondering, is that person a believer in one God, in the Pope, in Luther, in the Bible? Does this question make sense?

00:19:21 Andrew Curran: Again, it's very difficult to imagine a collective, consciousness and everybody thinking the same way, but I think it's certainly possible to, imagine a time when the biological side of race is really not just doesn't really exist. At the same time, xenophobia and the notion of alterity, as literature specialists like to say, is certainly present. And the dehumanization of people who are, if we're talking about Europeans, non European is enormous. Gypsies, Jews, Muslims, West Africans, Asians to a much lesser extent. There's a lot of kind of xenophobic hatred and scorn and fear of other people. I mean, for a long time, North Africans were slave trading, and, there's a kind of exchange of, exchange. There's all sorts of kind of terrible relationships that exist between North Africa and Europe. So there's a lot of, fear, and, of course, the crusades are play an enormous role in the way that Europe is going to be, understanding the rest of the world. Native Americans, how Europeans see Native Americans is also a kind of a gigantic 15 volume, answer that I'm not gonna give right now, but it's very difficult to say that everyone was kind of thinking the same way. There are you can find people who are incredibly open minded in the, fifteenth century. Marco—I'm not talking about Marco Polo, but Marco Polo's, fellow Venetian, Cadamosto, takes off to West Africa, and he's a slave trader. But he sees Africans as being really intelligent and great merchants, and he talks about their the structures of government. You don't see the same kind of race based views that you certainly see by the eighteenth century when views of Africa come not from Africa, but from the laboratories in the colonies where there are tens of thousands of Europeans in contact with enslaved, Africans. And they're writing about them with this new methodology where they see people as not only dehumanized, but they are able to explain the dehumanization throughout these spurious racial kind of theories that crop up during the time.

00:21:52 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting you use the term open minded to describe one of Marco Polo's traveling companions [ed.: Cadamosto sailed in the 1450s, nearly two centuries after Marco Polo; a fellow Venetian, not a companion] because he was sympathetic to sympathetic, to the people he met in Africa. Is that the idea of being open minded, is that by definition, Andrew, an Enlightenment concept? I mean, did people use the term open mindedness before the Enlightenment?

00:22:23 Andrew Curran: I think, you know, in French, esprit ouvert has been around for a while, open minded. I honestly don't know how long that's been around in English, I expect, for quite a long time. What I how I could answer this question is by saying that one of the big values of the Enlightenment is relativism, cultural relativism. And it's the idea that there's not just one absolute truth. This is one of the great legacies of the Enlightenment, and there are many great legacies of the Enlightenment. So we can take, for example, Montesquieu, who writes the very famous, the Persian Letters, epistolary novel in 1721, where he publishes it in 1721, which is the story of two Persian, Iranian men who show up, aristocrats in Paris, and discuss what life is like in Paris. And the most famous line from that book is, a story being told by one of them about meeting a Parisian who looks at him and says, how is it you can be Persian? And that is a kind of a funny ironic idea that it's the notion that how can some other type of, existence exist other than other reality exist other than the Parisian French reality. And Montesquieu is making fun of the fact that Europeans think that they are at the center of the universe and understand everything, whereas these two Persian men, although they do represent Asian despotism, are able to talk about, France in a way that people in France cannot do it. So there's this clash of cultures, which is super important during the Enlightenment. People are traveling much more. Something else that's really, indicative of this is that, the most famous or the most popular kind of literature, say, in 1680 might be it was religious literature. So you're getting the stories of the saints, and you're reading maybe if you were able to read, you might read some theological treatises. But by, you know, 1750, 1760, the most popular, genre of literature is travel writing. Yeah. People are fascinated by the rest of the world during the eighteenth century. They are far less so, and they were mostly worried about their eternal soul in 1650 and 1660.

00:24:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, that travel writing was a form of mirror, certainly, for Montesquieu in reminding Frenchmen perhaps that they weren't quite as smart or sophisticated or advanced as they thought they were just as, I guess, in a way, Tocqueville's travel writing in the nineteenth century on America says the same thing. Let's talk a little bit about America. You mentioned Native Americans. Would it be fair to say, Andrew, that America is the quintessential Enlightenment project, which explains both its brilliance, its danger, but also its blind spots? If we are to find a history of the Enlightenment, it's in the history of the United States, for better or worse.

00:25:43 Andrew Curran: Another great question. I think, you know, in the way I frame it in the book, in, certainly the, story of race and the progress that takes place, kind of political progress that takes place in the eighteenth century. There's no doubt that, the United States, embodies both the best values of the Enlightenment project, as some people call it, and also the worst. In that, certainly, the universalism, which is being, which is part and parcel of the way that people like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, the other kind of founding fathers, thought of the United States was, really an extension of the ideas that had been circulating in Europe for a long time, coming from John Locke and those kind of folks. And it was a fascinating thing for Europe to look and see these ideas as unthinkable, this unthinkable, occurrence that a bunch of insurgents, as they were called at the time, and just love emphasizing that these insurgents, kicked out the most important and powerful monarchy, in existence at the time, at least the most powerful. And, yeah, certainly the scary side of the Enlightenment era, which is the era where the slave trade reaches its, apex, at a time when the dispossession of Native Americans is taking place just starting to take place at a rapid rate. The dehumanization of people that's made possible through some of these Enlightenment ideas are also taking place in the United States. You know, the book you know, we're talking about some very serious things here, but I like to always remind people that the book is written in a way that's very different from, the traditional intellectual history, and we could get back to that if you want, and that it embeds the story of race and the story of people. And the way that people, grapple with the question of race individually. And that allows me to talk about Thomas Jefferson. Right.

00:28:02 Andrew Keen: And then I was gonna come to Jefferson because, of course, he is the great question when it comes to this. On the one hand, the most sophisticated and enlightened figure in America, the owner of Monticello, and on the other hand, also the owner of slaves, and, we know also his own extremely controversial sexual history. So could we say I mean, speaking of, maybe let me revise the question. Your book, the subtitle is from Louis the fourteenth to Thomas Jefferson. So Louis the fourteenth is certainly not really a figure out of the Enlightenment. What was the difference between Louis the fourteenth? It wasn't a very enlightened figure, but maybe less interested in race, and Thomas Jefferson, who, on the one hand, the architect of the American of American independence, the author of the Constitution—of the Declaration of Independence, and yet a slave owner. How could we compare and contrast Jefferson and Louis the fourteenth in terms of this Biography of a Dangerous Idea?

00:29:20 Andrew Curran: What I would say is that, for and I'm gonna get back to those guys in a second, but my preface would be that, for many of the figures who are writing about race during the eighteenth century, Buffon, Linnaeus in Uppsala in Sweden, Kant in Königsberg, and Blumenbach who really makes the—popularizes the expression Caucasian very important for the world. For many of these people, they were talking about race in very abstract terms. I am going to quote, Catherine the Great who was talking to Diderot, my buddy Diderot, about

00:30:05 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Subject of, I think it was your first book, one of your early books, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. So you're quite an authority on Diderot.

00:30:14 Andrew Curran: Diderot had all sorts of wild ideas about how to change Russia to make it much more democratic, and, Catherine looked at him and said, oh, Diderot. Diderot. Diderot. You write on paper, and I write on skin. And that's the difference between us. And to get back to Louis the fourteenth and Thomas Jefferson, some of these people in the middle of the book are really writing on paper, and Louis the fourteenth and Thomas Jefferson are writing on skin. Louis the fourteenth is the first person well, he actually, I shouldn't say that. He's the most famous monarch to put his signature on a slave code. Slave codes, you know, came up came about. They were usually composed by militias who were charged with, overseeing the slave populations in Brazil and Central America and then Northern America, of course, and, you know, and particularly in the Caribbean, in places like Barbados. And France's most famous slave code is the, sixteen eighty five Code Noir, the Black Code that Louis fourteen signed, as I said, in 1685. And like most slave codes, this made gave slavery a legal status, and it transformed, the people who were enslaved, black Africans into property. And so the notion of what it meant to be called, a Negro or a negre in French went from being a kind of an ethnographic slash proto-racial term into being a term associated with the political status. It's not yet race, but we're getting really close to it. So Louis the fourteenth does that, and a hundred years later, exactly, a hundred years later and remember that Thomas Jefferson is floating around France at this time, actually meeting with Louis the sixteenth in the same halls of Versailles where Louis the fourteenth was hanging out a century before. And he writes Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he too is, writing on skin because he's helping to construct the new country, and he's gonna do so based on his racial vision of what the new country should be. He was terrified of slave uprisings, and one of the things he recommended is that, for the country to go to move forward, it needed to separate itself from its enslaving, enslavement of different Africans. He hated slavery, but in many ways his solution to that problem was to get rid of the slaves, either by sending them out to the far, far West, maybe to the Caribbean or even back to Africa, which is one of the big, proposals circulating in this, seventeen eighties and nineties. So, yes, Jefferson and Louis the fourteenth, bookend the project quite literally because they, really show what happens over the course of the century, both, given the fact that the notion of race had didn't quite exist yet and the justification for slavery in 1685 was the fact that you, people lost their, physical freedom but they gained eternal salvation. This is what the very, very pious Louis the fourteenth is telling himself. By 1785, the anticlerical deist slash skeptic Jefferson had no illusions about why people were being enslaved. And he had bought into all the European, theories circulating at the time and so he really saw them as inferior, inferior groups of people.

00:34:03 Andrew Keen: Slavery has always existed, of course, but would it be fair to say then that the slavery that existed in America, that Thomas Jefferson invested in and benefited from, was racial slavery? I mean, could you have had slavery? Were there slaves in America who were white, or was it impossible to be a white slave?

00:34:27 Andrew Curran: Well, certainly during the you know, if you went back to 1650 in Virginia, 1680 in Virginia, there were, a huge number of indentured servants, and indentured servitude happened, you know, all over the place. The, you know, in the seventeenth century, people were raising tobacco as opposed to sugarcane. And tobacco, if you can think about tobacco leaves as being, you know, light and fluffy and not nearly as brutal as sugarcane, which has these razor sharp stalks which cut you to shreds and you feed them into a roller, and you lose your arms in the roller. Sugar is terrible. And, the indentured servants, deserted, or went back either they took off very often. It just kind of died out, and the, African chattel slavery changed everything. I mean, it was it existed certainly from the earliest times, but indentured servants who their lives are very much like enslaved people's lives, except they could get out after three or four years and depending on where they were. So even if they were working side by side, enslaved Africans, you know, materially, I really can't say everywhere, but just generally their lives are pretty miserable and pretty much the life of a slave, of a bonded person. Except, as I said, a white person would not be, bonded for life, and then, a white person's kids would never be children, would never be seen as, bearing that save, that same status of enslavement.

00:36:05 Andrew Keen: Jefferson is, of course, a remarkably controversial fellow. I mean, there are two, perhaps, rather vulgar views of him. On the one hand, people excuse him. They say, well, everybody was a racist back then, and everyone had slaves, so he was no different from anyone else. On the other hand, people will argue that he reveals the, not just the contradiction, but the profound hypocrisy of the founding of the United States and all the cant about individualism and freedom and democracy. Of course, there is a huge gray area between those two views. How should we think about Jefferson, Andrew, when it comes to this issue of race? Are either of those positions credible, or are they is it so complex that we eventually just kind of muddle those two?

00:36:58 Andrew Curran: Jefferson is incredibly, complex and utterly fascinating. I will say he was the person who scared me the most, being someone who studies Europe and not the United States to come over and, you know, think through the legacy of this person when there are there's this gigantic industry, of people who, are locked in these gigantic ideological battles about who he was. I think it, one of the nice things about the chapter I wrote about Jefferson, which, does think about him as a kind of a whole person, is that, you know, we see him as, profoundly, awkward in the beginning of his life when he's governor of Virginia and having had some really kind of, a lot of troubles, early on before he finds his footing. He is brilliant. He is very much interested in putting into practice the ideas that are circulating in the Enlightenment. When it comes to the his overall legacy, if I could jump ahead here, to the question of slavery and the way that people talk about him and say, well, everyone was a racist at the time, and that's not true. One of the great legacies of the more positive legacies of the Enlightenment is that, the Enlightenment may have produced race, but it also produced what we might call in a very, you know, careful context, anti racism. There are a lot of people who were bitter, very much engaged in refuting the ideas that people like Jefferson were disseminating at the time. As a matter of fact, we go back to Jefferson in the seventeen eighties where he is in Paris, and he's engaged with, working with the revolutionaries like Lafayette to come up with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which is taking place in his, a townhouse on the Champs-Élysées. It's an amazing story. At this at the same time this is happening, there's a group of people in France who are trying to convince him to join the Society of Friends of Blacks, which is actively engaged in refuting the racist ideas which had become the justification for slavery. Jefferson says, You know, no, I really can't do that. And years later we see that, he really believed in the, fundamental physical inferiority of Africans, and that's one of the reasons he just couldn't join the society, at least that's what I believe. He was, challenged by numerous people during his lifetime to think, more positively and question his own ideas, most famously by a brilliant, black, astronomer, a man who published his own almanac named Benjamin Banneker. Benjamin Banneker wrote him when Thomas Jefferson was secretary of state. And Jefferson wrote him a very, very polite reply, which was very rare at the time for somebody like him to reply to a black man, but he said it would be great if it is really true what you are saying about black people. And he always maintained that kind of very cautious, and not overtly racist discourse and the way he spoke publicly, but privately he was, certainly, saw people as intrinsically inferior and went and extrinsically inferior. And if you look at the Notes on the State of Virginia, you can see that he absorbed, as I said, the worst ideas from European racial thought. One of the things that stunned me about Jefferson is that when, I started looking into, the relationship between his ideas and, Europe, something that it's more useful to do if you have really studied French archives is that he had every single one of these thinkers on his bookshelf, not only the first tier race makers, that we're talking about here today, but the second, third, and fourth tier. He was reading everybody, all the naturalists, the classifiers. He had Kant, Hume, everybody on his bookshelves. It's really stunning. He was the American who synthesized these, racial ideas better and more than anyone else during the eighteenth century.

00:41:37 Andrew Keen: So that's an interesting response, certainly more critical than, some people would like to hear. You mentioned David Hume, another enormously influential Enlightenment thinker, perhaps the philosopher of the Enlightenment, a Scottish thinker. One book on him, which a lot of people like, is by Dennis Rasmussen, whom I know you've worked with—The Infidel and the Professor, the relationship between Hume and Adam Smith, the founder of the modern social science of economics. We had actually Dennis Rasmussen on the show recently, talking about Frederick Douglass, who he described in very enigmatic terms when it comes to race and the history of America and perhaps Jefferson's legacy, the constitutional legacy. Back to Hume, Andrew, and particularly the Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith. How much of your book and your analysis brings capitalism in? Because, of course, many people, particularly on the left, Marxists see the history of race or of racism and scientific racism very much in the context of the history of capitalism and its emergence at about the same time. I know these are all very big historical questions, which probably deserve a book or books on the subject. But do you address this question of capitalism and the market? Jefferson, of course, was also, in his own way, a capitalist farmer.

00:43:15 Andrew Curran: Yes. First, I'm not sure you know this, but I'm writing the book with Dennis.

00:43:20 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I do. What is it about?

00:43:22 Andrew Curran: It's called Good Beyond Belief. Yeah. It's a story of the first atheist who put forward the idea that or the eighteenth century atheist put forward the idea that, one could be good without God, that there's such a thing as a secular as secular morality, heretical idea during the eighteenth century. So I'm

00:43:44 Andrew Keen: And a Jeffersonian idea in its own way because

00:43:47 Andrew Curran: It really is. Yeah. I actually wrote it, a, an op-ed about Thomas Jefferson's anticlericalism this summer because people don't remember that aspect. We are fighting about, things that we're talking about today. But perhaps one of the most polemical was—

00:44:03 Andrew Keen: In the New Haven Register, two hundred years after Thomas Jefferson's death, America fuses church and politics. Is that the piece?

00:44:14 Andrew Curran: Right. And that's a good part of Thomas Jefferson's legacy, in my opinion, the idea that, you know, for democracy to function, we must be, free from some of the, kind of spiritual causality notions, I'll put it that way, that, do make us make decisions that are not based necessarily on the good of all people. But you asked me about Hume, and I have digressed for two minutes now. I, love Dennis. I love Dennis.

00:44:41 Andrew Keen: I love Dennis too.

00:44:42 Andrew Curran: I love David Hume. Wait till I tell Dennis this. David Hume is one of the most intriguing and interesting, characters of the Enlightenment, and he unfortunately wrote this horrific footnote. So he doesn't develop, a gigantic racial theory along the lines of what even Voltaire does or, certainly somebody like Kant, who's responsible for providing a rigorous philosophical definition of race for the first time. David Hume, was and I'm again, I'm I was speculating about this, but, he traveled quite a bit as a secretary when he was quite young, and one of the things that struck him as a great student of history is that when he went to places like Greece from his perspective, people had changed dramatically. He had this vision of the Greeks as being this fantastic sophisticated society, and he came into this country and he saw when he read about the I'm sorry, when he read about the contemporary Greeks compared to, the Greeks of antiquity I think I'm mixing some things up here, but he's talking about the Greeks. He talks about the Greeks of antiquity as being civilized and sophisticated and the contemporary Greeks as being corrupt and backward and so on and so forth. And he was, at that time really skeptical about climate theory because climate theory was one of the big ideas about how people came about. Montesquieu was a big partisan of climate theory, so was Buffon, and he said climate doesn't change anything. Look, these people have been the same climate for ages, and they've changed radically. And he, like Voltaire, hated the notion of climate theory and did everything possible to refute it. And one of the ways he did so was to say that people were pretty much from different species. There was something natural about who they were, and in the case of Africans, their inferiority. So he, uses the vocabulary of the super racial, inferiority vocabulary in order to make his point that the environment, does not affect people at all the way that most people were thinking at the time. You also asked about capitalism, and that's a really important question. You mentioned Thomas Jefferson and capitalism. It's a funny example to pick because Thomas Jefferson was broke because tobacco had become such a poor crop. His management of his plantation and his profligate ways made him completely bankrupt at his death. In fact, Monticello was sold off and some, and his enslaved population was sold off. Many of them were sold off at a time, which was just a really kind of a terrible, thing to think back at because we know these people through some of the writings. So, but, yes, clearly, the economic, driver is hugely important for the rise of race and racism. One thing I wanna make clear that I think a lot of people get wrong about the rise of race as a really kind of operative concept and the, as I said, the use of race as an ideological tool to, subjugate people is that for the longest time, race was, the ideas were out there. I think I've already said that they were floating around sometime since the fifth, you know, sixteenth century, seventeenth century. They're floating around, but they're being used by a lot of very few people. You can imagine a discussion of some of these proto-racial ideas involving a 100 or 200 people, three, four hundred people, an elite group of gentlemen writing from their scientific academies or their giant chateaus or castles and so on and so forth. So it's a very kind of small conversation, and it becomes much larger later on. By the 1760s and 1770s, when the abolitionist movement takes off and people are questioning the slave trade, and when the idea that slavery no longer provides people eternal salvation, particularly in Catholic countries, the people who are members of the proslavery lobby go back and harness all these ideas that have been floating around. It's by 1760 and 1770 that, racial ideas really explode because they're disseminated much more forcefully by people who are justifying their economic endeavors. It's there where I really think that capitalism, race, and classification all come together. And race explodes in 1775. If you look at, in the book, you can kind of see all of a sudden everybody is writing about it. Classification schemes are one way of really looking at this in a fascinating way. The first classification scheme, was, and that he's this guy's in the chapter, and one of the chapters well, the first classification scheme was proposed in 1685 [ed.: Bernier's essay was published in 1684] by François Bernier and it was very anecdotal and quite chatty. The second time a classification scheme came about was done by Linnaeus writing from Sweden in 1735, and he modifies this. But the next big innovation is 1775. It's every fifty or thirty years. It's not all the time. By 1775, there's 10 or 15 classification schemes that have popped up. It just takes off. Anthropology, proto anthropology, capitalism, and, proslavery, racism all explode in the 1770s at the same time when slavery and the economic benefits of slavery, come under fire.

00:50:57 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And of course, the rest is history. We've done many shows on the history of eugenics and how they were in many ways, born, this science of race, born in the United States. Let's end. There's so much more to talk about, Andrew, but let's end by coming back to your exchange between Diderot and Catherine the Great on the stuff either being written on one's skin or on paper, in other words, in theory or practice. You're a historian, so you're much more comfortable writing on skin, perhaps. Sorry, writing on paper—

00:51:34 Andrew Curran: Put up the glass. [unclear]

00:51:34 Andrew Keen: Skin. Please. But on the other hand, you, you're also, a partner of, Henry Louis Gates. You've written books with him. You had an interesting piece recently in the New York Times on needing a new language for talking about race in America in the twenty twenties. Given we live in an age of racial radical racial sensitivity of one kind or another, some people see that the current administration, peddling a new kind or an old kind of racism. Others on the right see the woke movement as being obsessed with race. What does I know these are all big questions, but what does your Biography of a Dangerous Idea, this history of race, which was born in the Enlightenment? What does it tell us today, given our incredible sensitivities over race? Either everyone thinks everyone's a racist or everyone fears the ubiquity of race in terms of making sense of the world. What wisdom do you bring as a historian about all this?

00:52:49 Andrew Curran: Well, I think that, first of all, the delivery system of the history of race, in this case, is quite different from what I've done in the past. My first book was a traditional

00:53:07 Andrew Keen: intellectual history.

00:53:08 Andrew Curran: Intellectual history, The Anatomy of Blackness you see here. And the in this the book we did with Henry Louis—with Skip Gates is more of a vertical history because it tells the story of a contest on the source of black skin that took place in 1739.

00:53:24 Andrew Keen: And that book, by the way, is entitled Who's Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race.

00:53:34 Andrew Curran: And having written the Diderot book, I said, you know, the story of race we're talking about is something that people really don't know about, that much. And I've written about it for Time Magazine, written about it for the New York Review of Books, written about it for New York Times, but I still think that, people are astonished to discover the kind of things I'm talking about. So I wrote about it, from a biographical point of view because you can see the ambitions, the institutions, the educational system. You can kind of see the functioning of race in a very different way. And I also wanted to write a book that everybody could read, as opposed to a book that, as I said, would just simply castigate the Enlightenment, or say the Enlightenment couldn't be racist because race didn't exist in the way it existed in the nineteenth century. I wanted to write a book that allowed people to understand how it all came about and how people were responsible for it and how the ideas were invented and the fact that they were invented in the first place, if we could all agree that this is an invention that has no basis in biological reality, which it doesn't, that would be a first step because people think that race has always been forever. And the second thing would be more along the lines of the article that, Skip Gates and I wrote for the New York Times. We talked about the fact that DNA really has allowed us to understand that we are a monogenetic race coming from one origin, and the differences among different groups are so minimal as to be necessarily inconsequential. We are different generally because of nurture, not nature. And so, there are often more differences between two people of, quote, unquote, one race than there are between, two people of two different races. So it's interesting to think about, these two things. That's where I would kind of end is that this is, one of the reasons I got into this whole business was trying to help people, think through this question.

00:55:51 Andrew Keen: So very, very briefly, Andrew, as one word answer, some people think we can get beyond race, and when we look at people, we don't see the color of their skin. Is that a utopia or a dystopia?

00:56:06 Andrew Curran: I really don't know. I thought, in some—

00:56:08 Andrew Keen: Neither?

00:56:09 Andrew Curran: In some ways we were making progress, but history is cyclical. So, I don't I would say neither then. Yeah.

00:56:18 Andrew Keen: Interesting. We'll have to get you back on the show. I knew you were writing something with Rasmussen and, another friend of the show. It's always nice to make these connections. Andrew Curran, author of Biography of a Dangerous Idea, important new book came out earlier this year about race, our obsession one way or the other. Thank you so much.

00:56:39 Andrew Curran: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.