“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?
Five Takeaways
• Before Race. Europeans spoke of nations, peoples and varieties — variety being a botanical word implying hybridization and continuity. Race implies fixity. The shift between them is the story.
• The First Anthropological Century. All men are created equal — and then the question mark: are they? Classification schemes arrive in bursts, from Bernier in 1684 to fifteen at once by 1775.
• Writing on Paper, Writing on Skin. Catherine the Great’s line to Diderot. Louis XIV wrote on skin when he signed the Code Noir in 1685; Jefferson wrote on skin exactly a century later.
• Jefferson’s Bookshelf. He owned every race-maker in Europe, first tier through fourth — and declined to join the French society formed to refute them.
• Why It Exploded in the 1770s. Not ideas spreading on their own: the proslavery lobby reached for them when abolitionism threatened the trade. Race explodes in 1775 because it was needed.
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Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: the Enlightenment’s blindest blind spot
00:02:04 Censors, apologists, and a third way
00:05:22 What was the Enlightenment?
00:08:46 Was race imagined before the Enlightenment?
00:12:38 Varieties, races and species
00:15:02 Race, racism, and the tree in the forest
00:16:27 Noah’s sons, and the word Caucasian
00:17:54 What did people see when they looked at each other?
00:22:23 Cultural relativism and the rise of travel writing
00:24:48 Is America the quintessential Enlightenment project?
00:28:02 Louis XIV and Jefferson as bookends
00:29:20 Catherine the Great: you write on paper, I write on skin
00:33:00 The Code Noir, and what changed by 1785
00:34:03 Was American slavery racial slavery?
00:36:05 How should we think about Jefferson?
00:38:00 Banneker, Lafayette and the Friends of the Blacks
00:40:00 Jefferson’s bookshelf
00:41:37 Hume’s footnote, and the war on climate theory
00:43:15 Does capitalism explain it?
00:47:00 Why race exploded in the 1770s
00:50:57 What the history tells us now
00:55:51 Beyond race: utopia or dystopia?