“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 fifteen per cent.
• The First Anthropological Century. The Enlightenment’s great virtue, in his account, is universalism — all men are created equal, a universal human condition, inalienable rights. Its blind spot is the question mark that follows: are they? The same century that put the human at the centre of knowledge also became the first anthropological one, and the new science qualified the universalism in a dozen ways — anatomical discoveries, skin samples, treatises on physiological difference, proto-evolutionary ideas about peoples degenerating over time, and the conviction that commercial European society sat at the pinnacle. The classification schemes arrive in bursts rather than steadily: François Bernier in 1684, anecdotal and chatty; Linnaeus from Uppsala in 1735; then an explosion by 1775, when ten or fifteen appear at once. Christianity’s loosening grip is what made the room: monogenesis — Noah’s sons setting out from the Caucasus, the origin of the word Caucasian — had kept all humans related, and the pre-Adamite heresy that Native Americans were a separate creation was dangerous precisely because it broke that.
• Writing on Paper, Writing on Skin. Catherine the Great’s line to Diderot, who had arrived in Russia with elaborate plans for democratizing it: Diderot, Diderot, Diderot — you write on paper, and I write on skin. Curran uses it to divide his cast. Buffon, Linnaeus, Kant in Königsberg and Blumenbach wrote on paper, in abstractions. Louis XIV wrote on skin: in 1685 he became the most famous monarch to sign a slave code, France’s Code Noir, which gave slavery legal status and converted enslaved Africans into property — moving the word nègre from an ethnographic term towards a political status, not yet race but close. Exactly a century later, Jefferson wrote on skin in Notes on the State of Virginia. The justification had changed completely in between: the devout Louis told himself the enslaved lost their freedom but gained eternal salvation, while the anticlerical deist Jefferson had no such illusions, and had instead absorbed the European theories of inferiority.
• Jefferson’s Bookshelf. The chapter Curran says frightened him most to write, as a historian of Europe stepping into an American industry of ideological combat. What stunned him was the library: Jefferson owned not only the first-tier race-makers but the second, third and fourth tier — Kant, Hume, the naturalists, the classifiers, all of them. He was, Curran says, the American who synthesized European racial thought better and more thoroughly than anyone else in the eighteenth century. In Paris in the 1780s, while drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man with Lafayette in his own townhouse, he was invited to join the Société des Amis des Noirs, which existed to refute exactly the ideas being used to justify slavery. He declined. He replied courteously to the Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker — rare in itself — saying it would be wonderful if what Banneker claimed about Black people were true. Publicly cautious, privately convinced of intrinsic inferiority. And this is why the everyone-was-like-that defence fails: the Enlightenment produced race, and it produced the anti-racists who fought it.
• Why It Exploded in the 1770s. The sharpest corrective in the hour. For most of the period these were the ideas of a tiny elite — perhaps a few hundred gentlemen writing from scientific academies and châteaux. What turned a private conversation into an ideology was the abolitionist movement. As ...
