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

Podcast: Keen On America · Andrew Keen

Opublikowano: 2026-10-01

“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 i...