Biography of a Dangerous Idea

An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely . Over the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly “processed” by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the