Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens - Couverture souple

Nelson, William Max

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0226825582 ISBN 13 : 9780226825588

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2024

Synopsis

A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath.

In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals.

In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

William Max Nelson is associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One and a coeditor of The French Revolution in Global Perspective.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0226825582
• ISBN 13: 9780226825588
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 319
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible