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Enlightenment Biopolitics

A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens
By William Max Nelson
Series: The Life of Ideas
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Brief Description
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... Read More
Format: Hardback
$40600

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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.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780226825564

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 06 May 2024

Country: United States

Imprint: University of Chicago Press

Illustration: 10 halftones

Audience: Tertiary education

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 25.0mm

Width: 152.0mm

Height: 229.0mm

Weight: 540g

Pages: 328

Collections

European History History & Archaeology History & Military Non-Fiction Philosophy & Psychology Philosophy & Stoicism Series: The Life of Ideas William Max Nelson

About the Author

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.

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