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

Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780226825588,9780226825571,0226825582,0226825574

Product detail:

• ISBN 10: 0226825574
• ISBN 13: 9780226825571
• Author: William Max Nelson

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.

Table of contents:

1. Chapter One. Organizing the Swarm of Being
2. Chapter Two. Enlightenment Eugenics
3. Chapter Three. Making Men in the Colonies
4. Chapter Four. In Society, but Not of It
5. Chapter Five. New Citizens, New Slaves
6. Chapter Six. Making the New Man
7. Chapter Seven. An Evolving Constellation

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