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

In Enlightenment Biopolitics, William Nelson traces the emergence and circulation of biopolitical ideas in the context of the Enlightenment, when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and the development of ideas of race. In fact, these did not just coexist; they were actually mutually constitutive. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics, Nelson examines the conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization. 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.