New book on race (review)

The London Review of Books for 5th June publishes a review by David Todd of William Max Nelson's book Enlightenment Biopolitics (2024), a study of 18th-century theories of race.

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

by William Max Nelson.

Chicago, 311 pp., £28, May 2024, 978 0 226 82558 8

Reviewed by David Todd - "Most Handsome and Best", LRB

Publishers' introduction: 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.(University of Chicago Press)

See:

William Max Nelson - website

This book and other works by Professor Nelson have been made available in full-text by the University of Toronto:

William Max Nelson - University of Toronto (academia.edu)