Share
Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens (The Life of Ideas)
William Max Nelson (Author)
·
Univ Of Chicago Pr
· Paperback
Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens (The Life of Ideas) - William Max Nelson
£ 25.20
£ 28.00
You save: £ 2.80
Choose the list to add your product or create one New List
✓ Product added successfully to the Wishlist.
Go to My WishlistsIt will be shipped from our warehouse between
Thursday, June 06 and
Friday, June 07.
You will receive it anywhere in United Kingdom between 1 and 3 business days after shipment.
Synopsis "Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens (The Life of Ideas)"
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.
