Book Review: William Max Nelson. Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780226825588
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: As opening anecdotes go, the vignette deployed by William Max Nelson in Enlightenment Biopolitics (2024) is difficult to surpass.He begins with a surprising re-evaluation of Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, popularly known as the author of the defining document that shaped the early French Revolution, What is the Third Estate (1789), and the coup of Brumaire (1799) that effectively brought the revolution to an end.In an unpublished manuscript uncovered by Nelson, Sieyès fleshes out a bizarre project to engineer "a species between men and animals, a species capable of serving man for consumption and production" (p.151).Making "new races of anthropomorphic monkeys" into "slaves" he argued, could resolve much of the tension between one tier of the Third Estate, those "active" citizens with greater rights, means and time to be involved in politics, and the other, comprising poorer passive citizens too pre-occupied by hard labour to exercise political agency.Although admitting that breeding humanoid beasts of burden could be deemed "immoral," Sieyès
Author: Robert Brown
Language: English
Topic: Medical History and Research
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7119008506
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