William Max Nelson, "Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Montezo Hadjizadeh from Critical Theory Channel.

Today, I'm here with Dr. William Max Nelson to talk about his latest book, which is published with Chicago University Press. The book is called Enlightenment Biopolitics, a history of race, eugenics and the making of citizens, which just came out a few months ago in 2024. And Dr. William Max Nelson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto in Canada. William, welcome to New Books Network.

Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise and areas you teach, and then perhaps you can tell us how the idea of this book, Enlightenment by Politics, came to you? What was the story of the inception of the book?

Yeah, sure. I work on primarily the 18th century. My academic, two academic books have both been about the 18th century and the development of ideas in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. And my kind of research and teaching interests are also kind of beyond that and inform and help me kind of, you know,

develop my perspective on the 18th century. I'm also interested in phenomenology and creative nonfiction and in forms of creative writing that are adjacent to academia. And sometimes now, particularly kind of in history, we're starting to to kind of integrate a little bit more into into what we do.

A lot of my work has brought together intellectual history, the history of ideas with the history of science. So trying to understand how these people in the 18th century developed their ideas in relation to many different domains of knowledge that we sometimes think of as separate. So I'm kind of very interested in the ways that, you know, the fact that these philosophes, particularly in, in,

France, that many of the most people that I'm studying in France, in the Francophone world, in the French Atlantic, were interested in the sciences, going to, you know, chemistry lectures, studying mathematics, interested in physics.

and also in philosophy, in kind of politics and what we would think of as political theory. And I'm interested in the ways that those interests and the knowledge in those different areas kind of inform and kind of develop and kind of lead to the development of new ideas. So, you know, particularly biopolitics, you could see how I kind of

That orientation of mine as a scholar has kind of led me to this kind of topic. I also more specifically kind of came to biopolitics through some of my previous research, which looked at naturalists in the middle of the 18th century in France who were thinking about animal breeding and how they could control the outcome of animal breeding and to make better domestic animals, you know, animals that were

profitable that that had better quality of wool or whatever the case may be um and it it's it was a relatively um you know it seems like a kind of practical and and somewhat maybe even limited um

kind of endeavor that they were involved in, but they had lots of ideas about how they could intervene in the processes of regeneration and generation to control the formation of these animals. And it led to not only kind of new ideas about the future and how much human beings could play a role in the control or influence of the development of the future, but it also, I think, played a role in their sense that they could intervene in nature and these very complex processes and, you know,

have some influence over the development of, you know, lineages, not only of animals, but then also to humans. It was something I was finding oftentimes that in this material about people thinking about the breeding of animals, you know, not infrequently somebody would say, oh, and if we can do this with animals, why can't we do this with humans? Or why don't we do this with humans? What are the ways that we can improve human beings as well? And it was usually put in a, um,

in a relatively presented as a kind of benign consideration. You know, we can, we can improve human beings, the qualities of their body, their health,

their, you know, possibly their intelligence. We can improve populations as a whole. There wasn't explicitly the dark side of that vision that we can think of in relation to eugenics in the 19th and 20th century, explicit in the 18th century, but it did make me curious and it kind of got me into both how they thought that this was possible and also why they thought this was desirable.

And how widespread this was. And I ended up finding that it was more widespread than I think had been adequately appreciated. And that this was revealing something fundamental about the core of Enlightenment thought. It wasn't just a kind of marginal idea. I remember when I was doing my PhD research like seven or eight years ago, the chapter of my research was on Frankenstein and the ideas of... I was working on environmental humanities.

And I came across a few books. That was not my focus of research, but to me it was fascinating how people start thinking about how they can manipulate, you know, the process of breeding animals, just as you mentioned. And there were illustrations of how cows could be larger, sheep could be larger and produce more milk or more meat or more milk. And I was just blown away because I always thought that it's more or less a modern approach.

product of engineering, you know, by engineering. But I was just blown away that centuries ago people were thinking about it. And I think there was a, there's a really good book written by your friend, I'm guessing, because he has also endorsed your book, Invention of, sorry, the Perfection of Nature, Animals, Breeding, and the Race in the Renaissance. Yeah.

McKinsey Cooley, a woman. Yeah, that's right. And I think there's a podcast. I wanted to interview her about the book, but I realized that there's already a podcast on New Books Network about their book. Yeah, yes, we already do. Let me ask you about biopolitics. In my mind, at least, when I hear biopolitics, I immediately think of Foucault. Give us a definition of biopolitics in your field of research. How is it similar or different to

Foucault, if you were inspired partly by Foucault. But I'm particularly interested in the idea of enlightenment biopolitics. So how do you also distinguish biopolitics in general from enlightenment biopolitics that you have written about?

Yeah. And, and just to clarify, I know, I don't think you're saying this, but it's not, you know, these are not, this is not enlightened biopolitics. This is biopolitics that's emerging from the enlightenment and out of this kind of intellectual milieu. And definitely it relates to Foucault and my reading of Foucault and the, the way, you know, Foucault is the figure who articulated this idea of biopolitics in the sense that it's most commonly used. I, I,

specifically kind of mean it to refer to those approaches to intervening in the processes of life, um, transforming, controlling, modifying, managing, um, both at the individual level of like a human being and at the, the larger collective body level of could be a population could be, um, a species could be some specific element of population. Um,

And Foucault's definition and setting out of the kind of problematic of biopolitics was really, I think, important and has been influential. There's a couple ways that I saw something different going on. So I don't, you know, I'm not too worried about trying to kind of revise or present some dramatically different account from Foucault. But I do think that there's a different...

kind of origin story that I have. He tended to, so he also kind of looked at the 18th century as a time in which biopolitics took shape, but he tended to emphasize the development of certain kinds of approaches to counting births and deaths, mortality records, kind of some of the beginnings of public health studies that were really more focused on quantitative information.

And, um, although that is important, I think one of the things that I noticed is how much these enlightenment philosophes who I was seeing, who were thinking about selective breeding, um, breeding human beings, they were really interested in the kind of

of organisms, of people, rather than just quantities. So it wasn't just about kind of population sizes. It was also about what specific features individual people and bodies had. And they were interested in possibly manipulating that and intervening in that process.

And so it's a different emphasis and there is a different set of concerns that I saw people engaging with who are developing these kind of biopolitical considerations. So it's really more focused on two strains that I identified. And one was breeding, which is relates to what we think of as eugenics, kind of selective breeding of human beings to control the kind of qualities of bodies, but also the

the strain that I characterize as exclusionary or exclusion and is really kind of focused on the larger collective bodies. So the body of the nation, the group of the nation, society, population, species, and trying to think about

what exactly this, this large collective body is this holistic entity, um, and who should be excluded from that, um, body possibly. Um, I, I found many of the ideas, uh, in the, in the 18th century as people are starting to articulate these concepts in an explicit fashion, uh, in a new way, society, particularly society, species, race, nation, um,

They are also interested in deciding who should be excluded from these holistic entities, these collective bodies. And that's a part of this biopolitical larger kind of vision or project because, you know, there's, there's the sense of who should be excluded and why. And, you know, sometimes the exclusion, um, is for some kind of practical, um,

as some kind of practical reasons. But oftentimes it's reasons that are not social or economic, but biological, that there is a desire to exclude a certain group from affecting or the main body or kind of reproducing with them or kind of transforming the characteristics of them, of the larger collective body. And sometimes

So there's kind of the movement of who to exclude. And then once there's an idea of who should be included, kind of how to bring about transformation, possibly, you know, improvement in the sense or the terminology of these 18th century figures of this group of these people. And one part of this that I really enjoyed myself, like I told you, because I was working a few years ago on environmental humanities and I started reading about

conceptions of nature, utility, materiality, vitality. I was really excited when I was reading about it in your book as well, that at that time there was this holistic, or let's say the idea of relational idea, approach, relational holism, as you mentioned it.

to nature, nature was very much alive. It was not just a dead material. But then this also influences these thinkers' ideas about the ideas of organisms, populations, communities. Can you talk about that relational holism? What do you mean? What was that approach to nature? And then how did this kind of thinking influence their idea about communities, organisms, organizations, etc.?

and community in general. Yeah, yeah. So I think the kind of larger...

and kind of story is that in the 18th century, many of the thinkers that I'm focusing on are responding to the previous centuries kind of dominant way of thinking, particularly in the sciences of mechanical philosophy. And the idea that any given entity is simply made up of parts that, you know, you can take apart, put back together. The whole is nothing more than the parts. If you break anything,

down a hole into its parts and you know all the parts, then you will know the whole. There's a kind of simple, in some ways, simple mechanical relationship between the parts and the whole. A number of people already in the 17th century, you know, they recognized that this was maybe a little bit better for physics than it was or natural philosophy than it was for our biological or what we would characterize as kind of the

the evidence of the life sciences, life organisms, the development of organisms, explanation of life itself, that mechanical explanations had significant limits of what they could answer. And so there was, there had been a kind of long kind of concern about how exactly to explain various vital phenomena and,

And in the 18th century, you see a number of people really wanting to not go to kind of either pole of being atomistic in a mechanical philosophical sense or being holistic and just arguing that the whole is something fundamentally different than the parts or the whole is the kind of has...

something that none of the parts have. Uh, and that thing oftentimes kind of forms of vitalism, uh, would be, um, kind of people thought there was some extra entity, some extra property, life vitality. Um, and the, these 18th century philosophes were interested in how

They could have a materialist approach, just looking at matter, not having something like spirit or the soul or a kind of metaphysical entity and understanding how parts coming together could develop kind of new characteristics, new qualities, new properties that were emergent properties. They had an idea of organized bodies or organized beings.

being sometimes they called it. And it's one of these terms that I focus on because it sounds, you know, they often talk about organization and organization sounds like

pretty bland and it might sound more like what we think of in more contemporary kind of managerial thought or sciences and, you know, organization of complex infrastructural networks or something. But organization to them was a pretty powerful philosophical way of kind of getting beyond a lot of the questions of kind of

Mechanical philosophy as well as divine creation and trying to understand entities, organized bodies as self-generating and self-organizing. How that could happen in the case of organisms, you know, some animals over generations. There wasn't some external force coming in.

something like a divine power to allow for generation each time, allow, you know, intervene. There was something self-generative in their self-organizing and trying to understand, you know, these very complicated properties of living beings, particularly they had this idea of organized bodies and there were all of these characteristics of them. They were these integrated coals. The parts were,

connected interconnected um they relied upon one another they were interdependent um just like the organs of the body and our kind of our the body as a whole you know the life of our organ and the life of our body are interconnected in so many ways um

They developed this idea and they also saw kind of levels of life throughout nature in terms of organization. So we ourselves as human bodies, human beings are an organized body, but inside us we have organized bodies. So we are made up in different levels. So our organs also can be thought of as an organized body. And within that, there's another level of, you know, kind of below that in some sense of the material body.

kind of the smaller scale. And you could also go above, you could go outside of the humans. We all as human beings can add up to a new type of organized body, something like society or a species, a nation. And so there was this interesting way that there was a connection between life at different levels

And intervening in life at some levels might affect life at other levels. So intervening in something like the generation of human bodies changing their properties, characteristics could potentially

have effect at the macro scale, at the scale of society, of the nation, of the species, of the race. And they're kind of one of their new terms that they were thinking through. So that's some of what they were working with. And a lot of the people who were developing Enlightenment biopolitics were

We're we're articulating these ideas about organization and organized bodies and kind of trying to develop this relational holism. And it's by relational holism. I mean, a type of holism that understands there's a whole and there's parts and

And there's also the relations between the parts and the relations between the parts and the whole. And it creates this kind of very complex entity that is more than the sum of the parts and led them in much of their understanding of nature and particularly their approach to trying to understand nature further, their epistemology, focusing on the relation between things.

liaisons, the correspondence, all of these kind of different terms and ways that they were focused on trying to understand the connections and parts within individual bodies or between bodies and environments. Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new.

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Difficult to get my mouth running early in the morning. I still haven't had coffee. So the bodies are also malleable based on this conception, I guess. And again, in the book, you discuss how the progress of science and also this idea of bodily malleability helped them, or let's say, provide the foundations for this idea of eugenics. Can you talk about that and how the progress of science at that time? Because to me, eugenics was more or less

19th century phenomenon. But so to me, it was quite interesting. And we will go to some of the examples that you have in the book that they start thinking about breeding these improved species of human based on that idea of bodily malleability. Can you talk about that, please? Yeah. So the malleability of bodies was one of the concerns of some naturalists.

And they were trying to, I think they were primarily trying

motivated to study it by recognizing human variation, recognizing that human beings had all of these different kind of outward appearances, things that they were oftentimes using to create categories of race. But they were also interested in how they were all created. There were people that were polygenists that thought these different groups were

were created as distinct or separate in the beginning by divinity. They were also monogenous, people who thought all human beings come from the same source or the created of one type. They are all of one species. But nonetheless, there's this variety and variation. And

well, how did that come about? Where did that variety come from? How does it continue possibly to unfold or how do people continue to change the characteristics of people? And so this is very connected to their interest in race, identifying, defining and differentiating what they are starting to classify as human races. They're trying to understand the biological mechanisms that

explain reproduction and might account for how variation or variety could develop. And they get some very technical answers that are, you know, kind of

sometimes hard to follow, but were attempts to make theoretical, theoretically compelling explanations for this. And they also had significant empirical examples of types of bodily malleability. And again, animals were one of the kinds of examples they had. And they thought if this kind of

If this malleability was possible, maybe it was possible for human beings to intervene and kind of take some kind of control or at least influence that process. It was a central part of the development of this set of ideas about human breeding that I think...

can be adequately characterized as eugenics. So it's not proto-eugenics, it's not quasi-eugenics. I think it is eugenics that has the same features as what we refer to as eugenics developing in the late 19th century and then being further developed in the 20th century and implemented more often in practice in policy in the 20th century. Um,

is oftentimes about race. It's focused on human reproduction. It's huge. It's focused on how human beings can intervene in reproduction,

to transform the quality and the quantity of human beings. Sometimes it's about who should be excluded from reproduction. Sometimes it's about how those who are reproducing, um, can be, uh, you know, chosen or selected or transformed in some way to, to have results for the, at the, the larger level of populations or species. Um,

There were theories of generation. There were, you know, something like what we would call genetics. Of course, they didn't have the idea of a gene. They didn't have that as the specific mechanism to explain the passing on of characteristics over generations. But they did have means to do so. And they they were focused on that. So there are many of the basic features of eugenics here.

It's true that there was not a eugenics movement. There was not a large variety number of people who were involved in thinking about this and kind of advocating for it. But there was the development of the ideas. And I think it's really important to note, since I am kind of trying to push back the definition or the beginning of eugenics into the 18th century rather than just the 19th.

Just on the logical terms, this is something that's already recognized by historians of eugenics. So they they talk about the way that Francis Galton, the person who first coined the term and developed some of the basic ideas, he himself was coming up with eugenic ideas 20 years before he was he had developed the term. There is a way that, you know, we can see that kind of development of some of these ideas well before the term in the 1880s emerged.

And in fact, there are some forms of continuity in the kind of scientific understandings of race, of generation, of population that allow us, I think, to as well kind of connect some of these 18th century ideas to the 20th century ones.

Thank you. Let's talk about some specifics. As I said, you have a lot of examples of different people, cases where they tried to use this idea of improving human species or creating an army of slaves. That one was both horrifying and interesting to read as well.

Let's talk about the first, what in your book you call the first modern eugenic plan, which I guess came from this French person. And I'm going to be mispronouncing a lot of words here. A lot of names here, I mean. So you correct me, please. Charles Augustine Vandermonde, if I'm not mistaken. So he was, who was he and...

What was, what was he, let's say, what you call the first modern eugenic plan that he came up with? Yeah, he was somebody who was a physician. He lived in this milieu of mid-century France, mid-18th century France. He was somebody who was involved in the study of nature.

He ended up being educated at the King's Garden. It was kind of the place in which natural history and some of the life sciences were taught. And there were public lectures and collections that you could study. And he was he kind of

emerged as a, as a young man from that environment became a physician. And he was one of the first, he was the first to take this idea that was largely being developed by before on people working, uh,

on animals and animal breeding. And he is applying it and thinking about how it could be applied to human beings. And it's a two volume work. He kind of extensively is going through these ideas and suggesting the ways that human beings could use selective breeding to develop specific characteristics within individuals.

So he's he's both kind of he thinks that there is the possibility for a relatively fine degree of control to produce at least certain types of characteristics. And he's suggesting to to sovereign rulers that they should do so.

And he kind of goes through a number of kind of examples of, you know, the types of things they could consider and what they could actually do. So he's he's presenting a eugenic vision to be applied to a population by rulers. Not he never names a specific ruler. He doesn't like address the king of France. But it is about, you know, a vision.

vision of eugenics that can actually be implemented. And he's trying to convince people that this is something that can be done and show them that it's a compelling idea. Were these ideas picked up by anyone to actually try to implement them? Or did it create, let's say, a wave of support or even criticism, backlash? Yeah, it's one of the interesting features of these ideas in the 18th century that the

Although there are a number of people who are developing them and writing about them, they are a part of published books and pamphlets and works in the public sphere. It's not a hugely...

It's not an extremely widely read or reproduced kind of set of books or ideas. So somebody like Vandenberg, he's not obscure. He's reviewed in some of the periodicals that exist that kind of announce new books or that publish kind of long extracts. He's kind of integrated into the intellectual life of the philosoph in Paris. There's evidence that

You know, later biopolitical thinkers were reading him and interested in him and drawing on his work to build up their own ideas. So Gregoire later in the century, Assiez was interested in reading his work and gaining getting some copies of it. We don't know if he did, but he might have. So there are people that that.

reference him and point to him as this kind of important figure who was arguing for the possibility of doing this with people. But it wasn't, as I said before, it wasn't a eugenics movement. It wasn't something that was super widespread. There also wasn't a notable backlash. This wasn't a

something that caused controversy or made people kind of rise up in defense of dignity or kind of to argue against why this should happen. I guess it's a useful place to also maybe segue to one of the things that you kind of referenced, to

This relates to race and this relates to slavery. And some of the early biopolitical ideas were very much not only emerging from the body of thought of naturalists who were thinking about race, but also were being applied to populations that were thought to be of different races. And sometimes the most shocking ideas were ideas that were not

published in um in kind of bookstore pamphlets um so the abby c is why i opened the book with uh this archival document that we have of his where he suggests that human beings and um other primates um apes larger monkeys orangutans can be bred together to produce hybrid beings

Um, this is a kind of, this is a shocking document where he's literally envisioning these human, um, uh, ape, you know, hybrids, uh, and he's envisioning them as a new type of slave, a population that could be created, uh, to be enslaved and that it could provide some kind of, um,

Presumably it would transform the kind of enslaved population in the colonies, maybe reducing the number of people of African descent who were enslaved. That's not directly addressed in the document. But what he does directly address is that this new population could take off some of the labor burden from working people, particularly kind of urbanized.

urban workers, craftsmen in metropolitan France, and that they would have more time to become better educated and more capable of being citizens, of being kind of actively involved in politics. And it's a shocking document for a number of reasons. You know, he's envisioning breeding specifically less than human hybrid beings.

He's envisioning and doing that for enslavement. Like these would be this kind of realization of Aristotle's idea of a natural slave. It's way. But also shocking is that he's imagining doing this so as to make the

the circumstances in France more inclusive to kind of enable more workers to be involved in politics. So in the name of democratic inclusion, he's envisioning breeding this group that is to be excluded and, and really to be immiserated in, in this kind of forced labor that they would, they would in, in his idea be put into. And it's,

It's this fascinating and troubling document that very much is coming out of this Enlightenment discourse of biopolitics. And it's something that, you know, I was not the first to come across this. Others have even written about it.

But I think it is hard and was kind of hard to place within Enlightenment thought or within the context of the French Revolution where Abyssinia is most thought of because of his important role in just before the revolution with his pamphlet, What is the Third Estate? But also his continued involvement in the revolution and his kind of intellectual and political philosophical contributions. But I...

Because of my work on these ideas of breeding, because I knew that other naturalists thought that these human hybrid forms, these are non-human hybrids between humans and other species were possible because I knew of the, the somewhat specialist discourses of human generation and what was possible. I, I knew that he might not be just kind of

joking or going to some um extreme kind of in the way that jonathan swift or voltaire might be kind of presenting some satirical vision for effect um and in fact you know by doing more research on this this document and then siez i have a whole chapter on siez um

I think I show that he was very much involved in thinking through some of these problems of Enlightenment biopolitics. And there were other places where he thought about and wrote about in his manuscripts, these kind of hybrid beings that could be created. So this wasn't just a kind of one-off, you know, wild idea that he just...

put away. It's true that he didn't publish it. It's true that, you know, it wasn't acted upon. But it fits within this context of Enlightenment biopolitics that I think

asks us to reassess it and asks us to see it as not as wild and outside of, of a kind of mainstream of, of ideas as it might at first appear. Right. It might, it seems to me like when I first came across it, it's like planet of the apes. It's kind of this, this wild and tragic kind of science fiction. But in ways it was like,

kind of developing from this set of ideas and this body of enlightenment, biopolitical thinking. But C.S., I think the unpublished work you're talking about, is that What's the Third State? The pamphlet called What's the Third State? No, no. So his, this archival, it's an archival document. So it's his writing about the breeding of humans and apes is an un-

unpublished archival document. It's relatively short. It's in the National Archives of France. It's different from what is the Third Estate. But what's interesting is that you can see sets of concerns. There are ways that these documents are not disconnected. One of the things that

Siez is very concerned with in what is the third estate is thinking about what is the nation and he defines it as the third estate and he excludes particularly those privileged people who are the first estate and the second estate the nobility and the clergy I mean the nobility and the nobles and

And he's he's excluding some people from from the nation. He's involved in this this kind of work of trying to think about what the the kind of collective body is, as well as how it can be kind of transformed. Make your next move with American Express Business Platinum. You'll get five times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on AmexTravel.com.

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The third said, but before asking that, I just would like to make this comment that I think my question about these ideas being controversial was a little bit anachronistic because obviously these days you can't publish these ideas. But in renaissance, there were horrible ideas about race as well or about African people.

which was just part of the parlour and the common discourse among intellectuals. But now we're looking at the history and we come to realise that what they were discussing maybe was controversial based on our modern perspectives.

But anyhow, who was Joseph, Emmanuel Joseph C.S.? Can you talk about his pamphlet, What is the Third State? C.S. is an interesting figure. He was somebody who had a role in the church, had a position, a formal position, but he never rose as high as he would have liked. He was kind of denied some of the more prestigious positions

uh, kind of positions, um, that were oftentimes reserved for not reserved for nobility, but, but, um, you know, achieved through, uh, connections and oftentimes noble lineage and social connections. Um, he felt he was kind of in some ways, um,

he didn't advance as well in the churches he would have liked because of that. So he was a bit of a frustrated figure, but he did have a position that allowed him a decent amount of study and he kind of deeply involved himself in enlightenment thought. He got very interested in political economy, very kind of

interesting and innovative set of ideas in the Enlightenment. And he was reading the Physiocrats. And his first work, actually, he wrote basically a big kind of book-length work that he never ended up publishing that was meant to be an intervention in the political economic debates, largely stemming from physiocracy, from this group of political economists called the Physiocrats. So he was deeply engaged in Enlightenment philosophy and had the ability to kind of develop

himself as an intellectual within the church. And then really he broke onto the public scene with this publication of pamphlet that was incredibly important before kind of in the lead up to what would be the French Revolution. And he intervened

In the public debates, and particularly, what is the third estate, was the pamphlet that argued that the third estate was the nation, you know, and really the question was, what is the nation? And he argued.

made quite strenuous and compelling um rhetorical claims for why the third estate was and why the first and second estates were not the nation uh and and actually in some ways were kind of um you know i think he uses gangrene as one of his metaphors they're kind of gangrenous bodies on the on the state on the nation um and they're they're living off of the the kind of

productive forces of the Third Estate. And it was a very strong kind of rallying cry that galvanized the

a lot of people in the build-up to and what became the French Revolution. And it gave him a quite prominent kind of position in political discourse. He wrote a few other things at the time, and he ended up having a role in elected positions in the French Revolution. He was a figure that

It's kind of a joke, but it is true as well that he played a role in inaugurating the French Revolution as well as ending it or closing it because he was also instrumental in convincing Napoleon to carry out the coup in 1799.

So he was this figure that was very influential. A lot of people who work in the history of political thought think of him as the most profound and insightful political thinker of the French Revolution. He was involved in many of the kind of important events.

Questions of the day, um, not only involved in, um, thinking about constitution, thinking about the form of, of the government, um, thinking about citizenship, what exactly it is, what form it would take. He had a very, um, uh, controversial idea of there being active citizens and passive citizens. Um,

in theory, you know, passive citizens, people would be included in the revolution. They would have the rights. Um, they would have certain protections of rights, but they wouldn't have, uh, an active role in politics. They wouldn't be active citizens. Uh, they couldn't vote nor could they stand for election. Uh, he wanted to create these two different groups. Um, as I, uh,

Cho and others have kind of... William Sewell particularly has done a nice job of...

Showing the reasons why he separated out these groups and what he kind of the denigrating things that he wrote about workers particularly. He felt that they weren't in a position to be active citizens because their lives were consumed by their labor and they just didn't have the time or space in some sense to become citizens.

fully and adequately educated in order to make these kind of larger decisions for the whole, for society. And so he wanted to create this distinction, which was actually enacted in the revolution for a brief period. He was also involved in rethinking the territory of the nation and restructuring the territory and political structures

political representation, particularly how that would relate to who is getting elected to the governing bodies. He had a lot of elaborate ideas that did not end up being enacted, but he was somebody who was kind of involved as a thinker, as thinking the big questions of the formation, particularly formations and functions of government, of institutions. And he was also deeply involved in

ideas, developing them. And as particularly became is clear from some of his later notebooks, he was deeply involved in some of the questions and what we would now call biology, but physiology and the life sciences that...

Most obviously you could characterize as vitalist questions or questions of generation, but are a part of the kind of theoretical foundations for biopolitics and were some of the kind of theoretical ideas emerging from the bodies of work of the same people that were developing biopolitical ideas. So he's this kind of interesting figure that is mostly remembered for his political work and his involvement in politics,

But I try and show that this biopolitical engagement was there for, it seems like, for a long time, for the kind of duration of his intellectual life or maturity. And there's a number of kind of striking ways that it shows up in some of his ideas. Earlier in the interview, you mentioned that the two main features of Enlightenment biopolitics is selective, is breeding and also exclusion. Right.

And these ideas, the theories, and then we talked about the idea of the relational holism and the ideas of organization, communities, society. But these theories of organizations, the exclusionary versions of them were particularly directed at

against certain groups of people. Vegabounds, which again, I guess, has this Foucauldian ring as well. They're not economically conducive to the society. And also the people of African descent and women. So there seems to be three groups against whom these theories are, let's say, directed.

And I know that you've reached the whole chapter on that. It's a terribly, terribly general question I'm asking. But can you give us an idea, a general idea of that chapter of the book and say why these particular groups of people? And I guess it kind of makes sense if you understand why the vagabonds, the people of Africa, the Senate women, they're the people who've always been kind of excluded from the main, from the public sphere in general and politics. But can you just give us an idea of how those exclusionary theories work?

directed against these three groups particularly. Yeah, definitely. So the vagabonds were people, it was a term that was used at the time to characterize people who did not have a fixed abode, didn't have a fixed home,

or a fixed income, a regular income, or sometimes as well did not have some attestation to their upstanding position in society. Sometimes you would get a letter from where you went out onto the road. If you were a migrant laborer, you would bring a letter with you to kind of

uh, reflect to attest to your upstanding nature. Um, so if you didn't have that as well, it was, it was a problem. Um, and this, this was a term that was used to characterize, um,

this kind of mobile population that oftentimes was migrating to different parts of the, of the country for labor. But also related to, you know, there were specific moments, particularly at the end of wars, like the end of the seven years war, there was a concern. The government had a concern with kind of returning soldiers and sailors kind of adding to this vagrant vagabond population being troublesome, causing social unrest and,

Um, of course they were not productive members of the economy in the way that, um, the, the state, uh, would, uh, recognize, uh, oftentimes they were just thought of or treated as being, um, uh, as being, you know, kind of taking from the vitality of, of the whole and the collective, um, not adding anything to it of being a threat of, you know, stealing and being an opposition to society. Um,

And so that was one group. And the people of African descent, there was a general distrust of the government of this group, by the government of this group. But also there were specific circumstances in which there was a heightened concern. And particularly people of African descent in metropolitan France, right?

The government grew concerned and a few kind of very outspoken advocates grew concerned that this population was going to be a problem, was a problem, not only because they would take kind of.

free thinking back to the colonies, back to enslaved populations if they went, that they would cause social unrest in the metropole, crime particularly, but also that they would be a biological threat. They would be some kind of contamination to the population as a whole, threat

to the well-being of the population on a biological level. So there was an introduction of a biological kind of justification argument against them and a need of the government to do something to kind of control them. And this was, it actually resulted in one of the sets of biopolitical practices that were enacted. They're called the Palais de Noir, the

policing of the blacks in metropolitan France, referring to particularly people of African descent, although occasionally people from, um, um, uh,

The Pacific as well were included in this group. And the set of restrictions they had to, it was about surveillance of them. They had to carry identity cards. They had to register with the local officials. If people were coming from the colonies and enslaved people, they had to stay and be imprisoned in the ports before they were sent back. They couldn't, you know, any longer enter the country again.

They as well eventually passed some regulations that there could be no marriages, there could be no reproduction between black people and white people. There was an attempt to to kind of stop the creation of children from black and white people coming together. It was an attempt to.

eradicate this population from France to keep them from reproducing within France and slowly and not let anybody else come in and slowly they would be kind of dying out with of natural causes but the population would shrink

would no longer be the kind of threat or biological element of the population at large. So it was a kind of practice of negative eugenics. I think that was a major part of the motivation. You can see clearly in some of the writing of people who were suggesting these policies.

And the case of women, as you say, of course, this is a group that has long been excluded, excluded in so many ways and so many societies, was very significantly excluded already in France. One of the things that was new was that the kind of the

of justifications for excluding women, the reasons to exclude women from the public sphere were kind of newly articulated and intensified. And as there were as well, you know, there had been across the Enlightenment some ideas for the equality of women, for, you know, the fact that women have capabilities that should enable that they can play a larger role in, you

you know, they should be educated. They can play a larger role in public affairs. There were people who were kind of reacting against that and trying to find new reasons to justify the exclusion of women and in fact, find differences between men and women. There was a new scientific effort to ground differences between men and women bodies. So there's just fascinating work. Landa Scheibinger is the main person who's written about this and

The way that, you know, the differences between men and women that were being argued for by these scientists were things that went all the way down to the bone, all parts of the body, literally the vein structures, the muscles, the kind of muscles.

um, what they thought of as a kind of like sensitive apparatus of the body, uh, that also affected our, our thoughts and, and, um, and our sensations, um, were fundamentally different that men and women were, you know, these kind of diametrical, um, opposed beings that, um,

you know, that were kind of shown to be scientifically fundamentally different. And then all of these new arguments for their exclusion could be grounded in this kind of this argument of their other difference. And, and it was, and this is one of the areas where there was there was kind of real consequence coming from this body of thought in the French revolution. There were women who were actively involved in,

In street uprisings, in some limited ways, in political organizing, in political clubs, in political conversation, in political pamphlet writing. There were advances made. There were new legal advances for women. And there was also backlash. And there was also arguments for why women should be excluded from active participation in politics.

why they shouldn't be able to vote, why they shouldn't be able to stand in elected bodies.

uh, and, or stand for election to elected bodies. Uh, and those were the, the factions and the arguments that ultimately won the day. Um, they oftentimes resorted to this, this kind of, um, of arguments about the, the biological differences of men and women. Um, and just one other thing about this, this chapter. And one of the reason I focus on these three groups, one, they were all quite, um, significant. Um,

Women obviously being the, you know, very significant part of the population, half the population. The people of African descent in metropolitan France was not a huge population, but it related to the very significant number of enslaved people that the French had in colonies. So it was very much a kind of

way that colonial issues pressed upon issues in the metropole and had some kind of recursive impact. And also vagabonds were, there were a significant number of people who were kind of mobile working poor in the 18th century. And part of what I wanted to show though, is not just that biopolitical ideas developed in relation to each one of these groups, but

but also that the defining of each of these groups and the justifications, the reasons given for excluding them ended up playing a role in the kind of creating the space in which the citizen of the French Revolution was conceived, right? The citizen of the French Revolution was, through the years leading up to the revolution as well, was kind of being conceived by what it was not.

It was not foreign people, but it was also not these kind of working, untrustworthy vagabonds. It was not enslaved people. It was not, you know, people of African descent in the metropole. It was not women. There were a number of other categories and these various categories, sometimes the reasons, the arguments given for excluding them and thinking about them as a kind of

group that was not worthy of citizenship was through these kind of biopolitical arguments and that in a negative logic kind of creates the space for the citizen. The citizen was not necessarily defined strictly through biopolitics, but by biopolitics creating the outside, creating those who are not citizens kind of also ends up having some significant impact, I think, on determining what is the citizen. Yeah.

And I'm going to ask another terribly broad question. Well, we can obviously... The whole eugenic movement obviously had a huge impact on indigenous population in America, lots of immigrants that came to America. But again, we can still...

see traces of that kind of thinking maybe in modern times? This is just a speculative question I'm asking. You do talk about the legacy of these Enlightenment biopolitics throughout different centuries, from French Revolution and later on. But if you could generally tell us about this impact of this kind of Enlightenment biopolitics. And more important, I'm more interested in modern times,

And this is not something that is in the book, but it just came to my mind. I'm just throwing it out there. So you may want to talk about it. And I could be wrong. I'm interested in evolutionary biology, but I also know that how some of the arguments, although it has a scientific base, but it could terribly be reductive when you apply it to human society. And there are some criticisms that maybe those

That sort of biologic determinism that was prevalent in the 19th century, even traces of eugenics thinking is being reproduced, not deliberately, of course, you know, with a mask of science. It is scientifically proven that men or men of certain age,

Men who are born in certain geographies, which is race again here, have certain capabilities others don't. But how do you in general see that impact of that kind of enlightenment by politics, more importantly on modern times? Yeah, I think there's two ways I could approach this. And one is to say the...

Like, are there specific kind of historical links? And is there a genealogy that or, you know, kind of lines of thought? And I think there are. I think there's.

connections between eugenics as they're articulated in the later 19th century and the 18th century as I'm talking about, I think there's still more work now can be done and needs to be done to kind of connect those. I think there are ways that they are connected, sometimes in relatively direct fashion. Some of these same texts from 18th century France, I know, for instance, are like being cited or

or um quoted without sometimes without attribution by british thinkers who are talking about the kind of development of transformation of human populations and how we can manipulate them lawrence pritchard people who are before darwin but thinking about this and are very prominent and play a role in the what eventually becomes you know evolution and darwinian evolution um

I think as well, there's ways we could see connections with Darwin and this. But I think more than just specific historical connections that have already been established, I think we could also see a way that the Enlightenment biopolitics is showing that inclusion and exclusion exist.

equality and inequality of these arguments of inequality and equality are linked from the beginning. And that's one of the kind of main points I want to make about the enlightenment and how this helps us to understand what the enlightenment is and also kind of its, its legacy. It's, and I think that what I've, what I tried to argue is that the enlightenment, you know, although it is oftentimes remembered for and celebrated for, um,

certain types of inclusive arguments that, you know, people of different religions should be tolerated, uh, that more people should be involved in government, that there should be something maybe like popular, eventually popular sovereignty, um, democracy, um, that people should have rights. There should be some group that is, that is, you know, sizable and that's included in, in, um, given citizenship, given specific rights protections. Um,

There is some idea that freedom is something that should be extended to some kind of large group, right? There's all these ways where there's this kind of set of liberatory possibilities being envisioned for larger and larger groups. There's more and more people that are thought to maybe be able to be included in this group. It's the beginning of an expansion. It's the establishment of it in political and political philosophical ideas that

And part of what I want to show is that's I think that's true. And also that some of the same foundations for those ideas produce ideas about exclusion, about those who should be separated from or not included in this kind of privileged group.

And that those two things are connected, not just in logical terms that like anybody's excluded, you know, any demarcation of exclusion is also a demarcation of inclusion. More than that, that the means by which the kind of arguments are made to justify those things are oftentimes kind of grounded in the same body of ideas, perspectives, kind of sets of fundamental assumptions about things.

society, human bodies, reproduction, life, you know, these very fundamental kind of ideas. And so that we have them inexorably connected in this historical case. And oftentimes we see them kind of continuing to be. And that if we don't acknowledge the ways that they are interconnected and

we don't adequately allow ourselves to think through and enact equality, true egalitarianism, right? If we don't recognize that egalitarian ideas are oftentimes connected to inegalitarian ones or stem from a similar root or have implications for exclusion, then, you know, we aren't necessarily realizing the full potential of that egalitarian vision. So,

That's a rather abstract or philosophical one, but I think that is a way that this kind of dilemma and issue that gets established in the Enlightenment still continues to be something that troubles us. And the thinking about it in this Enlightenment context can inform our kind of critical approach to it in the present, in the contemporary world. Yeah.

Thank you very much, William. But before we come to the end of the interview, I know that you've just published this book last year. It takes a number of years to write another book. Is there any other project you're thinking about or is it something that is, you know, in preparation?

Yeah, it's thanks for asking. And, and, um, it is true that like, yeah, as, as I'm, uh, moving on from, from this book, it's, I haven't fully, uh, I haven't fully realized what will be next, but I do, I do have, uh, a few ideas for some 18th century projects. And I also have, um,

some interest in, in writing about some things beyond the 18th century to, to kind of explore some of my, some of my other interests. So yeah, at this point I have, I have a kind of book idea that's kind of, you know, developing some articles and 18th century things. Well, hopefully we'll be able to talk to you again. There've been a couple of years on new books. Let's work about your future work.

So, Dr. William Max Nelson, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us on New Books Network. Really, really enjoyed reading this book, and I strongly recommend it to our listeners, Enlightenment Biopolitics. And as I said, I guess at the beginning of the interview, to me, eugenics was something more or less 19th century onward. So it was fascinating to read about the history of that kind of thinking, you know, earlier on, and some of the thinkers who

who had all these ideas how to engineer society to save labor, to save time, to improve efficiency and all the other controversial ideas associated with it. So thank you very much, William, for your time. Yeah, thanks so much.