William Max Nelson

Reviewed summary

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

Ever wonder how the Enlightenment—the era we like to think of as the dawn of liberty and reason—helped cook up some of the nastiest ideas about race and who ‘deserves’ to be a citizen? Spoiler: it’s not all kumbaya and progress. William Max Nelson’s book drags the glow of those shiny ideals into the murkier corners of eugenics, colonialism, and exclusion, showing us that the Enlightenment was as much about control as it was about freedom.