ENLIGHTENMENT BIOPOLITICS

Will

ENLIGHTENMENT BIOPOLITICS

BOOK

University of Chicago Press
2024

CHEIRON BOOK PRIZE
KENSHUR BOOK PRIZE

LRB
NYRB
SCIENCE
AHR

“’If it is good to know how to use men as they are,’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1755 ... ‘it is better still to make them into what one needs them to be.’ Examples throughout this book demonstrate that many of Rousseau’s contemporaries and immediate successors agreed with him and that they envisioned this process of transforming people to be a question not only of education, moral formation, or the cultivation of civic virtue ... but of the physical transformation of individual and collective bodies.”

THE TIME OF ENLIGHTENMENT

BOOK

University of Toronto Press
2021

AHR
JMH

“The promise and peril of pressing into a future of our own making appears to be one of the elements [of the legacy of the Enlightenment] that has only increased in prominence in and relevance to our contemporary world. “

FRENCH REVOLUTION IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

BOOK (co-edited)

Cornell University Press
2013

LRB
EHR

“The French Revolution galnvanized and divided populations across Euope and the Americas, transformed the map of Europe through the creation of ‘sister republics’ and led to slave revolution in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the first abolition of slavery in 1793-94. Its continuing wars upset the status quo in Egypt and other parts of Africa, India and ultimately even places as distant as Java. Yet, despite the recent interest in global or transnational history, the Revolution in France iself has been analyzed in largely national terms. It might have reshaped the world outside France, but its own causes and processes have been explained by reference to French factors. This volume aims to show how global factors shaped the French Revolution in France and helped make it [in Hegel’s words] ‘world-historical’.”

MAKING MEN

ARTICLE

American Historical Review
2010

“Making Men: Enlightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering”

“The emergence of ideas and practice of [racial engineering] ... transform our understanding of the Enlightenment and the central paradox that the same movement that produced such new and powerful ideas of political and social inclusion and equality also transformed ideas and practices of exclusion and inequality.”

COLONIZING FRANCE

CHAPTER

in French Revolution in Global Perspective
2013

“Colonizing France: Revolutionary Regeneration and the First French Empire”

“The long history of colonialism informed one of the greatest problems of revolutionary governance: how to transform people and make them capable of creating the radically new future envisioned by revolutionary leaders?”

BIOPOLITIQUE

ARTICLE

Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine
2021

“Biopolitique et fabrique de la race pendant les Lumières”

LEAPING INTO THE FUTURE

ARTICLE

in Oxford University Studies on the Enlightenment
2024

“Leaping into the future: Enlightenment ideas of progress and French revolutionary time”

“In the early years of the French Revolution, as people’s expectations were continually challenged, exceeded, augmented, and transformed, the future became not only something that could be made but also something that could be jumped into.”

EARLY MODERN GLOBALIZATION

REVIEW ESSAY

in History Workshop Journal
on Michael Kwass, Contraband.
2017

“Feeling ostracized from society and persecuted for his beliefs, the great and troubled philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau took many long walks through the Swiss countryside where he lived later in life. On a hike in 1765, he searched for solace in the remote mountains and valleys west of Lake Neuchâtel. ... Sitting down in a clearing, his mind wandered as he lost himself in his surroundings. ... Immediately after deciding that he was like a new Columbus discovering an unknown land, he heard a familiar clanking. The sound repeated and became louder. Investigating, he pushed through a thicket of brush to find that a mere twenty feet from where he had been sitting in wild contemplation was a stocking mill.”

LYRIC RESEARCH

ESSAY

In a forthcoming volume edited by D. Graham Burnett and Julian Chehirian
2026