Cheiron’s book prize committee is delighted to announce the 2025 joint winner, William Max Nelson, for his book Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.

A writer and professor at the University of Toronto, Nelson specializes in the history of the Enlightenment in France and its colonies and the French Revolution. His work combines intellectual history and the history of science to explore the ways in which ideas about race, gender, and the body, and about time and progress, emerged, circulated, and shaped conceptions of citizenship and social order. He has also written extensively on art and aesthetics, experimental modernist prose, and early modern globalization.

Many of these themes are taken up in innovative and compelling new ways in Enlightenment Biopolitics. Starting from the premise that eugenics was not a twentieth century invention, but actually has deep roots in the eighteenth century, Nelson argues that Enlightenment themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity were connected with and dependent upon demarcating and defining their obverse: hierarchical categories based on race, gender, sex, and class. These twin projects—inclusionary and exclusionary—did not simply coexist but were dialectically related, stemming from a common assumption, a fixation on human quality and belief in human malleability in the service of the state that Nelson calls “biopolitics.”

Through his incisive readings of works of natural history and political economy, Nelson examines a startling range of ideas about controlling human reproduction and classification: the “manufacture” of mixed race soldiers (especially to guard the rebellious populations of Saint-Domingue); the restriction of the bodily autonomy of certain “others” to create a designated underclass of laborers;  the forbidding of intermarriage between whites and people of African descent; even proposals for crossbreeding humans and apes to create a race of “natural slaves.” As he persuasively documents, equality and inequality, inclusion and exclusion, the human and the dehumanized, rights and race, were intertwined and co-constitutive ideals.

On the committee, we praised Nelson’s book as beautifully written and highly original, and in illuminating the complexities and ironies of the project of human equality, revealing for us how much there is still to learn about the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions. Because questions of human rights and of citizenship—whether and in what ways to extend them, who deserves them—remain current and fraught, Nelson’s book also has much to teach us about our own present day.