William Max Nelson
My work focuses on the ways that ideas about time, race, and biopolitics emerged in the eighteenth century. I focus on France, though I am interested in the Enlightenment as a whole and in the relationship between France and its colonies, particularly those in the Atlantic world.
My book The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One was published in 2021 by the University of Toronto Press. It is available Open Access.
My second monograph, Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens was published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.
Other research and teaching interests include the development of early modern globalization, the history of science (particularly the life sciences and human sciences), social theory, the phenomenological tradition, modernist prose, and experimental forms of writing history.
My essay "Five Ways of Being a Painting" won the Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize in 2017. It was subsequently published in Five Ways of Being a Painting and Other Essays, excerpt in The Independent (UK), and translated in German in the Neue Rundschau. Weaving together the personal and the historical, this essay builds on my interests in experimental modernist prose, early modern globalization, aesthetics, and the history of ideas.
More can be found on williammaxnelson.com
My book The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One was published in 2021 by the University of Toronto Press. It is available Open Access.
My second monograph, Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens was published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.
Other research and teaching interests include the development of early modern globalization, the history of science (particularly the life sciences and human sciences), social theory, the phenomenological tradition, modernist prose, and experimental forms of writing history.
My essay "Five Ways of Being a Painting" won the Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize in 2017. It was subsequently published in Five Ways of Being a Painting and Other Essays, excerpt in The Independent (UK), and translated in German in the Neue Rundschau. Weaving together the personal and the historical, this essay builds on my interests in experimental modernist prose, early modern globalization, aesthetics, and the history of ideas.
More can be found on williammaxnelson.com
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Books by William Max Nelson
Articles and Chapters by William Max Nelson
"The unexpected events and disorienting transformations of the French Revolution brought about a number of unusual developments in how people thought about and experienced the future. One effect was to alter the status of the future in the discourse of progress inherited from the Enlightenment. In the early years of the Revolution, as people’s expectations were continually challenged, exceeded, augmented, and transformed, the future became not only something that could be made or needed to be made, but also something that could be jumped into. A new sense emerged among some people living through the Revolution that progress could be extremely rapid. In fact, some thought it could be so quick that transformations that might have taken centuries given the rate of progress during the Enlightenment could now be achieved in a number of years.
In order to understand this development and reveal how it became conceivable, I identify and analyze some features of the Enlightenment idea of progress that have gone unnoticed. I argue that, in addition to the well-known idea that some people living in supposedly less developed socioeconomic circumstances were living in earlier stages of history, as if they represented the past of the Europeans, there was also the idea that Europeans lived in the future of these supposedly less developed people. In fact, the implied temporality of stadial progress was even stranger and more complex, since all of these peoples existed at the same moment in the present. This resulted in an undecidable compound temporality in which some people were represented as living in both the past and the present (or past-present) while others lived in the future and the present (or future-present). This simultaneous coexistence and compounding of past, present, and future were a condition of possibility that made conceivable to some people living through the French Revolution that they had propelled themselves into a yet more distant future that lay centuries ahead of their global contemporaries, even their supposedly advanced European neighbors."
https://www.nyrb.com/products/2017-notting-hill-editions-essay-prize
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. Passing through dense black pines and fallen beech trees, he entered an isolated area that felt like another world. Rousseau bounded over boulders, lay down on his stomach to peer over precipices, and watched hawks and osprey fly above. He observed the plants around him and collected specimens of toothwort, club moss, laserwort and sowbread. Sitting down in a clearing, his mind wandered as he lost himself in his surroundings. As he recounted in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, it was just at this moment – immediately after deciding that he was like a new Columbus discovering an unknown land – that 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.
Rousseau’s tale captures a well-known concern of European writers at the time, while also opening up a small window onto a less-known historical vista. Like the Romantic authors who would succeed him, Rousseau explored the paradox of progress and the tension that resulted from the longing to be at one with nature in a quickly developing Europe on the eve of industrialization. But Rousseau’s stocking mill was not simply a case of town invading country. It was also a case of distant forces of production, trade, and consumption beginning to remodel the landscape and the ways of life in even the most inland and remote corners of Europe. The anecdote reflects the way that realms of existence and zones of activity once thought distinct and distant were beginning to collide and intertwine in unexpected ways in the eighteenth century. Rousseau’s reverie about this remote and pastoral landscape is not only a sign of the Romanticism to come. If placed in the right context, we can see that it is also a sign of the early modern globalization that began in the seventeenth century.
...
(a long review essay of Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground)
https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbx015/3066161/European-History-and-Early-Modern-Globalization?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Current Book Project by William Max Nelson
Papers by William Max Nelson
"The unexpected events and disorienting transformations of the French Revolution brought about a number of unusual developments in how people thought about and experienced the future. One effect was to alter the status of the future in the discourse of progress inherited from the Enlightenment. In the early years of the Revolution, as people’s expectations were continually challenged, exceeded, augmented, and transformed, the future became not only something that could be made or needed to be made, but also something that could be jumped into. A new sense emerged among some people living through the Revolution that progress could be extremely rapid. In fact, some thought it could be so quick that transformations that might have taken centuries given the rate of progress during the Enlightenment could now be achieved in a number of years.
In order to understand this development and reveal how it became conceivable, I identify and analyze some features of the Enlightenment idea of progress that have gone unnoticed. I argue that, in addition to the well-known idea that some people living in supposedly less developed socioeconomic circumstances were living in earlier stages of history, as if they represented the past of the Europeans, there was also the idea that Europeans lived in the future of these supposedly less developed people. In fact, the implied temporality of stadial progress was even stranger and more complex, since all of these peoples existed at the same moment in the present. This resulted in an undecidable compound temporality in which some people were represented as living in both the past and the present (or past-present) while others lived in the future and the present (or future-present). This simultaneous coexistence and compounding of past, present, and future were a condition of possibility that made conceivable to some people living through the French Revolution that they had propelled themselves into a yet more distant future that lay centuries ahead of their global contemporaries, even their supposedly advanced European neighbors."
https://www.nyrb.com/products/2017-notting-hill-editions-essay-prize
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. Passing through dense black pines and fallen beech trees, he entered an isolated area that felt like another world. Rousseau bounded over boulders, lay down on his stomach to peer over precipices, and watched hawks and osprey fly above. He observed the plants around him and collected specimens of toothwort, club moss, laserwort and sowbread. Sitting down in a clearing, his mind wandered as he lost himself in his surroundings. As he recounted in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, it was just at this moment – immediately after deciding that he was like a new Columbus discovering an unknown land – that 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.
Rousseau’s tale captures a well-known concern of European writers at the time, while also opening up a small window onto a less-known historical vista. Like the Romantic authors who would succeed him, Rousseau explored the paradox of progress and the tension that resulted from the longing to be at one with nature in a quickly developing Europe on the eve of industrialization. But Rousseau’s stocking mill was not simply a case of town invading country. It was also a case of distant forces of production, trade, and consumption beginning to remodel the landscape and the ways of life in even the most inland and remote corners of Europe. The anecdote reflects the way that realms of existence and zones of activity once thought distinct and distant were beginning to collide and intertwine in unexpected ways in the eighteenth century. Rousseau’s reverie about this remote and pastoral landscape is not only a sign of the Romanticism to come. If placed in the right context, we can see that it is also a sign of the early modern globalization that began in the seventeenth century.
...
(a long review essay of Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground)
https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbx015/3066161/European-History-and-Early-Modern-Globalization?redirectedFrom=fulltext