New Work Roundup

Over the past month, I’ve had some new publications, mostly focused on France. In The New York Review of Books, I wrote about William Max Nelson’s excellent Enlightenment Biopolitics. It is a book that deals with the difficult subject of race in the Enlightenment, and with what followed after French thinkers began to treat humans as an object of scientific knowledge—as belonging to a natural world that is perpetually changing. Nelson traces the growing fear that humans might be subject to physical degeneration and examines Enlightenment speculations about how to counter this process through scientific breeding. He concludes that these intellectual changes helped lay the foundation for the scientific racism and eugenics of the nineteenth century. Yet he resists condemning the Enlightenment as a whole, and the book is a model of nuance and careful analysis. I only criticized Nelson for relying too heavily on Foucault’s vision of the radical novelty of modern biological thought, and therefore neglecting the way Enlightenment discussions built on important earlier precedents.

Meanwhile, in The Nation, I have a review of the new book by Nelson’s dissertation supervisor Lynn Hunt, entitled The Revolutionary Self. The search for the origins of the “modern self” is as difficult as it is venerable, but Hunt offers a delightful new take on the subject. Rather than return to the same canonical works of philosophy explored in depth by scholars such as Charles Taylor and Jerrold Seigel, Hunt provides five short chapters that explore from different angles what she presents as the central paradox of modern selfhood: that individuals are seen as both radically autonomous, and as inescapably shaped by social conditioning. She has chosen her subjects with what can only be called whimsy: British tea parties, engraved portraits of France’s revolutionary National Assembly; revolutionary military strategy; the career of a woman portrait painter; and that of a Swiss financier turned revolutionary. But taken together, the chapters illuminate her thesis beautifully. With Hunt, my principal criticism is that she might have paid more attention to the way one thinker in particular—Jean-Jacques Rousseau—shaped eighteenth-century thinking on the subject of the self. No writer insisted more forcefully on his own individuality and autonomy, and none decried the imprisoning and destructive effects of social conditioning with greater eloquence.

In The Guardian, I wrote a short take on what could be called France’s Autumn of Discontent, with its combination of toxic political stalemate and a range of public scandals. Is the country on the brink of some huge and destructive upheaval? I offered a note of caution. Breast-beating about national decline is a venerable French habit (the first book to bear the title “The Decline of France” was published in 1842). Predictions from a decade ago about the country sliding into large-scale racial violence have not come to pass. And unlike in the United States, popular anger stems largely from a feeling on the part of many constituencies that they are not receiving the benefits and support they deserve from social elites and the state (both embodied all too well by the miserably unpopular Emmanuel Macron). It does not, for the most part, reflect the sort of ever-deeper cultural and ideological divisions present in the United States. I concluded that “things will not go as badly for the French as the French themselves predict,” and I devoutly hope that the winter proves me right.

Finally, in The Chronicle of Higher Education I wrote a short piece on the subject of grade inflation in elite American universities. But readers of this newsletter don’t need to click over to the Chronicle to read it, as I published it here first.