Publications:
Publications:
My book project Reason for Slavery: Social Science in Antebellum Proslavery Thought revisits the intellectual history of slavery after recent debates about slavery and capitalism. The project looks at how a faction of white Southerners appealed to the nascent social sciences--such as political economy, racial science, statistics, sociology, and socialism--to defend bondage in the Antebellum period. Drawing on a Foucauldian perspective, my basic argument is that proslavery social scientists developed a theory of what I call modern paternalism, which was an attempt to depersonalize power. This theory sought the bureaucratic and state-directed control of enslaved people’s life processes to ensure productivity and order. In a slogan: intellectuals transcended the plantation family, and the plantation patriarch became a bureaucrat surveying mortality rates.
The significance of the argument isn't just historical. Social science and the appeal to abstraction figures prominently in attempts to justify contemporary racial inequalities, as we have seen with the post-1990s flourishing of racial science—especially the race and I.Q. research program—in public and increasingly academic circles.