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Dissertation Information for William Max Nelson

NAME:
- William Max Nelson

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2006)

ADVISORS:
- Lynn A. Hunt

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Mary Terrall
- Anthony Pagden
- M. Norton Wise
- Kirstie McClure

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: The weapon of time: Constructing the future in France, 1750 to year I

Abstract: An active orientation to the future that looks to know and construct the future is absolutely essential to our lives in the contemporary world. In fact, this orientation is so widespread and fundamental that it is widely taken for granted. In my dissertation, I demonstrate how practices in Enlightenment France brought this orientation into being and how it played an important role in making possible the French revolutionaries' unprecedented attempts to remake the world completely anew. I argue that it was through the development of instruments and experiments that aimed to counter degeneration that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and create a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but was fundamentally different from it.

The new orientation to the future that emerged from these practices was not something that was explicitly articulated during the Enlightenment. Instead this practical orientation must be seen as an "understanding" of historical temporality. By using the term "understanding," I wish to emphasize that actors often had a tacit knowledge of time---one that they worked with ---without necessarily being fully aware of it or articulating it explicitly in their writing.

The instruments and experiments that I analyze were employed to produce very specific and detailed prescriptions for action, whether they were in relation to tax policy or the breeding of sheep. For example, I investigate the way in which the prominent political economists, the Physiocrats, developed an instrument called the tableau économique in order to support their arguments for specific changes in French economic policy. Another chapter analyzes the animal breeding experiments of famed natural historian Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, in which he showed that through influencing the generation of animals, man could influence the generation of the future. My final chapter analyzes the creation of the Republican clock and calendar during the French Revolution and the way that it was an extension of the active orientation to the future that had developed during the previous fifty years.

MPACT Scores for William Max Nelson

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calculated 2008-08-09 09:22:51

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Students under William Max Nelson

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None