Through rich readings of major Enlightenment tracts on sovereignty, colonization, and human geography, DeGabriele argues that the drone strikes conducted by the Obama administration were in fact perfectly consistent with an Enlightenment that was always invested in maintaining and extending sovereign power. Moreover, he frames the asymmetrical violence imparted by US drone strikes not as the antithesis to the liberal and democratic ideals fashioned in early modern Europe, but as a necessary and constitutive feature of Enlightenment thought. In so doing, Drone Enlightenment successfully navigates one of the oft-discussed paradoxes of the Enlightenment era, a period that fostered liberatory social and political formations on the one hand and cultivated unprecedented forms of expropriation and human domination on the other, particularly in the context of colonial capitalism.-- "Eighteenth-Century Studies"

DeGabriele makes original use of the drone and contemporary drone warfare to open up new readings of the early Enlightenment natural right tradition, as well as using that tradition to reread the drone to examine its relation to questions of sovereignty, occupation and the right to kill. The book straddles Enlightenment philosophy, British literature, warfare, and colonialism past and present, breathing fresh life into an often asthmatic area of scholarship

--Tony C. Brown, University of Minnesota, author of The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic