Concept
Biopolitics
Overview
Biopolitics is a major paradigm in the social sciences and humanities, which begins from the premise that life is central to modern politics. In the early nineteenth century, biopolitics emerged as a specific form of politics with a series of concerns over "life", such as concerns with overpopulation, public hygiene, pseudo-scientific theories such as biological racism, and into state forms of biological domination such as Nazi Germany. More recently, contemporary issues such as combating climate change, preventing the global spread of infectious diseases and pandemics, as well as rethinking the meaning of being human given biomedical advances in such areas as genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, even prosthetics, have pushed life to the forefront of politics.
Biopolitics as a concept was developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Across a number of writings and lectures in the 1970s, Foucault examined how life was gradually caught up in a number of apparatuses (dispositifs) of power/knowledge, which sought to govern life. Life was managed, regulated, controlled, and in privileged cases protected. Foucault's thesis claims that contemporary power structures are increasingly preoccupied with the administration of life itself, rather than solely focusing on individual behaviors or actions. Accordingly, biopolitics entails the governance of populations as biological entities, with an emphasis on optimizing their health, productivity, and reproductive capacities in manners conducive to broader political and economic objectives. In its essence, biopolitics investigates how political power intersects with biological life, shaping the bodies, behaviors, and well-being of populations through diverse strategies and controls.
This interdisciplinary field scrutinizes the mechanisms through which political authorities and institutions exercise control over populations which goes beyond conventional forms of governance. This encompasses areas such as the regulation of health, reproduction, sexuality, and other aspects of biological existence. The governmental power of biopolitics is exerted through practices such as surveillance, healthcare policies, population control measures, gender-based laws, and the implementation of biometric identification systems.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
For popular use this definition is amply sufficient, but it still falls short of the complete accuracy required for the purposes of the philosopher. Political Economy does not treat of the production and distribution of wealth in all states of mankind, but only in what is termed the social state; nor so far as they depend upon the laws of human nature, but only so far as they depend upon a certain portion of those…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
States what Biopolitics is.
The territory was the same; but the human beings had changed. Hence the division by territories was chosen as the point of departure, and citizens had to exercise their rights and duties wherever they chose their abode without regard to gens and tribe. This organization of inhabitants by localities is a common feature of all states. It seems natural to us now. But we have seen what long and hard fighting was…
Friedrich Engels, The origin of the family, private property, and the state
Close in meaning to Biopolitics; the term itself is not named.
Bodies politic die, but it is of disease, or violent death; they have no old age. The following sentence from Hooker’s _Ecclesiastical Polity_ is an instance of a false analogy from physical bodies to what are called bodies politic. “As there could be in natural bodies no motion of any thing unless there were some which moveth all things, and continueth immovable; even so in politic societies there must be some…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Biopolitics is.
Philosophers who discussed Biopolitics
Related ideas
- Organicism
- Government
- Genetic engineering
- Queer theory
- John of Salisbury
- Edward Said
- Postcolonialism
- Life
- Middle Ages
- Industrialisation
- Nazi Germany
- Political spectrum
- Political science
- Post-structuralism
- Antonio Negri
- Health care
- Sociobiology
- State (polity)
- Collège de France
- Nazism
- Giorgio Agamben
- Subaltern (postcolonialism)
- The Nation
- Michel Foucault
Place in the tradition
Part of Conservatism.