Concept
Biopower
Overview
Biopower (or biopouvoir in French), coined by French social theorist Michel Foucault, refers to various means by which modern nation states control their populations. In Foucault's work, it has been used to refer to practices of public health, regulation of heredity, and risk regulation, among many other regulatory mechanisms often linked less directly with literal physical health. Foucault first used the term in his lecture courses at the Collège de France, and the term first appeared in print in The Will to Knowledge, Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality. It is closely related to a term he uses much less frequently, but which subsequent thinkers have taken up independently, biopolitics, which aligns more closely with the examination of the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority over knowledge, power, and the processes of subjectivation.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed Biopower
Related ideas
- Greco-Roman world
- Samuel P. Huntington
- Biopolitics
- Le Monde
- Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
- Isaac Newton
- Power (social and political)
- Jurisprudence
- Middle Ages
- Civil Rights Act of 1964
- Classical mechanics
- Nation state
- Roman emperor
- Natural law
- Jean Bodin
- State (polity)
- Sovereignty
- Nobility
- Collège de France
- Technology
- Social theory
- François Quesnay
- Michel Foucault
- Capitalism
Place in the tradition
Part of Knowledge.