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.
Background Previous notions of the concept can be traced back to the Middle Ages in John of Salisbury's work Policraticus, in which the term body politic was coined and used. The term biopolitics was first used by Rudolf Kjellén, a political scientist who also coined the term geopolitics, in his 1905 two-volume work The Great Powers. Kjellén used the term in the context of his aim to study "the civil war between social groups" (comprising the state) from a biological perspective, and thus named his putative discipline "biopolitics". In Kjellén's organicist view, the state was a quasi-biological organism, a "super-individual creature". The Nazis also subsequently used the term in the context of their racial policy, with Hans Reiter using it in a 1934 speech to refer to their concept of nation and state based on racial supremacy.
In contemporary US political science studies, usage of the term is mostly divided between a poststructuralist group using the meaning assigned by Foucault (denoting social and political power over life) and another group that uses it to denote studies relating biology and political science.Liesen, Laurette T. and Walsh, Mary Barbara, The Competing Meanings of 'Biopolitics' in Political Science: Biological and Post-Modern Approaches to Politics (2011). APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper In the work of Foucault, biopolitics refers to the style of government that regulates populations through "biopower" (the application and impact of political power on all aspects of human life).Michel Foucault: Security, Territory, Population, p. 1 (2007)
Morley Roberts, in his 1938 book Bio-politics argued that a correct model for world politics is "a loose association of cell and protozoa colonies". Robert E. Kuttner used the term to refer to his particular brand of "scientific racism", as he called it, which he worked out with noted antisemite Eustace Mullins, with whom Kuttner co-founded the Institute for Biopolitics in the late 1950s, and also with Glayde Whitney, a behavioral geneticist. Most of his opponents label his model as antisemitic. Kuttner and Mullins were inspired by Morley Roberts, who was in turn inspired by Arthur Keith, or both were inspired by each other and either co-wrote together (or with the Institute of Biopolitics) Biopolitics of Organic Materialism dedicated to Roberts and reprinted some of his works.
In the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, biopolitics is framed in terms of anti-capitalist insurrection using life and the body as weapons; examples include flight from power and, "in its most tragic and revolting form", suicide terrorism, conceptualized as the opposite of biopower, which is seen as the practice of sovereignty in biopolitical conditions.Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2005). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Hamish Hamilton.
According to Agni Vlavianos Arvanitis,Global Marshall Plan Foundation "Towards a World in Balance: A Virtual Congress for a Better Balanced World", pg. 169. John L. Pellam Bibliotheque: Worldwide International Publishers (2011) "The Preeminent 500: 500 Exceptional Individuals of Achievement in Commerce Science & Technology, Medicine and the Arts & Letters" pg. 53. John L. Pellam Bibliotheque: Worldwide International Publishers "Encyclopedia Intelligentsia A Compendium of Great Thinkers and Bright Minds of the 21st Century", pg. 43. biopolitics is a conceptual and operative framework for societal development, promoting bios (Greek for "life") as the central theme in every human endeavor, be it policy, education, art, government, science or technology. This concept uses bios as a term referring to all forms of life on our planet, including their genetic and geographic variation.UNESCO Eolss Publishers Co. Ltd, (2001) Our Fragile World: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development Vol. 1, Pg. 1027.
Michel Foucault
In the last chapter of The History of Sexuality, "Right of Death and Power over Life", Michel Foucault argues that biopolitics is the study of how the "biological" is captured by the "political" when life enters into "knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention."Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Roberto Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 142–43. He points out that a new form of power emerged, which no longer is based on sovereign-juridical power (the right to "take life and let live"), instead biopower is the power to "make live and let die". In place of the negative, power over life represented by sovereignty, biopower is a productive form of power that either fosters life or disallows "it to the point of death". Biopower was introduced through various techniques and calculations which targeted individual bodies (disciplinary dispositifs of control) and broader populations (regulatory mechanisms of control). This definition is repeated in his famous "biopolitical" lecture in Society Must Be Defended.Foucault, Michel. 2003. "Lecture 11: 17 March 1976." Pp. 239–264 from Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, translated by D. Macey. New York: Picador, pp. 239–264.
Foucault first discussed his thoughts on biopolitics in his lecture series Society Must Be Defended given at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1976. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is largely derived from his own notion of biopower, and the extension of state power over both the physical and political bodies of a population. While only mentioned briefly in Society Must Be Defended, the conceptualisation of biopolitics developed by Foucault there and subsequent lectures and books has become prominent in social science and the humanities.Lemke, T., Casper, M. J., & Moore, L. J. (2011). Biopolitics: an advanced introduction. NYU Press.
Foucault described biopolitics as "a new technology of power...[that] exists at a different level, on a different scale, and [that] has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments." More than a disciplinary mechanism, Foucault's biopolitics acts as a control apparatus exerted over a population as a whole or, as Foucault stated, "a global mass." In the years that followed, Foucault continued to develop his notions of the biopolitical in subsequent lectures to the Collège de France over the next two years, which are published under the titles Security, Territory, Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics.Michel Foucault (2007) Security, Territory, Population 1977–1978 pp. 311–332 pp. 333–361 pp. 378–380
Foucault gave numerous examples of biopolitical control when he first mentioned the concept in 1976. These examples include "ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on." He contrasted this method of social control with political power in the Middle Ages. Whereas in the Middle Ages pandemics made death a permanent and perpetual part of life, this was then shifted around the end of the 18th century with the introduction of milieu into the biological sciences. Foucault then gives different contrasts to the then physical sciences in which the industrialisation of the population was coming to the fore through the concept of work, where Foucault then argues power starts to become a target for this milieu by the 17th century. The development of vaccines and medicines dealing with public hygiene allowed death to be held (and/or withheld) from certain populations. This was the introduction of "more subtle, more rational mechanisms: insurance, individual and collective savings, safety measures, and so on."
Strains of biopolitics