Biopolitics is a concept introduced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in the mid-20th century. At its core, biopolitics explores how governmental power operates through the management and regulation of a population's bodies and lives.
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.
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.
Notions of biopolitics
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. 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).
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.
According to Professor Agni Vlavianos Arvanitis, 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.
Alternative usages
One usage concerns the interplay and interdisciplinary studies relating biology and political science, primarily the study of the relationship between biology and political behavior. Most of these works agree on three fundamental aspects. First, the object of investigation is primarily political behavior, which—and this is the underlying assumption—is caused in a substantial way by objectively demonstrable biological factors. For example, the relationship of biology and political orientation, but also biological correlates of partisanship and voting behavior. (See also sociobiology.) Note here Ernst Haeckel's famous proposition that "[p]olitics is applied biology."
Another common usage is per a political spectrum that reflects and or advocates various positions towards regarding the biotech revolution.
A less common one sometimes surfaces in the green politics of bioregionalism.
In the colonial setting
Biopolitics, read as a variation of Foucault's Biopower, has proven to be a substantive concept in the field of postcolonial studies. Foucault's term refers to the intersection between power (political, economic, judicial etc.) and the individual's bodily autonomy. According to postcolonial theorists, present within the colonial setting are various mechanisms of power that consolidate the political authority of the colonizer; Biopolitics is thus the means by which a colonising force utilises political power to regulate and control the bodily autonomy of the colonized subject, who are oppressed and subaltern. Edward Said, in his work Orientalism, analysed the means by which colonial powers rationalised their relationship with the colonized societies they inhabited through discursive means, and how these discourses continue to influence modern-day depictions of the Orient. Franz Fanon applied a psychoanalytic frame to his theories of subjectivity, arguing that the subjectivity of the colonized is in constant dialogue with the oppressive political power of the colonizer, a mirroring of the Oedipal father-son dynamic. While not using the term himself, Fanon's work has been cited as a major development in the conceptualisation of biopolitics in the colonial setting.
Michel Foucault
French philosopher and social theorist Michel 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 his "Society Must Be Defended" lectures, the conceptualisation of biopolitics developed by Foucault has become prominent in social science and the humanities.
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 his "The Birth of Biopolitics" and "The Courage of Truth" lectures.
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."
