Michel Foucault · Philosophy
Foucault argued that around the eighteenth century a new kind of power emerged. The old sovereign power was the right to <em>take</em> life - the king’s sword. The new power is the power to <em>foster</em> life: to manage populations, optimize health, regulate birth and death, and make populations live. He called it <em>biopower</em> - and saw sexuality as its hinge.
In the closing pages of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976), Foucault draws one of his grandest contrasts. For most of history, he argues, the characteristic power of the sovereign was the right of death: the king could have you executed, send you to war, take your life or spare it. Sovereign power was essentially the power of the sword - a power that subtracts, that seizes things, bodies, and ultimately life itself. Its formula was “to take life or let live.” But beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Foucault argues, a profoundly different kind of power emerged alongside and gradually overshadowed it - a power not over death but over life. This new power does not mainly seize and kill; it administers, optimizes, and multiplies life. It is concerned with health, longevity, fertility, vigour, the quality and quantity of the population. Its formula reverses the old one: it is the power “to make live and to let die.” Foucault names this new regime biopower: the entry of biological life itself - birth, death, health, reproduction - into the calculations and mechanisms of political power.
Biopower, Foucault argues, developed along two poles that are linked but distinct. The first pole, emerging slightly earlier, centres on the individual body as a machine: this is the realm of the disciplines you met in the study of the prison and the Panopticon - the training, drilling, and optimizing of the single body to make it docile and productive. He calls this the anatomo-politics of the human body. The second pole, emerging in the eighteenth century, centres not on the individual but on the population as a biological mass - the ‘species body.’ This is the realm of regulatory controls: the management of birthrates and mortality, of fertility, of public health, of epidemics, of the conditions that affect the life and death of populations as a whole. He calls this the biopolitics of the population. New sciences and instruments arise to serve it: demography, statistics, public hygiene, epidemiology, actuarial tables. The census counts; the statistician finds the norms and rates; the state acts to optimize them. Together, discipline (of bodies) and biopolitics (of populations) form the two arms of biopower - one individualizing, one massifying - that between them take hold of human life from the cell to the species.
The concept of biopower changed how we understand the modern state and modern politics. Once you see it, a vast range of phenomena that seem unrelated - public health campaigns, vaccination, social insurance, the welfare state, eugenics, family planning, the management of immigration and birthrates, the politics of pandemics - appear as expressions of a single underlying transformation: the taking-charge of biological life by political power. Foucault’s darkest observation is that this benevolent-seeming power over life has a terrible shadow. The same regime that promises to foster and optimize the life of the population can also turn murderous in life’s name: it was, he argued, precisely the modern biopolitical concern with the health and purity of the population - with protecting and improving the species body - that gave rise to state racism and made possible the genocidal projects of the twentieth century. When power’s job is to make the population live and flourish, killing can be recast as a kind of hygiene - the removal of what threatens the life of the whole. The power to make live and the power to massacre, Foucault warns, are two faces of the same coin. To grasp biopower is to see both the gentle administration of our health and the most catastrophic crimes of the modern age as expressions of the moment when life itself became the business of politics.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Foucault, modern power became biopower : a power over life that took two forms - disciplines of the individual body and regulation of the population (births, deaths, health). The old sovereign right to ‘take life or let live’ gave way to a power to ‘make live and let die.’ Explain why he thought s…
Leads to Thomas Hobbes.
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