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.
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.’…
Leads to Thomas Hobbes.
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