Biopolitics

Introduction

Biopolitics refers to the administration and regulation of life itself as object of political power. The concept, developed primarily by Michel Foucault in the 1970s, describes how modern power operates not just through juridical sovereignty (the right to kill or let live) but through detailed management of populations’ biological existence: birth rates, mortality, health, hygiene, sexuality, and reproduction. Biopolitics marks a historical transformation in how power functions—from sovereign power over death to administrative power over life.

Where traditional political theory focused on state sovereignty, law, and individual rights, biopolitics examines how power operates through science, medicine, statistics, public health, urban planning, and social welfare to optimize populations’ vitality, productivity, and utility. This isn’t necessarily repressive—biopolitical power often presents as care, improvement, and empowerment. Yet it represents profound expansion of political control into previously private or natural domains: bodily functions, sexual behaviors, life processes themselves.

Biopolitics has become central to critical theory’s analysis of contemporary power. It illuminates how racism operates through biology and health policy; how neoliberalism governs through responsibilization and risk management; how borders function through differential access to life and death; how pandemics reveal and intensify biopolitical governance. Understanding biopolitics is essential for analyzing how power operates in modernity and how life itself becomes political battleground.

Key Figures

Related Thinkers:

• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) - Foundational theorist, lectures and History of Sexuality
• Giorgio Agamben (1942-present) - Bare life, state of exception, Homo Sacer
• Achille Mbembe (1957-present) - Necropolitics as critique
• Roberto Esposito (1950-present) - Immunization paradigm
• Judith Butler (1956-present) - Precarity and grievability

📖 Essential Reading: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (1976), Part Five: “Right of Death and Power over Life”

Foucault’s Conceptual Framework

From Sovereign Power to Biopower

In The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (1976) and the 1975-76 lectures Society Must Be Defended, Foucault distinguished two modalities of power:

Sovereign power (medieval through 18th century) operated through the right to “take life or let live.” The sovereign could execute, wage war, or demand subjects sacrifice themselves. Power was spectacular, juridical, and negative—manifest in public executions, rituals of punishment, and display of sovereign authority. It focused on territory and juridical subjects.

Biopower (emerging 18th-19th centuries) inverts this to “make live and let die.” Rather than spectacular violence, power operates through administration of life: improving health, increasing longevity, managing populations. It’s productive rather than repressive, operating through normalization rather than law. It focuses on biological populations and living bodies.

This transformation doesn’t replace sovereignty but supplements it. Modern states exercise both sovereign power (police, military, law) and biopower (public health, social services, population management). Yet biopower becomes increasingly central to governance.

Two Poles: Anatomopolitics and Biopolitics

Foucault distinguished two poles of biopower:

1. Anatomopolitics of the Human Body (Discipline)

Developed in 17th-18th centuries, disciplinary power operates on individual bodies through techniques of surveillance, examination, training, and normalization. Institutions like schools, hospitals, prisons, factories, and military organize bodies in space, structure time, and optimize movements to maximize utility and docility.

Discipline and Punish (1975) analyzed how disciplinary power produces “docile bodies”—subjects who internalize norms, self-regulate, and become productive. The Panopticon (Jeremy Bentham’s prison design where inmates are potentially always visible to central tower) exemplifies disciplinary logic: subjects behave as if constantly watched, internalizing surveillance.

Disciplinary power is individualizing—it operates on specific bodies, creating detailed knowledge about each subject through examination, testing, and record-keeping. It produces individuals as objects of knowledge and targets of intervention.

2. Biopolitics of the Population

Emerging in 18th-19th centuries, biopolitics operates at population level through statistics, demography, epidemiology, and public health. It addresses birth rates, mortality, morbidity, longevity, and fertility as political-economic problems requiring management.

Rather than disciplining individual bodies, biopolitics regulates populations through interventions in reproduction, housing, sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare. It uses probabilistic knowledge (statistics) to govern aggregates rather than individuals, managing species-body of the population.

Biopolitics is massifying—it treats populations as biological entities with collective properties (birth rate, life expectancy) that can be calculated and modified. Individuals matter only as instances of populations, data points in statistical distributions.

Racism and State Racism

Foucault argued biopower generates modern racism as means of introducing death (sovereign power) into life-administering biopolitical regimes. If power is about making live, how can modern states kill on massive scales (colonialism, genocide, war)?

State racism provides the answer by fragmenting populations into sub-populations—superior races that must be protected and inferior races that must be eliminated or subordinated. Racism establishes biological hierarchy justifying letting certain populations die (or actively killing them) to improve the species overall.

This isn’t just ideological prejudice but function of biopower’s logic. Once the state takes responsibility for population’s biological welfare, identifying internal or external threats to the population’s health becomes governmental necessity. Racism provides biopolitical justification for eliminating those threats.

Nazi Germany exemplified this: a regime simultaneously concerned with Aryan population’s health, welfare, and vitality while systematically exterminating those deemed biological threats (Jews, Roma, disabled, homosexuals). Biopolitical concern with racial hygiene produced industrial genocide.

Sexuality and Population

The History of Sexuality analyzed how sexuality became object of biopolitical intervention. Rather than simply repressing sexuality, Victorian society proliferated discourses about it: medical, psychiatric, pedagogical, demographic. Sexuality was scientifically studied, categorized, managed, and normalized.

This wasn’t liberation but new form of power. By making sexuality an object of knowledge and intervention, biopower linked individual sexual behavior to population-level concerns: birth rates, public health, hereditary disease, racial vitality. Sexuality became simultaneously:

• Private individual concern (self-regulation, normal vs. deviant)
• Public political problem (population management, regulation)

The medicalization of sexuality created new subjects (the homosexual, the pervert, the hysteric) who required surveillance and normalization. Biopower operates through producing knowledge and subjectivities, not just repressing desires.

Historical Development

18th Century Origins: Political Economy and Police Science

Biopolitics emerged with 18th-century concerns about population as economic and political resource. Mercantilists recognized population size determined national power and wealth. Larger populations meant more soldiers, workers, and taxpayers—but only if healthy, productive, and orderly.

“Police science” (Polizeiwissenschaft) developed as administrative knowledge for managing populations. Unlike modern police (law enforcement), police science encompassed comprehensive administration of urban life: sanitation, markets, hospitals, food supply, construction, fire prevention, and morality. The goal was maximizing population’s welfare and utility.

Political economy similarly treated population as productive resource requiring optimization. Birth rates, mortality, labor capacity, and health became governable problems. This marked crucial shift: previously, subjects existed for sovereign’s glory; now, population’s welfare became governmental end.

19th Century: Public Health, Social Medicine, Eugenics

Public health movements exemplified biopolitical governance. Cholera and typhus epidemics prompted state interventions: sanitation infrastructure, vaccination campaigns, health regulations, housing standards. Bodies and environments became objects of medical-political management.

Social medicine emerged, recognizing that health is social/political problem, not just individual medical issue. Disease correlates with poverty, housing, working conditions, and nutrition. Managing population health requires social interventions, not just treating individual patients.

Eugenics represented darker biopolitical logic: scientifically managing human heredity to improve the species. Francis Galton coined “eugenics” in 1883, inspiring movements across Europe and North America. Positive eugenics encouraged reproduction among the “fit”; negative eugenics discouraged or prevented reproduction among the “unfit” through sterilization, marriage restrictions, and institutionalization.

Eugenics shows biopolitics’s potential for violence. Concern with population’s biological quality justified coercive interventions: forced sterilizations (65,000+ in U.S. alone), immigration restrictions based on racial hierarchies, and eventually Nazi genocide.

20th Century: Welfare States and Population Science

Post-WWII welfare states expanded biopolitical governance through comprehensive social services: universal healthcare, public housing, social insurance, family policy, and nutritional support. The state took responsibility for citizens’ biological welfare “from cradle to grave.”

This represented biopolitics’s benevolent face: caring for population, reducing suffering, extending life. Yet it also meant unprecedented state knowledge about and intervention into intimate life: sexuality, reproduction, child-rearing, health behaviors.

Demography, epidemiology, and statistics became refined governmental technologies. Populations were mapped, calculated, and optimized. Target metrics (infant mortality, life expectancy, fertility rates) became measures of governmental success.

Neoliberal Biopolitics (1980s-Present)

Neoliberalism transformed but didn’t eliminate biopolitics. Rather than direct state intervention, neoliberal biopolitics operates through:

• Responsibilization: Individuals responsible for their own health through lifestyle choices
• Risk management: Populations segmented by risk profiles; individuals manage their risks
• Privatization: Healthcare, insurance, and welfare shift from public to private/market
• Human capital: Bodies and health treated as investments requiring optimization

This creates “entrepreneurial subjects” who self-govern according to market rationality: managing health risks, investing in fitness, optimizing productivity. Biopolitical governance operates through market mechanisms and self-responsibilization rather than direct state administration.

Key Concepts

Population

Population is biopolitics’s central object—not a collection of individuals but a mass phenomenon with its own regularities, rates, and processes. Populations have biological properties (birth rates, mortality curves, disease prevalence) that can be statistically known and governmentally modified.

This marks epistemological shift. Where sovereign power knew subjects as juridical individuals, biopower knows populations through statistics and probability. Individuals matter only as instances of populations, data points enabling calculation of norms and distributions.

Norm and Normalization

Biopolitical power operates through normalization rather than law. Instead of juridical prohibition (legal/illegal), biopower establishes norms (normal/abnormal, healthy/pathological) and seeks to normalize populations toward statistical averages and medical standards.

This is subtly coercive. Rather than commandment, power operates through internalized norms. Subjects self-regulate to achieve normality—normal health, normal sexuality, normal development. Deviation from norms triggers interventions: medical treatment, therapy, education, rehabilitation.

Norms are simultaneously descriptive (statistical averages) and prescriptive (standards to achieve). This slippage allows power to present itself as neutral, scientific, and benevolent while actually imposing specific forms of life.

Security and Risk

Foucault’s later work (Security, Territory, Population, 1977-78) emphasized biopolitical governance through security mechanisms managing risk and circulation. Rather than prohibiting or disciplining, security regulates flows and probabilities.

Examples:

• Epidemiology: Rather than quarantining everyone, calculate infection rates and intervene where risks concentrate
• Urban planning: Rather than rigid spatial control, design environments channeling circulation while managing risks
• Insurance: Calculate actuarial risks, segment populations, price accordingly

Security mechanisms accept that dangers exist; the goal is managing rather than eliminating them. This produces populations as statistical distributions of risk requiring differential interventions.

Race and Racism

For Foucault, modern racism is function of biopower’s logic. Once the state takes biological responsibility for population, distinguishing between sub-populations becomes necessary. Racism establishes hierarchies within the species, justifying differential treatment: intensive care for some, neglect or elimination for others.

This explains how liberal democracies concerned with citizen welfare simultaneously perpetrated colonialism and genocide. Biopolitical care for “our” population required protecting it from biological threats represented by racialized others.

Thanatopolitics and Necropolitics

If biopolitics is power to make live, thanatopolitics (death politics) is its shadow—the power to let die or make die that accompanies life-administration. Achille Mbembe extended this with necropolitics: sovereignty as the power to dictate who may live and who must die, particularly in postcolonial contexts where death rather than life is primary governmental concern.

Contemporary Applications

Pandemic Governance and COVID-19

COVID-19 starkly revealed biopolitical governance. States implemented extraordinary measures to manage population health:

• Lockdowns restricting movement and association
• Mask mandates governing bodily practices
• Testing regimes generating massive data
• Contact tracing surveilling social networks
• Vaccination campaigns managing immunity
• Quarantines controlling circulation

These interventions were justified through population-level calculations: “flattening the curve,” reducing transmission rates, protecting hospital capacity. Individual rights were subordinated to population health imperatives.

Yet biopolitical governance was profoundly unequal. Essential workers (disproportionately people of color, immigrants, poor) faced maximum exposure with minimum protection—“let die” in practice. Wealthy nations hoarded vaccines while Global South populations died—global necropolitics. Age-based triage decisions made explicit calculations of whose lives to prioritize.

The pandemic demonstrated biopower’s intensification through digital platforms: health apps tracking infection, QR codes controlling access, algorithms modeling spread, vaccines passports governing mobility. Biological citizenship became datafied, algorithmic, and conditional.

Border Control and Migration

Borders function biopolitically, determining who may access life (healthcare, employment, security) and who is abandoned to death. Immigration enforcement doesn’t just exclude but manages populations through detention, deportation, and differential rights.

Mediterranean migration exemplifies necropolitics: European states create conditions where thousands drown while claiming humanitarian concern. The border operates not as simple barrier but as selective membrane—allowing some mobility while condemning others to precarity or death.

Refugee camps are biopolitical spaces par excellence: populations are managed, counted, administered, kept alive but not allowed to truly live. Bare life—life stripped of political meaning—is biopolitics’s production.

Reproductive Politics

Abortion, contraception, IVF, surrogacy, and maternal healthcare are biopolitical battlegrounds. States claim authority to regulate reproduction, determining who may reproduce, under what conditions, with what support or restrictions.

This operates through both prohibition (abortion bans) and incentive (family planning programs, demographic engineering). China’s one-child policy exemplified coercive biopolitics; contemporary concerns about declining birth rates in wealthy nations produce pronatalist policies incentivizing reproduction.

Reproductive politics are racially stratified: Black and Indigenous women face forced sterilization and medical neglect; white middle-class women access reproductive technologies; poor women’s reproduction is surveilled and regulated. Biopolitics determines whose life is worth reproducing.

Mass Incarceration

Prisons function as biopolitical institutions managing populations deemed threats to social body. The U.S. incarcerates 2+ million people—disproportionately Black and poor—through mass incarceration that emerged simultaneously with welfare state’s dismantling.

Loïc Wacquant argues this represents shift from social to penal management of marginalized populations. Rather than biopolitical care through social programs, neoliberalism governs through incarceration. Prison becomes warehouse for surplus populations capitalism no longer needs.

Inside, prisoners face both extreme biopolitical control (every aspect of life regulated) and neglect (inadequate healthcare, dangerous conditions). This paradox—total administration alongside abandonment—characterizes contemporary biopolitics.

Mental Health and Psychiatry

Psychiatry is paradigmatic biopolitical discipline, medicalizing distress and normalizing subjectivity. What counts as mental health/illness is deeply political, yet presented as neutral medicine. Homosexuality was psychiatric illness until 1973; ADHD didn’t exist before diagnostic expansion in 1980s.

Psychiatric diagnosis proliferates (DSM-5 contains 297 disorders), making more behavior pathological and treatable. This extends medical power while individualizing social problems. Depression is neurochemical imbalance requiring medication, not response to alienating conditions requiring social change.

Critical psychiatry and mad pride movements resist biopolitical normalization, asserting neurodiversity and refusing pathologization. They recognize psychiatric power as form of social control, not benevolent healing.

Environmental Biopolitics

Climate change and environmental destruction raise new biopolitical questions: Which populations will be protected from climate impacts? Who will be abandoned to rising seas, droughts, and heat? How is environmental governance biologized through health frames?

“Climate refugees” exemplifies this: people displaced by environmental destruction but denied refugee status. They’re let die through environmental violence while being excluded from biopolitical care.

Environmental justice movements resist unequal distribution of environmental harms: toxic waste dumps in Black neighborhoods, polluting industries on Indigenous land, climate impacts on Global South. This is environmental necropolitics—systematic exposure to death masquerading as neutral policy.

Disability Politics

Disability reveals biopolitics’s normative violence. Disabled people are measured against abled norms and found deficient, triggering interventions to normalize or eliminate disability: therapies, surgeries, genetic counseling, prenatal testing, and selective abortion.

Biopolitical governance treats disability as problem requiring medical solution rather than social model recognizing disability as produced by inaccessible environments and ableist norms. This justifies eugenic impulses: preventing disabled births, withholding care from disabled people, quality-of-life calculations devaluing disabled existence.

Disability justice movements challenge biopolitical normalization, asserting disability as identity and difference rather than deficiency. They demand access, accommodation, and value for disabled lives rather than elimination.

Digital Biopolitics and Quantified Self

Wearable devices, health apps, and genetic testing represent digital biopolitics—datafication and algorithmic management of biological existence. Bodies become databases; health becomes metrics; life becomes optimizable data.

The “quantified self” movement exemplifies neoliberal biopolitics: individuals responsibilized to monitor, measure, and optimize their biological functions. This is simultaneously empowering (knowledge, control) and disciplining (internalized surveillance, normative pressure).

Insurance companies increasingly use biometric data for risk assessment and dynamic pricing. Algorithms predict health outcomes, potentially creating self-fulfilling prophecies where predicted high-risk individuals receive less care.

Genetic Biopolitics

Genomics and genetic engineering raise profound biopolitical questions. CRISPR enables editing human genomes; genetic testing predicts disease risks; “designer babies” remain controversial possibility. Life becomes programmable code subject to technical intervention.

This intensifies eugenics’s logic through molecular biology. Selection against genetic “abnormalities” operates through prenatal testing and selective abortion. Enhancement possibilities (intelligence, appearance, health) could create genetic stratification—biological classes.

Yet biopolitical framing obscures social construction. What counts as genetic abnormality? Who decides which traits to select for/against? Genetic reductionism treats complex social-biological phenomena as purely genetic problems amenable to technical solutions.

Critiques and Debates

Eurocentrism and Colonial Critique

Foucault’s account focuses on European biopolitics, marginalizing colonialism’s role. Yet colonialism was laboratory for biopolitical techniques: population management, racial classification, public health interventions, medical experimentation.

Postcolonial critics (Achille Mbembe, Ann Laura Stoler) argue biopower was colonial from inception. European colonial subjects were first populations managed biopolitically while metropolitan citizens still had juridical rights. Biopower’s universalization required colonial racial hierarchies.

Necropolitics: Death, Not Life, as Primary

Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2003) critiques Foucault’s focus on life, arguing sovereignty in postcolonial world operates primarily through power to kill, not make live. In Palestine, Africa, and elsewhere, governance means creating “death-worlds”—spaces of maximum violence where populations are exposed to death.

Necropolitics highlights how biopolitics’s “make live” relies on “let die” elsewhere. European welfare states required colonial extraction. Contemporary humanitarian interventions claim to protect life while perpetuating violence. Death, not life, remains primary political concern for racialized populations.

Gender and Feminist Critique

Feminist scholars critique Foucault’s insufficient attention to gender’s role in biopolitics. Reproduction, traditionally women’s domain, is central biopolitical concern—yet Foucault marginalized it. Biopolitical governance of reproduction is inseparable from patriarchal control of women’s bodies.

Moreover, biopolitics operates differently across gender. Women face medicalization of reproduction (pregnancy, childbirth, menopause); men face different biopolitical imperatives (military service, labor, virility). Intersectional analysis reveals how race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect in biopolitical governance.

Agency and Resistance

Foucault’s account sometimes appears to present biopolitics as total system, leaving little space for resistance. If power is everywhere, permeates everything, and produces subjects themselves, how can resistance emerge?

Foucault responded that power relations always involve resistance—power requires capacity to resist, otherwise it’s violence not power. Biopolitical resistance appears in: disability justice, reproductive rights movements, medical activism (ACT UP), and refusal of normalization.

Yet the question remains difficult: if we’re constituted through biopower, can we resist or only reproduce it differently?

Liberalism or Socialism?

Does biopolitics indict all modern governance or specifically liberal capitalism? Orthodox Marxists argue biopolitics is feature of capitalism’s commodification of labor-power requiring healthy, productive workers. Socialist welfare states would continue biopolitical governance but toward liberatory ends.

Anarchist and autonomist critics argue all state governance is biopolitical—socialist states proved equally (sometimes more) controlling of populations. Resistance requires refusing state power entirely, building autonomous forms of life.

Foucault avoided clear answers, focusing on analyzing power rather than prescribing alternatives. This frustrates critics seeking political solutions but reflects his conviction that critique shouldn’t dictate political outcomes.

Further Reading

Foucault’s Works

• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. 1976. Vintage, 1990.
• Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Picador, 2003.
• Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Picador, 2009.
• Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Picador, 2010.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. Vintage, 1995.

Extensions and Critiques

• Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998.
• Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40.
• Esposito, Roberto. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
• Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Postcolonial and Race Theory

• Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press, 1995.
• Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press, 2014.
• Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press, 2017.

Feminist Theory

• Cooper, Melinda. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Zone Books, 2017.
• Murphy, Michelle. The Economization of Life. Duke University Press, 2017.
• Schuller, Kyla. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Duke University Press, 2018.

Contemporary Applications

• Aradau, Claudia, and Rens van Munster. Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown. Routledge, 2011.
• Dillon, Michael, and Luis Lobo-Guerrero. “Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century.” Review of International Studies 34.2 (2008): 265-292.
• Lemke, Thomas. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. NYU Press, 2011.
• Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today.” BioSocieties 1.2 (2006): 195-217.

Critical Perspectives

• Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. University of California Press, 2002.
• Fassin, Didier. Life: A Critical User’s Manual. Polity, 2018.
• Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Feminist Press, 2013.

See Also

• Michel Foucault
• Biopower
• Necropolitics
• Governmentality
• Discipline
• Panopticon
• Normalization
• Population
• State Racism
• Thanatopolitics
• Bare Life
• Sovereignty
• Security Apparatus