The Birth of Biopolitics

By Vladimir Safatle

Commentary on the posthumous book of Michel Foucault resulting from a 1978-1979 course.

The New Configurations of Homo Oeconomicus

Since Michel Foucault’s courses at the “Collège de France” began to be published, a privileged location for the development of his intellectual experience has been discovered. In these courses, discussions about the set of problems that articulate the field of reflection known as the "genealogy of power" appear in a structured manner. However, while the published texts gave visibility to issues that appeared in the early courses (such as the problem of sexuality, madness, and the punitive apparatus) and in the later ones (such as the extensive reflection on the ways of caring for oneself in Ancient Greece and Rome), there was a gap in the period from 1976 to 1979. Larger courses, which revolved around what Foucault called "governmentality," or the rationalization of governmental practices in the exercise of political sovereignty.

The issue of governmentality is fundamental for understanding his project in the last years, as it highlights the nature of his critique of modernity. For Foucault, modernity (which, according to him, truly begins in the mid-18th century) is fundamentally a historical period marked by the advent of a form of power and government whose respective names are "biopower" and "biopolitics." Understanding the fate and dilemmas of modernity will increasingly be inseparable from understanding what is at stake within the concept of biopolitics. Hence the importance of this course, delivered during the 1978-1979 academic year, entitled The Birth of Biopolitics.

Sovereign and Disciplinary Power

Foucault normally defines biopower and biopolitics through a dichotomy between two major models of power operation: sovereign power and disciplinary power. The first would be linked to the figure of the monarch's incarnation of legitimacy, with its foundation of law enforcement in the will of the sovereign. It is the power to decide on the life and death of subjects. Against this centralized power, vertical because it is asymmetric, personalized in its central pole in the figure of the sovereign, and impersonal at its base, modernity would have developed the hegemony of another power. A power devoid of a center, seemingly coming from everywhere, operating at multiple instances and levels; a horizontal power. Because it has no center, it appears impersonal, not exercised in the name of anyone, a power of structures that subjugate everyone indiscriminately, such as hospitals, schools, prisons, and companies. This is what Foucault calls "disciplinary power," or a "calculative management of life" and "administration of bodies." It will gain a fundamental framework when it is coupled with regulatory controls of the population. Hence why they will constitute a "biopower."

Biopower interests Foucault mainly due to its individualizing capacity: "The individual, it seems to me, is no more than the effect of power, insofar as power is a procedure of individualization." Foucault tends to think that submission to the sovereign's will is not constitutive in the sense that submission to disciplinary and security devices are. This is because submission to the sovereign’s will happens intermittently, whereas disciplinary and security power is constant and operates at all levels of formation. Hence why the philosopher can say: "The greatest effect of disciplinary power is what we might call a profound reshuffling of the relationships between somatic singularity, the subject, and the individual."

It is in this context that we must read The Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault wants to understand how a governmental reason develops that is not directly linked to the reason of the state, but instead appears as a peculiar principle of limitation to the sovereignty of the state. This reason will be inseparable from the development of liberalism and its fear of statism.

As if liberalism were, at its core, the true name of the disciplinary power developed by modernity (which perhaps explains why Foucault has to say that socialism never developed a reflection on governmental rationality, it only has a theory of the state, not a theory of government). Indeed, Foucault uses his entire course to show how the development of liberal political economy and its unrestricted defense of the market will be the key factor to ensure the self-limitation of sovereign power.

Independence of the Governed

In fact, when analyzing liberalism, especially the German ordoliberalism (by Von Mises, Erhard, Röpke, Eucken) and the North American neoliberalism (by Hayek and Friedman), Foucault perceives the advent of a peculiar notion of freedom. Here, it is not a legal conception in which freedom is conceived as the exercise of certain fundamental rights. It is a concept of freedom as the independence of the governed in relation to the rulers. But this freedom must paradoxically be produced and guaranteed by governmental practices; it must be the result of "a formidable extension of control procedures" and formation.

In this sense, neoliberalism and ordoliberalism cannot be situated under the sign of laissez-faire; rather, they are situated under the sign of state surveillance and intervention. This intervention will not be in the mechanisms of the economy, in the form of nationalization, policies to fight pauperization, inequality, or in favor of redistribution.

Instead, it will occur at the level of the conditions for the possibility of the economy, i.e., in what allows the economy to function freely according to its principles of competition. Hence, the intervention will occur at the level of populations, techniques, learning, and education. It will be massive in the social field and discreet in the directly economic processes.

It is important to note that it is not about correcting the destructive effects of the market on society, but about obtaining a society submitted to the competitive and market dynamics. To achieve this, a true social engineering capable of formalizing all spheres of social life according to the model of the company will be necessary. Foucault seeks to undo the myth that liberalism elevates the individual to the condition of the elemental unit of social life. In reality, this elemental unit is the company, or rather, the "company-form," because "the goal is to obtain a society indexed, not in the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity, but in the multiplicity and differentiation of the company."

In the extreme, the very subjective personality will be reconfigured as a set of aptitudes and competencies capable of valuing investments applied in training, relationships, or, in other words, as a space for the incessant valorization of "human capital." Hence why Foucault ends the course discussing the new configurations of homo oeconomicus: this man who is the entrepreneur of himself, one who is capable of calculating his time, his training, the affection devoted to his children, as an investment in the production of human capital profitability. As if the fate of the psychological notion of personality were to be described as a paradoxical private corporation. Thus, a new form of social control is imposed under the guise of "liberty" liberalism.

Vladimir Safatle is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo (USP). He is the author, among other books, of Dar Corpo ao Impossível: O Sentido da Dialética a partir de Theodor Adorno (Autêntica).

This article was originally published on A Terra é Redonda.