Biopolitics

Biopolitics is an intersectional field between biology and politics.

While the term is commonly attributed to Rudolf Kjellén in the 1920s who also coined the term geopolitics, it was actually coined by G.W.Harris as early as 1911. In contemporary US political science studies, usage of the term is mostly divided between a poststructuralist group using the meaning assigned by Michel Foucault (denoting social and political power over life) and another group who uses it to denote studies relating biology and political science.

Catastrophes are periodically mobilized as vehicles for historical transformation. European states often found themselves grappling with sociobiological propensities of populations. Mercantilism and capitalist modes of production led to a modern biopolitical approach to famine: the modern state depended on providing a diet sufficient to keep the biological machines of industrial capitalism running. The British developed biopolitics in tandem with colonization to help solidify their control over the Irish.

The French Third Republic in Western Africa also employed biopolitics in their colonial efforts. The fin-de-siecle revolution in microbiology and specific developments in public health legislation aided the French. Furthermore, thanks to the germ theory of disease pioneered by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, the etiology of some of the most deadly diseases—cholera and typhoid—began to be understood in the 1890s, and the French used this new scientific knowledge in the tropics of West Africa. Illnesses like bubonic plague were isolated, and vectors of malaria and yellow fever were identified for the political purpose of public health. They passed public health laws to introduce up-to-date health standards. The goal was for African subjects to respond in exactly the same way as metropolitan citizens to market incentives and new technologies imposed by a progressive state. Thus, public health was a political concern in the sense that the state hoped citizens would be more productive if they lived longer.

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 1975–1976. 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, his concept of biopolitics has become prominent in social and humanistic sciences.

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