Plagues, Criminals, and Deviants: Michel Foucault and the Biopolitical Management of Populations

(4 Credits)

What motivates a government to decide to “kill those whose lives it had, by definition, to protect, manage, and multiply”? During the radical 1970s, philosopher Michel Foucault developed the concept of biopower in order to understand why governance has come to increasingly include, by different methods, “the power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” In Foucault’s analysis, the various ways that governments decide to declare ‘war’ on parts of their own populations developed hand in hand with the histories of the modern social sciences: through colonialism, criminology, public medicine, racial eugenics, psychiatry, and security. Our goal in this class is to understand how this approach to government developed during the early modern period and what inspired Foucault to theorize it in the 1970s. Texts include Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, his lectures at the Collège de France, biographical writings, interviews, and more.