My history class assigned a Foucault lecture on biopolitics as one of the last readings. I'm a sucker for worldview-changing huge-picture frameworks, so I thought I'd write up a quick old-fashioned blog post about my understanding of, questions about and takeaways from the reading -- and a bunch of related readings from my politics class.

Classic sovereignty theory

A territorial sovereign state is a "political structure where a centralized power has a monopoly on legitimate violence over a well-defined territory," I wrote in an assignment for my intro comp politics class earlier this semester.

If this seems like a harsh definition, ask yourself what fundamentally distinguishes government from non-government institutions. Anyone can provide services in exchange for dues, as the government does for taxation: but only the government can enforce justice (or injustice, if it's not recognized as such) with violence (think of police, military, prisons) and have more or less everyone say, "yup, that's okay with me."

Territorial sovereign states have been the dominant political formation (the way that power is most reliably exercised) across the world for the past few centuries. "Countries" taking the form of nation-states are widely recognized as legitimate power structures: even if a specific government, regime or country is seen as illegitimate, that ruling entity's critics likely seek to replace it with a sovereign nation-state, not some other radically different form of governance.

Why is this the case? In 1993 American political scientist Mancur Olson laid out a nice thought experiment-type explanation.

Assume that in the absence of a structure of power, humans exist in a Hobbesian state of nature, competing violently with each other for resources, to the detriment of all. Olson imagines "bandits" in such an environment. "Roving bandits" travel around to wherever there are resources to be extracted -- undefended villages after harvests, let's say -- then takes their resources and moves on.

To extract resources from a certain region or village, one group of bandits might fight off other groups of bandits to ensure that they get maximum access. Over time, the bandits might even set up permanent defenses around that village, or base themselves permanently out of it, becoming "stationary bandits."

By stealing from the peasants in the village reliably rather than unpredictably as roving bandits did, the stationary bandits are able to allow their peasants to produce more year-to-year, resulting in greater profits for the stationary bandits than for roving ones. The bandits are furthermore incentivized to reduce violence among the peasants, as this would decrease productivity and therefore banditry profit. They might even set up some degree of transportation infrastructure, internal commerce, and dispute resolution system for the same reason.

Over time it's easy to see how stationary bandits would outcompete roving ones. Thus in Olson's model, clusters of stationary banditry is the stable equilibrium to which violent disorder resolves. Now call the bandits' regular thievary taxation and the stationary bandits territorial sovereign states -- which is what they are, having a centralized monopoly over violence over a well-defined area -- and we've arrived at a compelling theory for how territorial sovereign states came to dominate.

The real story has many more factors at play, obviously. Another reading from my politics class, a 1994 article by Dutch political scientist Hendrik Spruyt, analyzed the triumph of sovereign states over city-states and city-leagues in post-Medieval Europe, finding that not only pure competition (i.e. through war) but also mutual empowerment between states (via international recognition, trade and other treaties) played major roles in elevating the state form.

We read Kristin Fabbe's 2012 dissertation, which pointed out that ruling large populations by force alone (pure violent banditry, even in structured form) is highly inefficient. If the ruling power (bandits) can instead convince their dominated people to voluntarily support the state, such as by instilling a sense of national identity and pride in them (lots of nationalism readings on this later, as I summarized in this assignment) or reinforcing the legitimacy of the government through law and education, they can extract resources much more efficiently and outcompete states that rule purely by force. Historically wars were an effective way of creating strong states, Jeffrey Herbst famously argues.

From sovereignty to biopower

Foucault calls this body of thought the "classical sovereignty theory." Essentially it defines states -- and thus all ultimate forms of human power -- by their "right of life and death," or rather their "right to take life or let live," as this right was specifically to kill, and it doesn't make much sense for a state to make someone live.

Come the industrial revolution, though, the classical monopoly on violence was insufficient for states to effectively extract resources from its population, Foucault says in the lecture.

To compensate, states developed "disciplinary technologies" more strictly controlling individuals' lives and labor, Foucault argues. He brings up housing developments, schools, and hospitals as examples of this, of states exercising power over "bodies" to up resource extraction.

At this point Foucault still hasn't deviated too far from what I read in my politics class. The development from resource extraction via pure force to via power-over-individuals is akin to Fabbe's "social disciplining" that increases resource extraction efficiency.

The key thrust of Foucault's lecture is that the transformation of how states exercised power went further -- much further -- than the transformation from pure force to softer "discipline." Rather, Foucault argues that states' focus on managing life rather than death eventually displaced death and violence entirely as the center of politics.

Functionally this happened through a transition from managing individuals to managing populations, Foucault says. First, metrics like birth, death and fertility rates came to be measured for the first time. Then, state policies began to focus on these metrics rather than lower-level interventions. Random natural threats to life -- not epidemics as had always been the concern of states but now endemics, ever-present diseases and other threats to wellness -- became key state concerns, and loose state "discipline" institutions developed into centralized medical and public hygiene programs. The populations' environments, natural and created, also came under state control: Foucault mentions disease-causing swamps and urban environments, and my mind jumps to sprawling public works and parks projects that sought to have population-level influences on happiness and therefore productivity.

These projects aren't just reflections of expanding state control but a fundamental transformation from a "take life or let live" form of power to the opposite: "make live or let die." My mind jumps to political debates about healthcare in America, to the massive free rollout of COVID vaccines in the past two years: as much as or even more than by threatening violence or protecting people from internal or external violence, the government exercises its power by optimizing for population-level metrics and extracting the resulting economic gains.

Foucault illustrates this transformation strikingly by discussing societal attitudes towards death.

Death -- which has ceased to be one of those spectacular ceremonies in which individuals, the family, the group, and practically the whole of society took part -- has become, in contrast, something to be hidden away. It has become the most private and shameful thing of all (and ultimately, it is now not so much sex as death that is the object of a taboo.)

This is because death, once a transition from worldly to other-worldly (divine) power, has become in the new life-centered power structure a total escape from power. "Death is outside the power relationship. Death is beyoned the reach of power, and power has a grip on it only in general, overall, or statistical terms," Foucault says. I think about the abolition of death penalties and movements against police brutality across the US as concrete examples of this. "Power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death," Foucault concludes.

This new schema of power is what Foucault calls "biopolitics," and the power "biopower." It is "normalizing" and "regulatory" in contrast to earlier "disciplining" power; it turns individuals into masses rather than masses into individuals, it exercises power by making people live rather than making people die; and it creates a third "body" that is different from both the individual and the society of individuals, but that is a constructed "population" on which interventions are centered.

Biopower centers "racism"

Okay, so what? Why is the concept of biopolitics useful?

Because it forces states to rely on "racism" when exercising violent force, Foucault claims.

If states define their political activity at the population level -- "making live" through high-level interventions -- they give up the ability to "take life" in the same way (again, protests against the death penalty and police brutality come to mind).

The solution is to simply redefine "taking life" in terms of populations. Violence can never be justified within a population, but violence from the state's population against an "other" population is entirely coherent with biopolitics, as it's simply evolutionary theory that species compete with each other to get stronger.

Thus all state violence comes to be defined in terms of us vs. them. Innocent vs. criminal, Christian vs. savage, clean vs. drug-using, politically aligned vs. purged.

Foucault provocatively calls this "racism" ("not a truly ethnic racism, but racism of the evolutionist kind, biological racism"). State violence is only consistent with biopower if it entails "destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there represent to our race." More strongly, Foucault states that "if the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty...wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist."

The lecture concludes with hints at a critique of socialism. Foucault points out that "the socialist State...is as marked by racism as the workings...of the capitalist State" because it even more whole-heartedly embraces biopower, that is, "the idea that the essential function of society or the State, or whatever it is that must replace the State, is to take control of life, to manage it, to compensate for its aleatory nature, to explore and reduce biological accidents and possibilities."

(A quick search reveals this article about Foucault's attitudes towards Marxism, whose abstract reads that Foucault "was often critical of Marxism" and rejects "any utopian impulse revolving around the laws of economic development or the role of the proletariat in history," instead supporting "localistic forms of resistance and specific forms of democratic incrementalism, rather than revolutionary or totalistic strategies as the basis of transforming society." I won't dive in too much further here but interesting thread!)

Democracy?

The biggest hole in my understanding of political science theory at this point is where democracy fits in.

Often I've seen democracy named as an ideal to strive towards, both in the sense of American liberal democracy and Lenin's revolutionary Social Democracy.

Other times I've seen democracy discussed as a concrete political structure entailing governments whose rule reflects their citizens' will in some way, especially through fair and competitive elections and their accompanying institutions.

In the latter case, how did territorial sovereign states evolve into democracies? How do democracies exercise "sovereignty" -- that is, how does the dichotomy of sovereign and subject fit with the necessarily blurred lines of citizen and elected official? Besides operational definitions, do democracies constitute a fundamentally different form of state than non-democratic sovereign states?

In the former case, what are the implications of biopolitics on democracy? Are biopolitical states less democratic? Should biopower be resisted in pursuit of democracy? Transformed into something else?

These feel to me like basic questions that I'll seek to answer in the near future. For now I'm glad I got this post out -- it's been a while since I've engaged with reading material like this!

--

Edit May 3, 2022: before he left campus for the semester I was able to talk with my politics professor, Pierre Englebert, who provided the clarification that nicely wraps up this train of thought:

Territorial sovereign states did not "evolve" into democracies. Rather, sovereignty/statehood and democracy, though they may trade off with each other, function on fundamentally different levels.

Sovereignty can be split into both internal and external sovereignty, Englebert pointed out. A state can be defined by its ability to legitimately control its people, or by its recognition by other states. Ideally both are true but one or the other -- especially the latter in the case of recent post-colonial states -- can also suffice.

Democracy could affect external perceptions of legitimacy and thus external sources of sovereignty, but this is an indirect link: the structure of a regime, democratic or not, has no inherent bearing on whether they are recognized externally, and thus are sovereign.

Democracy could similarly help or hurt a state's ability to exercise internal sovereignty, e.g. by increasing the state's legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects/citizens or by reducing the state's ability to control its subjects, but again the state's existence as an internally sovereign entity does not inherently depend on it being democratic or not. In other words, regardless of how rulers rise to power within the state -- dynastic emperors or elected congresspeople turned PMs and presidents -- those rulers still have power over those who aren't ruling, and thus the state still meaningfully exists as something other than simply the people.

So democracy is both an ideal to strive towards and a concrete structure of governance. The two can easily clash, and both have some bearing on statehood, but neither fundamentally conflict with statehood or sovereignty.

The question of how biopolitics affects democracy is a deeper question that I imagine reading more Foucault would be the best way to explore, but I'll pause my journey here for now!