The Birth of Biopolitics

Michel Foucault's 1979 lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics , pursue and develop further the themes of his lectures from the previous year, Security, Territory, Population . Having shown how eighteenth century political economy marks the birth of a new governmental reason, Foucault undertakes the detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality. This involves describing the political rationality within which the specific problems of life and population were posed: "Studying liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics".
What are the specific features of the liberal art of government as they were outlined in the eighteenth century? What crisis of governmentality characterizes the present world and what revisions of liberal government has it given rise to? This is the diagnostic task addressed by Foucault's study of the two major twentieth century schools of neo-liberalism: German ordo-liberalism and the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School. In the years he taught at the Collège de France, this was Michel Foucault's sole foray into the field of contemporary history. This course raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twenty-first century politics. A remarkable feature of these lectures is their discussion of contemporary economic theory and practice, culminating in an analysis of the model of homo oeconomicus, or economic man.
Foucault's analysis also highlights the paradoxical role played by "society" in relation to government. "Society" is that in the name of which government strives to limit itself, but it is also the target for permanent governmental intervention to produce, multiply, and guarantee the freedoms required by economic liberalism. Far from being opposed to the State, civil society is thus shown to be the correlate of a liberal technology of government.
Original work by Foucault available in English