Biopolitics, Biological Racism and Eugenics

Abstract

This chapter explores the interpretive possibilities offered by Foucault’s concept of biopolitics with specific reference to eugenic thought in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Foucault’s most extended account of biopolitics can be found in the lectures published in Society Must Be Defended, in which he offers a more detailed exploration of issues raised in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality. In the lectures Foucault formulates his argument that biopower emerged as a field of force alongside the development of the modern nation-state, as the older sovereign right ‘to kill and let live’ was complemented by the new right ‘to make live and let die’. This formulation neatly captures the turn towards the active management of life by political and other authorities, which Foucault associates with the rise of the life sciences and clinical medicine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What is new in Society Must Be Defended is the more extended discussion of the second of the two levels on which biopower operates. The first level is through techniques centred on the disciplining of the individual body familiar from Foucault’s earlier work in The Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish; and the second through regularisation, which is not simply a variant form of discipline, but a new technique which infiltrates and encases it. This technique is addressed not to the individual body but to man-as-species, conceived as ‘a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on’.¹