Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century: The Malthus–Marx Debate and the Human Capital Issue

Abstract

Around the mid-1970s, at a time when Foucault was concerned with the emergent figure of “population” in pre-Malthusian economic thought, Malthus’s thinking enjoyed a worldwide revival of interest. Foucault seems to have remained blind to the political consequences of this “Malthusian moment. Mitchell Dean offers a unique reading of this moment, which is all the more pertinent in that it roots this lacuna in a certain narrowness of Foucault’s reading of early liberalism. In this chapter, I shall draw upon Dean’s reading and, more particularly, his critique of Foucault to try to understand how a neo-liberal “politics of life” was able to take shape. I propose to analyze the transformations of the economic concept of “population” from the moment it appeared in the work of Malthus to its most recent specification by the contemporary theorists of human capital. In this way, I hope to sketch out what could possibly be understood as an intellectual history of the economic valuation of human life.