Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a quiet transformation reshaped the nature of political power in the West. The sovereign, once defined by the prerogative to kill — to take the lives of disobedient subjects — began exercising a radically new form of authority: administering, optimizing, and regulating the life of populations. Michel Foucault called this shift biopower, and in doing so inaugurated one of the most productive conceptual fields in contemporary political philosophy.
What is at stake in biopower is not merely who governs, but how one governs — and above all, what is governed. No longer territories and subjects, but bodies, birth rates, public health, population flows, sexuality. This article traces the genealogy of the concept from Foucault’s original formulation, follows the developments proposed by Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, and examines its relevance in light of the health crises and digital surveillance of the twenty-first century.
1. From Sovereign Power to Biopower: The Foucauldian Reversal
Classical political theory, from Hobbes to Machiavelli, conceived of power fundamentally as sovereignty: the prince’s right to dispose of the life and death of his subjects. Foucault observes that in the European monarchies of the Ancien Régime, sovereign power operated through subtraction — it seized goods, labor, time, and ultimately life itself. In his formulation, it was the power to “make die and let live.”
From the late eighteenth century onward, this logic is reversed. Power ceases to be exercised primarily as a threat of death and reorganizes itself around the management of life. Population statistics, public health, urban hygiene, the regulation of sexuality, natality programs — all emerge as instruments of a new mode of governance. This new power, Foucault argues, does not deny death but displaces it: its primary objective is to “make live and let die.”
This reversal does not eliminate state violence — genocide, colonial massacres, and the total wars of the twentieth century prove otherwise. But Foucault contends that even these forms of violence are legitimized, within modern discourse, in the name of protecting the life of the population: one kills in order to preserve the health of the social body, to eliminate an internal biological threat. State racism, in this perspective, functions as the mechanism that reintroduces the logic of sovereign death within the biopolitical paradigm.
2. Making Live and Letting Die — The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
It is in the final chapter of The Will to Knowledge (Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1, 1976) that Foucault offers his most concentrated formulation of biopower. Sexuality, he argues, was not progressively repressed by modernity — on the contrary, it became the target of an unprecedented discursive explosion: confession, medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy, demography — all produced elaborate bodies of knowledge about sex.
This proliferation of discourse is no accident. Sexuality occupies a strategic position because it sits at the juncture of biopower’s two axes: the individual body (which must be disciplined, rendered useful and docile) and the population (whose fertility, mortality, and morbidity rates must be regulated). Sex belongs simultaneously to the anatomo-politics of the body and to the biopolitics of the population.
Foucault identifies four apparatuses of power-knowledge organized around sexuality: the hysterization of women’s bodies, the pedagogization of children’s sex, the socialization of procreative behavior, and the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure. Each articulates a technology of power that operates not through prohibition but through incitement, classification, and normalization.
3. Disciplinary Society: The Panopticon, Normalization, Docile Bodies
Before formulating the concept of biopower, Foucault analyzed in Discipline and Punish (1975) the disciplinary society — the mode of power consolidated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through institutions of confinement: prisons, hospitals, schools, barracks, factories. Discipline operates on individual bodies, organizing them in space, regulating their time, composing their forces to maximize utility.
The architectural model of this logic is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: a circular structure of cells surrounding a central watchtower. The inmate never knows whether he is being observed, but knows that he could be — and that suffices for him to internalize the surveillance. The panoptic principle, for Foucault, transcends the prison: it disseminates throughout all of society, becoming the general diagram of disciplinary power.
Discipline produces what Foucault calls docile bodies: bodies trained to obey, to function efficiently, to conform to standards of normality. The examination — medical, academic, military — is the instrument that combines hierarchical observation with normalizing judgment: it observes, measures, records, classifies. A detailed archive of each individual is created, transforming the person into a “case.”
The relationship between discipline and biopower is one of complementarity, not substitution. Discipline acts on the body-as-machine; biopower acts on the body-as-species. The former individualizes and trains; the latter massifies and regulates. Together, they constitute what Foucault terms the “great two-faced technology of power” that characterizes modernity.
4. From Discipline to Control: Deleuze and the “Societies of Control”
In 1990, Gilles Deleuze published a brief essay entitled Postscript on the Societies of Control, in which he diagnoses a mutation in the dominant form of power. If Foucault described the passage from the society of sovereignty to the disciplinary society, Deleuze argues that the latter enters a generalized crisis in the second half of the twentieth century: the institutions of confinement — school, factory, prison, hospital — collapse and are replaced by mechanisms of continuous, open-air control.
In disciplinary society, the individual passes from one enclosed space to another (family → school → barracks → factory), starting over each time. In the society of control, mechanisms of regulation follow the individual continuously and in a modular fashion: electronic monitoring, lifelong training, the corporation as a model of subjectivation, indebtedness as a form of subjection.
Deleuze associates disciplinary society with the capitalism of concentration (factory production) and the society of control with the capitalism of overproduction (financial, informational). The individual body, which discipline molded within enclosed spaces, gives way to the dividual — fragmented data, profiles, passwords, codes circulating in networks. Power no longer needs to confine; it need only modulate flows.
This Deleuzian diagnosis anticipated, with remarkable clarity, many of today’s debates about digital surveillance, algorithmic platforms, and governance by data — themes to which we return in section 9.
5. The Birth of Biopolitics: Governmentality and Neoliberalism
In the course The Birth of Biopolitics, delivered at the Collège de France between January and April 1979, Foucault undertakes a significant shift: rather than analyzing the disciplinary mechanisms that act on bodies, he examines the governmental rationality that guides the administration of populations. The central concept is governmentality — the ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections that make it possible to exercise this form of power over the population.
Surprisingly, the course is devoted almost entirely to an analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism as arts of governing. Foucault examines German ordoliberalism (the Freiburg School) and American neoliberalism (the Chicago School, Gary Becker), showing that neoliberalism is not simply a return to classical laissez-faire but an active form of government that seeks to extend market logic to every sphere of social life.
Under neoliberalism, the subject is conceived as an entrepreneur of the self — someone who invests in his or her own human capital (education, health, appearance, relationships). Neoliberal biopolitics does not eliminate the state; it transforms it into an agency that creates and maintains the conditions of competition, intervening permanently to ensure that the market game functions.
This analysis opened a vast field of inquiry into how neoliberal practices — performance evaluation, meritocracy, individual responsibility for health and pension — constitute contemporary forms of governing bodies and conduct, where coercion comes not from above but is exercised through subjectivity itself, as shaped by the market.
6. Agamben: Homo Sacer, Bare Life, State of Exception
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1942–) pushed the reflection on biopolitics in a more radical direction. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Agamben argues that biopolitics is not a modern invention, as Foucault suggests, but constitutes the hidden foundation of Western politics since Antiquity.
Agamben begins with the Greek distinction between zoē (biological life, the simple fact of living, shared by all living beings) and bíos (qualified life, the form of life proper to an individual or group within the polis). His central thesis is that Western politics is founded on the inclusive exclusion of zoē: biological life is included in the juridical order precisely insofar as it can be excluded from it.
The figure that embodies this logic is the homo sacer of archaic Roman law: one who may be killed by anyone without this constituting homicide, but who may not be sacrificed in religious ritual. Homo sacer stands outside both human law and divine law — his life is bare life (nuda vita), exposed to death without legal protection.
For Agamben, the concentration camp — not the city — is the political paradigm of modernity: the space where the state of exception becomes the rule and human beings are reduced to the condition of bare life. The camp is not an anomaly; it is the hidden matrix of modern political space, which is actualized whenever the state of exception is declared and human beings are placed outside the protection of law while remaining under its power.
The concept of the state of exception, developed in the 2003 work of the same name, designates that zone of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism in which provisional measures become permanent and executive power absorbs legislative competences. Agamben maintains that the state of exception tends to become the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.
7. Mbembe: Necropolitics — Who May Live and Who Must Die
The Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe (1957–) proposed, in his essay Necropolitics (2003), a critical extension of Foucault’s concept of biopower. If Foucault analyzed how modern power organizes itself to make live, Mbembe asks: what happens when power organizes itself to make die? When the primary function of the state is not to administer life but to administer death?
Mbembe argues that colonial and postcolonial experience reveals the limits of Foucauldian analytics. On slave plantations, in occupation colonies, in contemporary war zones, what operates is not biopower as management of life but what he calls necropolitics: the sovereign decision over who may live and who must die, exercised over entire populations deemed disposable.
Three historical figures anchor the analysis: the slave plantation (where the enslaved person exists as property, the master’s shadow, a living death); late colonial occupation (where sovereignty is exercised through territorial fragmentation, siege, and the destruction of infrastructure — Mbembe analyzes the case of occupied Palestine in detail); and contemporary war machines (militias, private armies, drones), which multiply spaces of death outside the classical state framework.
Necropolitics does not contradict biopower; it complements it by showing that “making live” and “making die” coexist, distributed unequally along lines of race, class, and geography. Where biopower administers the life of the population deemed valuable, necropolitics administers the death of those classified as threats or as surplus.
8. Biopower in the Pandemic: The Sanitary State of Exception
The Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2023) functioned as a global laboratory for the concepts discussed here. Within weeks, governments across the ideological spectrum implemented measures that would have been unthinkable under normal circumstances: mandatory lockdowns, contact tracing, health passes, vaccination as a condition for access to public spaces.
From a Foucauldian perspective, the pandemic revealed with striking clarity the articulation between discipline (individual quarantine, physical distancing, mask mandates) and biopolitics (epidemiological curves, viral reproduction rates, mass vaccination campaigns). Bodies were simultaneously disciplined within domestic space and regulated as part of a population whose biological indicators were monitored in real time.
Agamben, in a series of controversial interventions published from February 2020 onward, interpreted the health crisis as a confirmation of his thesis on the normalization of the state of exception. Restrictions on individual liberties, he argued, did not represent temporary measures but a new paradigm of government, in which “health security” replaces “national security” as the justification for the suspension of rights. These positions were harshly criticized by other philosophers, who pointed out that refusing to acknowledge the severity of the health emergency distorted the very concept of the state of exception.
The pandemic also made necropolitical dynamics visible: the unequal distribution of vaccines between rich and poor countries, the disproportionate mortality among racialized and impoverished populations, and the choice — imposed by the scarcity of hospital beds and ventilators — over who would receive treatment and who would be left to die. Medical triage, under these conditions, became a concrete exercise of sovereignty over bare life.
9. Digital Biopower: Algorithmic Surveillance and Biometric Data
If Foucault analyzed biopower in its industrial phase and Deleuze intuited its mutation in the societies of control, the twenty-first century presents a new configuration: digital biopower. The convergence of big data, artificial intelligence, biometrics, and digital platforms creates forms of governing bodies and conduct that exceed the analytical models of the twentieth century.
Algorithmic surveillance does not operate through the direct observation of a guard in a panoptic tower, but through the automated collection of behavioral data: location, consumption patterns, social media interactions, health data captured by wearable devices. These data are processed by algorithms that generate predictive profiles — what sociologist Shoshana Zuboff has termed surveillance capitalism: the capture and commodification of human experience as raw material for the prediction and modification of behavior.
Biometric data — facial recognition, fingerprints, DNA analysis, vital-sign monitoring — add a properly corporeal layer to digital surveillance. Governments deploy facial recognition in public spaces; companies require biometrics for access control; health apps monitor heart rates, sleep patterns, and reproductive cycles. The biological body becomes, quite literally, a surface of data inscription circulating within networks of power.
Deleuze’s concept of the dividual acquires concrete form here: the individual is decomposed into data flows, recomposed into profiles that guide automated decisions — credit scoring, insurance pricing, hiring, advertising dosage. The governance of bodies no longer requires physical presence or even the awareness of the governed: it operates at a distance, in real time, through algorithmic modulation.
10. Critiques and Limits of the Concept
Despite its enormous theoretical productivity, the concepts of biopower and biopolitics are not without criticism.
Conceptual imprecision. Foucault never systematized biopower into a coherent theory; the concept appears across texts, lectures, and interviews with varying emphases. Some commentators identify tensions between the formulation in The Will to Knowledge (biopower as the management of life) and the analyses of the Collège de France courses (governmentality, reason of state, neoliberalism). This plurality is fertile but makes the concept difficult to operationalize in empirical research.
Eurocentrism. The Foucauldian genealogy situates the emergence of biopower in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Mbembe, as we have seen, already pointed out that this chronology ignores the colonial experience, where brutal forms of population management (and destruction) operated long before and in quite different ways. Historians of slavery and colonialism question whether the European disciplinary model can be transposed to contexts where power was exercised primarily through open violence and racial dehumanization.
Resistance and agency. Foucault insisted that “where there is power, there is resistance,” but his analyses of biopower tend to emphasize mechanisms of subjection at the expense of practices of resistance and alternative subjectivation. Critics argue that a theory so focused on the capillarity of power risks producing a totalizing image of domination in which no space for freedom seems possible.
Inflationary use. The concept’s popularity has led to its application to widely disparate phenomena — from health policies to dietary regimes, from social networks to sports practices — with the risk that “biopolitics” becomes a generic label for any form of behavioral regulation, losing its analytical specificity.
Normativity. Foucault deliberately resisted grounding a normative position: he proposed no theory of justice nor criteria for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of biopower. Agamben, though more explicit in his tone of denunciation, has likewise been criticized for offering a catastrophic diagnosis without pointing to concrete political alternatives.
Conclusion
The trajectory from Foucault to Agamben and Mbembe reveals that modern power is exercised not merely through law, repression, or ideology, but through the meticulous administration of biological life — and, on the reverse side, through the calculated management of death. The concept of biopower illuminates dimensions of the political that classical theories of sovereignty and the social contract fail to reach: the normalization of bodies, the regulation of populations, the medicalization of existence, the algorithmic surveillance of behavior.
The crises of the twenty-first century — pandemics, climate change, mass migration, the expansion of digital surveillance — lend the concept an urgency that Foucault himself may not have foreseen, but that his analytical tools allow us to interrogate with rigor. If biopower is the predominant form of contemporary power, understanding it is not merely an academic exercise: it is a condition for any project of resistance and freedom that takes seriously the fact that politics today governs life down to its smallest details.
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