Michel Foucault on Biopower; note especially pp. 139-145
Right of Death and Power Over Life, from Michel Foucault, An Introduction to the History of Sexuality
.
In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this
power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were
not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles
of development linked together by a whole intermediary
cluster of relations. One of these poles-the first to be
formed, it seems--centered on the body as a machine: its
disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion
of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its
docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic
controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that
characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the
human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused
on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of
life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propa
gation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expect
ancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause
these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an
entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio
politics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the
regulations of the population constituted the two poles
around which the organization of power over life was de
ployed. The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of
this great bipolar technology-anatomic and biological, in
dividualizing and specifying, directed toward the perfor
mances of the body, with attention to the processes of life
characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps
no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power
140 The History of Sexuality
was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies
and the calculated management of life. During the classical ..
period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines
-universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops;
there was also the emergence, in the field of political prac
tices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate,
longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence
there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the SUbjugation of bodies and the control of
populations, marking the beginning of an era of "bio
power." The two directions taken by its development still
appeared to be clearly separate in the eighteenth century.
With regard to discipline, this development was embodied in
institutions such as the army and the schools, and in reflec
tions on tactics, apprenticeship, education, and the nature of
societies, ranging from the strictly military analyses of Mar
shal de Saxe to the political reveries of Guibert or Servan. As
for population controls, one notes the emergence of demog
raphy, the evaluation of the relationship between resources
and inhabitants, the constructing of tables analyzing wealth
and its circulation: the work of Quesnay, Moheau, and Sliss
milch. The philosophy of the "Ideologists," as a theory of
ideas, signs, and the individual genesis of sensations, but also
a theory of the social composition of interests-Ideology
being a doctrine of apprenticeship, but also a doctrine of
contracts and the regulated formation of the social body
no doubt constituted the abstract discourse in which one
sought to coordinate these two techniques of power in order
to construct a general theory of it. In point of fact, however,
they were not to be joined at the level of a speCUlative
discourse, but in the form of concrete arrangements (agence
ments concrets) that would go to make up the great technol
ogy of power in the nineteenth century: the deployment of
sexuality would be one of them, and one of the most impor
tant.
This bio-power was without question an indispensable ele-
Right of Death and Power over Life 141
ment in the development of capitalism; the latter would not
, have been p0ssible without the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes. But this
was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these
factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and
docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimiz
ing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same
time making them more difficult to govern. If the develop
ment of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of
power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the
rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eigh
teenth century as techniques of power present at every level
of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions
(the family and the army, schools and the police, individual
medicine and the administration of collectiv� bodies), ope
rated in the sphere of economic processes, their development,
and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as
factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting
their influence on the respective forces of both these move
ments, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of
hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to
that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to
the expansion of productive forces and the differential alloca
tion of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The
investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive
management of its forces were at the time indispensable.
One knows how many times the question has been raised
concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first forma"
tion of capitalism; but what occurred in the eighteenth cen
tury in some Western countries, an event bound up with the
development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon hav
ing perhaps a wider impact than the new morality; this was
nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the
entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species
142 The History of Sexuality
into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of ,
political techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this
was the moment when the first contact between life and
history was brought about. On the contrary, the pressure
exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very
strong for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the
two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always
dominated by the menace of death. But through a circular
process, the economic-and primarily agricultural--devel
opment of the eighteenth century, and an increase in produc
tivity and resources even more rapid than the demographic
growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these
profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks, the pe
riod of great ravages from starvation and plague had come
to a close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing
to torment life so directly. But at the same time, the develop
ment of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life
in general, the improvement of agricultural techniques, and
the observations and measures relative to man's life and
survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over
life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space
for movement thus conquered, and broadening and organiz
ing that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed
responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control
and modify them. Western man was gradually learning what
it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a
body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individ
ual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and
a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal
manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological
existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living
was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged
from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its
fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and
power's sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be
dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate
Right of Death and Power over Life 143
dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery
it would be able to exercise over them would have to be
applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of
life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access
even to the body. If one can apply the term bio-history to the
pressures through which the movements of life and the proc
esses of history interfere with one another, one would have
to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.
It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques
that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.
Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale
than ever; and the biological risks confronting the species are
perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the
birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society's
"threshold of modernity" has been reached when the life of
the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For
millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence;
modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence
as a living being in question.
This transformation had considerable consequences. It
would serve no purpose here to dwell on the rupture that
occurred then in the pattern of scientific discourse and on the
manner in which the twofold problematic of life and man
disrupted and redistributed the order of the classical epis
teme. If the question of man was raised-insofar as he was
a specific living being, and specifically related to other living
beings-the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode
of relation between history and life: in this dual position of
life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its
biological environment, and inside human historicity, pene
trated by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power.
There is no need either to lay further stress on the prolifera
tion of political technologies that ensued, investing the body,
144 The History of Sexuality
health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living condi
tions, the whole space of existence.
Another consequence of this development of bio-power
was the growing importance assumed by the action of the
norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Law
cannot help but but be armed, and its arm, par excellence,
is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last
resort, with that absolute menace. The law always refers to
the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life
needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It
is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field
of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of
value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure,
appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its
murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that
separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient
subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. I do not
mean to say that the law fades into the background or that
the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that
the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a con
tinuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on)
whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normal
izing society is the historical outcome of a technology of
power centered on life. We have entered a phase of juridical
regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century
societies we are acquainted with; we should not be deceived
by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since
the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a
whole continual and clamorous legislative activity: these
were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power
acceptable.
Moreover, against this power that was still new in the
nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support
on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a
living being. Since the last century, the great struggles that
Right of Death and Power .over Life 1 45
have challenged the general system of power were not guided
by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old
dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. One no longer
aspired toward the coming of the emperor of the poor, or the
kingdom of the latter days, or even the restoration of our
imagined ancestral rights; what was demanded and what
served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs,
man's concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a
plenitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that
was wanted is of little importance; what we have seen has
been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object
was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against
the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more
than the law that becam,e the issue of political struggles, even
if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning
rights. The "right" to life, to one's body, to health, to happi
ness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppres
sions or "alienations," the "right" to rediscover what one is
and all that one can be, this "right" -which the classical
juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending
was the political response to all these new procedures of
power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right
.
In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this
power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were
not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles
of development linked together by a whole intermediary
cluster of relations. One of these poles-the first to be
formed, it seems--centered on the body as a machine: its
disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion
of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its
docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic
controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that
characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the
human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused
on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of
life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propa
gation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expect
ancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause
these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an
entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio
politics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the
regulations of the population constituted the two poles
around which the organization of power over life was de
ployed. The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of
this great bipolar technology-anatomic and biological, in
dividualizing and specifying, directed toward the perfor
mances of the body, with attention to the processes of life
characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps
no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power
140 The History of Sexuality
was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies
and the calculated management of life. During the classical ..
period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines
-universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops;
there was also the emergence, in the field of political prac
tices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate,
longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence
there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the SUbjugation of bodies and the control of
populations, marking the beginning of an era of "bio
power." The two directions taken by its development still
appeared to be clearly separate in the eighteenth century.
With regard to discipline, this development was embodied in
institutions such as the army and the schools, and in reflec
tions on tactics, apprenticeship, education, and the nature of
societies, ranging from the strictly military analyses of Mar
shal de Saxe to the political reveries of Guibert or Servan. As
for population controls, one notes the emergence of demog
raphy, the evaluation of the relationship between resources
and inhabitants, the constructing of tables analyzing wealth
and its circulation: the work of Quesnay, Moheau, and Sliss
milch. The philosophy of the "Ideologists," as a theory of
ideas, signs, and the individual genesis of sensations, but also
a theory of the social composition of interests-Ideology
being a doctrine of apprenticeship, but also a doctrine of
contracts and the regulated formation of the social body
no doubt constituted the abstract discourse in which one
sought to coordinate these two techniques of power in order
to construct a general theory of it. In point of fact, however,
they were not to be joined at the level of a speCUlative
discourse, but in the form of concrete arrangements (agence
ments concrets) that would go to make up the great technol
ogy of power in the nineteenth century: the deployment of
sexuality would be one of them, and one of the most impor
tant.
This bio-power was without question an indispensable ele-
Right of Death and Power over Life 141
ment in the development of capitalism; the latter would not
, have been p0ssible without the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes. But this
was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these
factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and
docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimiz
ing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same
time making them more difficult to govern. If the develop
ment of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of
power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the
rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eigh
teenth century as techniques of power present at every level
of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions
(the family and the army, schools and the police, individual
medicine and the administration of collectiv� bodies), ope
rated in the sphere of economic processes, their development,
and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as
factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting
their influence on the respective forces of both these move
ments, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of
hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to
that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to
the expansion of productive forces and the differential alloca
tion of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The
investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive
management of its forces were at the time indispensable.
One knows how many times the question has been raised
concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first forma"
tion of capitalism; but what occurred in the eighteenth cen
tury in some Western countries, an event bound up with the
development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon hav
ing perhaps a wider impact than the new morality; this was
nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the
entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species
142 The History of Sexuality
into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of ,
political techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this
was the moment when the first contact between life and
history was brought about. On the contrary, the pressure
exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very
strong for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the
two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always
dominated by the menace of death. But through a circular
process, the economic-and primarily agricultural--devel
opment of the eighteenth century, and an increase in produc
tivity and resources even more rapid than the demographic
growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these
profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks, the pe
riod of great ravages from starvation and plague had come
to a close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing
to torment life so directly. But at the same time, the develop
ment of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life
in general, the improvement of agricultural techniques, and
the observations and measures relative to man's life and
survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over
life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space
for movement thus conquered, and broadening and organiz
ing that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed
responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control
and modify them. Western man was gradually learning what
it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a
body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individ
ual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and
a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal
manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological
existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living
was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged
from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its
fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and
power's sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be
dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate
Right of Death and Power over Life 143
dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery
it would be able to exercise over them would have to be
applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of
life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access
even to the body. If one can apply the term bio-history to the
pressures through which the movements of life and the proc
esses of history interfere with one another, one would have
to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.
It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques
that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.
Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale
than ever; and the biological risks confronting the species are
perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the
birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society's
"threshold of modernity" has been reached when the life of
the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For
millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence;
modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence
as a living being in question.
This transformation had considerable consequences. It
would serve no purpose here to dwell on the rupture that
occurred then in the pattern of scientific discourse and on the
manner in which the twofold problematic of life and man
disrupted and redistributed the order of the classical epis
teme. If the question of man was raised-insofar as he was
a specific living being, and specifically related to other living
beings-the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode
of relation between history and life: in this dual position of
life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its
biological environment, and inside human historicity, pene
trated by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power.
There is no need either to lay further stress on the prolifera
tion of political technologies that ensued, investing the body,
144 The History of Sexuality
health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living condi
tions, the whole space of existence.
Another consequence of this development of bio-power
was the growing importance assumed by the action of the
norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Law
cannot help but but be armed, and its arm, par excellence,
is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last
resort, with that absolute menace. The law always refers to
the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life
needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It
is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field
of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of
value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure,
appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its
murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that
separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient
subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. I do not
mean to say that the law fades into the background or that
the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that
the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a con
tinuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on)
whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normal
izing society is the historical outcome of a technology of
power centered on life. We have entered a phase of juridical
regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century
societies we are acquainted with; we should not be deceived
by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since
the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a
whole continual and clamorous legislative activity: these
were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power
acceptable.
Moreover, against this power that was still new in the
nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support
on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a
living being. Since the last century, the great struggles that
Right of Death and Power .over Life 1 45
have challenged the general system of power were not guided
by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old
dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. One no longer
aspired toward the coming of the emperor of the poor, or the
kingdom of the latter days, or even the restoration of our
imagined ancestral rights; what was demanded and what
served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs,
man's concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a
plenitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that
was wanted is of little importance; what we have seen has
been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object
was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against
the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more
than the law that becam,e the issue of political struggles, even
if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning
rights. The "right" to life, to one's body, to health, to happi
ness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppres
sions or "alienations," the "right" to rediscover what one is
and all that one can be, this "right" -which the classical
juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending
was the political response to all these new procedures of
power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right
of sovereignty..
