Why read The Birth of Biopolitics?

Book cover of The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979

Book description

Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France in 1979, 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 rationality -- seeking maximum effectiveness by…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Birth of Biopolitics as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

David Theo Goldberg

Author

In these extraordinary lectures, Foucault offers a comprehensive social history of neoliberal theory from the 1920s to 1980 in Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S. While this work does not focus on racism, Foucault critically elaborates neoliberalism’s defining ideas: the attack on the state and dissipation of the commons, the privatization of everything, and the individualizing of all responsibility; financializing all social and individual choice, while redefining social subjectivity as “the Man of Enterprise,” of innovation and self-making. Foucault opened me to seeing how the liberal in “neoliberalism” signals the elevation of individual freedom as a counter to state power…

From David's list on spotlighting race and neoliberalization.