Thomas Hobbes's name often comes up as scholars debate the history of biopower, which regulates the biological life of individual bodies and entire populations. This article examines whether and to what extent Hobbes may be regarded as the first biopolitical philosopher. I investigate this question by performing a close reading of Hobbes's political texts and by comparing them to some of the most influential theories on biopolitics proposed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and others. Hobbes is indeed the (...) first great thinker to assert the supreme political importance of safeguarding life. Furthermore, this prominence of non-contemplative life is not limited to mere survival but also seeks to allow for the people's happiness. This may indeed allow us to consider him as the first biopolitical philosopher, at least in some limited capacity. However, the Englishman's biopolitical stance lacks the practical aspects seen in examples of ‘properly modern’ biopolitics. Moreover, peoples’ lives were already governed radically in antiquity. I argue that Hobbes's biopolitical system was, therefore, minimal in the sense of a ‘biopolitical nightwatchman state’. However, he acted as an undeniable catalyst to the ‘properly biopolitical era of modernity’, when mundane life and happiness became the explicit main objects of virtually all politics. (shrink)

In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes, and promises of ‘biopolitics' to understand and frame global health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global histories of populations’ politics of life and health to situate present and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue for an affirmative biopolitics, that at once de-securitizes our (...) approach to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions. (shrink)

Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. Here, we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions of direct environmental effects on bodies have been used to naturalize racial hierarchy and inequalities in the past. (...) Next, we conduct a scoping review of postgenomic work in environmental epigenetics and DOHaD that looks at the role of race/ethnicity in human health (2000–2021). Although there is substantial heterogeneity in how race is conceptualized and interpreted across studies, we observe practices that may unwittingly encourage typological thinking, including: using DNA methylation as a novel marker of racial classification; neglect of variation and reversibility within supposedly homogenous racial groups; and a tendency to label and reify whole groups as pathologized or impaired. Even in the very different politico-economic and epistemic context of contemporary postgenomic science, these trends echo deeply held beliefs in Western thinking which claimed that different environments shape different bodies and then used this logic to argue for essential differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. We conclude with a series of suggestions on interpreting and reporting findings in these fields that we feel will help researchers harness this work to benefit disadvantaged groups while avoiding the inadvertent dissemination of new and old forms of stigma or prejudice. (shrink)

Foucault’s argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century—an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics—has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault’s periodization about the politics of health and the way its story has been solidified into an uncritical account. Building on novel historiographic work, it challenges (...) the modernist bias of histories of biopolitics and public health and considers an earlier and more plural history of collective practices of health of which the story told by Foucault is just one important episode. Finally, it discusses the implications of this revised model for wider sociological debates on the link between modernity, health and the body. (shrink)