The aim of this book is to explain what makes the contemporary discourse of biopolitics essential both to the understanding and to the critique of modern civil society, as developed from Hegel and Marx up to Arendt, Foucault and Agamben. The perspective of biopolitics sheds light on the dynamics in liberal and neoliberal governmentality that replace politics by police government, rule of law by governance, action by normalized conduct. These shifts that accompany the rise of liberal civil society are linked to the entrance of human biological life as the new object and subject of politics and ... More

The aim of this book is to explain what makes the contemporary discourse of biopolitics essential both to the understanding and to the critique of modern civil society, as developed from Hegel and Marx up to Arendt, Foucault and Agamben. The perspective of biopolitics sheds light on the dynamics in liberal and neoliberal governmentality that replace politics by police government, rule of law by governance, action by normalized conduct. These shifts that accompany the rise of liberal civil society are linked to the entrance of human biological life as the new object and subject of politics and government. The crossing of biological life into political life leads to the relative autonomy of family, law and the economy with respect to the political control of the state, a dynamic that places the republican understanding of politics in crisis. The underlying question motivating the chapters of this book is whether this new horizon of biopolitics poses a challenge that republican politics is unable to cope with, or whether, to the contrary, a republicanism of the living is both possible and necessary. The book seeks an answer by identifying the affirmative political potential found in the biopolitical category of natality, and its relation to both normality and normativity, within and between each sphere of civil society.