The Birth of Biopolitics

The Birth of Biopolitics is a part of a lecture series by French philosopher Michel Foucault at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1979 and published posthumously based on audio recordings. In it, Foucault develops further the notion of biopolitics introduced in a previous lecture series, Security, Territory, Population, by tracing the ways in which the eighteenth-century political economy marked the birth of a new governmental rationality. Foucault uses the term Governmentality and raising questions of Political science, political philosophy and social policy concerning the role and status of the State and neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics.