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The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979

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These lectures demonstrate persuasively that the attempt to master life, especially human life, is not the legacy of Nazism or sci-fi nightmares, but the spontaneous consequence of economic liberalism in its modern form. The idea that government should intervene in society but only to establish, strengthen, and extend the market and its principles to all areas of society means that the population must be managed and even remediated or improved to ensure its members can participate productively in the market. Foucault ends these lectures, after this important demonstration, by showing how the idea of civil society is both a complement to this vision of the market economy and the motor of history that leads to potentially radical changes in politics. This book is a must-read for all serious students of Foucault, critical theory, and contemporary politics.

I am a historian doing researches on the economic and legal development in Chinese early modern history. Reading Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics is a wonderful experience, I learned a lot and cannot help but to think that the dialectics between "external politics" and "internal politics" in Europe from 17thc on may probably constitute an interesting and plausible comparative framework against the deployment of statecraft project in the sixteenth to eighteenth century China.

I bought this book in French when it was first published in 2004. At the time the topic meant very little to me in that we were living in a world that had re-elected GWB and seemed somehow to have found stability in its grandiose fantasies... House prices were up up up... The Stock market was up up up... Iraq was becoming another Vietnam ... Liberal thought was as solid a dogma as ever and not a set of evolving ideas ... We lived in a form of ideologically blocked society. `If you're not for us...' The Security volume caught my attention. Last week - after having it literally fall on my knee - I picked it up and opened it. Not only was it fascinating but it helped me understand better the thinking behind the world that fell apart these past six months. A great read and his developments on liberalism are clear and brilliant!

Michel Foucault at his best reveals mechanisms once considered radically invasive that now now permeate the "basic" structure of Western government and public institutions. Here, his discussions on the uncomfortable common grounds between centrist or left-of-centre Democracies and totalitarian states turns on the former's absorption of Frankfurt School economics and a general sort of self-absolving historical pessimism. What begins as a revulsion with Fascism and National Socialism supposedly ends with a deflating realization that they are only the maximalist endpoints of some very "logical" lines of inquiry in the west. These include "How can we expand 'the markets' to encompass the entire body politic?" and "How can we use the markets to scrutinize the population's behaviour while making the markets themselves inscrutable?" and "How can we apply this process to any number of political and social organs?" It is only the methods that differ and even then, only some of the time.

This book contains Foucault's usual hang-ups. He does not investigate gender, ethnicity, poverty or non-European theatres seriously. But it is still essential reading for the decade we are in. Jonah Goldberg had no reason to write "Liberal Fascism" because everything he could have hoped to say about the subject is right here.

A book that was due to be translated in English and provides the first attempt of Foucault to cirscumscribe the neoliberal enterprise.

This book is a collection of lectures that Foucault gave. They are focused on the development of Neo-liberalism after World War II, in Germany and the U.S. Foucault traces the development of this theory and how how it differs in Germany and the U.S. respectively. The book being a collection of his lectures, it is at times choppy when reading, because at times the recordings were not able to pick up what was being said. The editor of the book does a wonderful job at acknowledging these parts, but I did not find them detracting from the work. The editor also wrote the lectures in a way that reproduces the lecture so that one can close their eyes and easily imagine themselves there listing to them. The analysis of Neo-Liberalism in this book is the best that I have ever read, and the depth of thought is amazing. It is not an easy read, but one that anyone interested in theory or Foucault should read. It is enjoyable and worth every penny spent.

this is an important book. thanks for sending it so quickly and at an unbeatable price!

Michel Foucault was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. These lectures are the finest examples of his ideas as they formed into the masterworks of his books. It is a rare occasion to watch the unfolding of such profound ideas.