The idea of biopoliticshas proved one of the most generative in social studies of medicine and science, yet until recently it is an idea most readily deployed in relation to the history of Western Europe and the northern, developed nations. This is unsurprising, given that, in Foucault's historical account of biopower, its emergence as a form of politics in the nineteenth century is intimately bound up with the formation of modern, Western European nation-states and the constitution of their national populations (Foucault 1978). In this account, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Western European states begin to address their populations as embodied beings in order to improve physical productivity and discipline in the interests of capital formation and military prowess. They begin to regulate and optimize population processes—the life processes of fertility, birth, health, sexuality, morbidity, and life span—drawing on the new biomedical and statistical sciences of the nineteenth century to provide administrative traction on the citizen's body. Biopolitics deals with such phenomena as mortality and fertility that are unpredictable at an individual level but that have certain kinds of regularity at a collective level, and that are susceptible to collective, regulatory modification—the lowering of the birth rate, the increase in overall fertility, improvement in morbidity rates, and so on. Above all, Foucault states, biopolitics is addressed to the securing of an optimal biological stability in populations “to compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field… to optimize a state of life” (2003: 246).
