Life, Legitimation and Government

What is it about?

Foucault is widely credited as the primary source of current interest in biopower and biopolitics, despite the fact that these terms played only a fleeting role in his genealogies of contemporary political power. His interest in biopolitics quickly gave way to an interest in governmentality, by which he meant the ways in which states sought to govern societies. Far from providing a coherent account of the ways in which life enters into contemporary forms of government, his lectures proliferate questions about what is meant by life and how it becomes an object of the theory and practice of government.

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