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The Birth of Biopower in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Claudia Stein
Claudia Stein
Affiliation:
Dr Claudia Stein, Director, Centre for the History of Medicine, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected]
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In April 2009, Sir David Attenborough, the respected face and voice of British natural history programmes for more than fifty years, became the patron of a new charity, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), an organisation campaigning to limit the world's population. His reason for accepting the honour, he confessed to The Times, was that he was terribly worried about the dramatic increase of the world's population and the effect it was having on the quality of human life throughout the world:

There are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programmes only a mere fifty-six years ago. It is frightening. We can't go on as we have been. We are seeing the consequences in terms of ecology, atmospheric pollution and in terms of the space and food production.

Keywords

BavariaBiopoliticsBiopowerCameralismEnlightenmentMichel FoucaultOptimum Population TrustJohann Anton von Wolter
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 331 - 337
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 ‘David Attenborough to be Patron of Optimum Population Trust’, The Times, 14 April 2009, online: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6087833.ece, accessed 27 January 2011.

2 ‘David Attenborough: In the Beginning’, The Telegraph, 29 October 2010, online: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8090747/David-Attenborough-in-the-beginning.html>, accessed 27 January 2011.

3 ‘OTP’s Stop At Two – Make a Difference!’, <http://www.optimumpopulation.org/stopattwo.html>, accessed 27 January 2011.

4 If Attenborough is criticised at all for his support of the OPT it is because of his belief in overpopulation as a ‘fact’. Several commentators have pointed out that the size of the world’s population is still in dispute. For a rare but pointed critique that goes to the heart of the matter – excessive consumption on the part of rich countries eating up the world’s resources – see the interview with the environmentalist journalist Fred Pearce; Matilda Lee, ‘Fred Pearce: Overpopulation Worries are a Potentially Racist Distraction’, The Ecologist, 2 February 2010, online: <http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/409152/fred_pearce_overpopulation _worries_are_a_potentially_racist_distraction.html>, accessed 27 January 2011. See also his recent monograph, Peoplequake: Massmigration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash (London: Transworld Publishers, 2010).

5 See Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen (eds), Eugenics And the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Demark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 2005); and Mark B. Adams (ed.), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

6 ‘David Attenborough to be Patron of Optimum Poulation Trust’, op. cit. (note 1).

7 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population [1789] (repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter I, p. 13; also Chapter VII, p. 61; see also, Frank W. Elwell, A Commentary on Malthus’s 1798 Essay on Population as Social Theory (Lewiston: Mellon Press, 2001).

8 The term ‘statistics’ did not come into widespread use until the second and third decade of the nineteenth century; see Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Belkam Press of Harvard University Press, 1986). For recent work in this area relating to England and France, see Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Health: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and for the discussion centred on the German territories, see Martin Fuhrmann, Volksvermehrung als Staatsaufgabe? Bevölkerungs- und Ehepolitik in der deutschen politischen und ökonomischen Theorie des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002).

9 The Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito explained the difference between the two terms ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ as follows: ‘By the first is meant a politics in the name of life and by the second a life subjected to the commands of politics’. See Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota, 2008), 15. For Foucault’s discussion see, for example, Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 [1977] (repr. London: Penguin, 1998), 140. On the use of ‘biopower’ in contemporary intellectual debate in philosophy, social and political sciences, see Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, ‘Cracking Biopower’, History of the Human Sciences, 23 (2010), 109–28.

10 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, ibid., 1–4.

11 Foucault sketched out the characteristics of sovereign power in the first two chapters of his famous work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 3–69.

12 Michel Foucault, ‘The Birth of Social Medicine’, in idem, Power, J.D. Faubion (ed.), (New York: The New Press, 2000), 38.

13 Foucault attributed the manifestation in the German-speaking lands to the lack of any unitary state structure (in contrast to France and England), the relatively small size of each political entity, and their close proximity, which encouraged perpetual conflict and confrontation: ibid., 137–8. Recently, the sociologist Patrick Carroll has tried to demonstrate that eighteenth-century England did indeed develop successful practices of medical policing: ‘Medical Police and the History of Public Health', Medical History, 46 (2002), 461–94.

14 On cameralism see, Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Academic Discourse (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1988); David F. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). However, there is much disagreement over the actual effectiveness of Cameralistic policies. See, for example, Volker Bauer, Hofökonomie: Der Diskurs über den Fürstenhof in der Zeremonialwissenschaft, Hausväterliteratur und Kameralismus (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997); and Andre Wakefield, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).

15 Foucault, ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’, in idem, op. cit. (note 12), 96.

16 For a solid overview see Caren Möller, Medizinalpolizei: Die Theorie des staatlichen Gesundheitswesens im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Vittoria Klostermann, 2005).

17 See, for example, Martin Dinges, ‘Medicinische Policey zwischen Heikunde und “Patienten” (1750–1830)’, in Karl Härter, Policey und frühneuzeitliche Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 263–95; Mary Lindemann, Health and Healing in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996); Francisca Loetz, Vom Kranken zum Patienten: “Medikalisierung” und medizinische Vergesellschaftung am Beispiel Badens 1750–1850, (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1993); Ute Frevert, Krankheit als politisches Problem (1770–1880) (Göttingen: Böhlau, 1984). For the openness of the term ‘policey’, which described the ensemble of mechanisms to ensure political order, see Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, Bd.1: Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaft 1600–1800 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), 369–70.

18 See the discussion in Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in idem, op. cit. (note 12), 214; for the only German contribution, to my knowledge, which uses Foucault’s concept of biopower to analyse health in the eighteenth century, see the work of the sociologist Christian Barthel, Medizinische Polizei und Aufklärung: Aspekte des öffentlichen Gesundheitsdiskurses im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1989).

19 Revealing in this regard is von Wolter’s lecture given on the occasion of the Elector Maximilian III’s birthday in 1768: see Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Akademische Reden, Bd. 1762–1770, Wolter (1768), 12 October 1768. On von Wolter, see Elisabeth Barbara Peer, Johann Anton von Wolter 1711–1787: Kurfürstlicher Leibarzt und Protomedicus im aufgeklärt-absolutistischen Bayern (dissertation, Munich 1977); and Claudia Stein, ‘Johann Anton von Wolter (1711–87): A Bavarian Court Physician Between Aufklärung and Reaktion?, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 173–94.

20 For an overview of the impact of enlightened ideas on the sciences and medicine in absolutist Bavaria see Andreas Kraus, Die naturwissenschaftliche Forschung an der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1759–1806 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1978); also Luthger Hammerstein, ‘Die Aufklärung in Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft, in Max Spindler and Andreas Kraus, Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte, Vol. II, 2nd edn (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), 1135–97.

21 For eighteenth-century Bavarian politics see, for example, Manfred Rau, Verwaltung, Stände und Finanzen: Studien zu Staatsaufbau und Staatsentwicklung Bayerns unter dem späten Absolutismus (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988); and Hans Rall, Kurfürst Karl Theodor: Regierender Herr in sieben Ländern (Mannheim: B.I. Wissenschaftsverlag, 1993); and now Michael Schaich, Staat und Öffentlichkeit im Kurfürstentum Bayern der Spätaufklärung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001).

22 For an example of the substantial literature on midwifery in eighteenth-century Germany, see, Hans-Christoph Seidel, Eine neue “Kultur des Gebärens”: Die Medikalisierung von Geburt im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998).

23 The marriage of the Elector Karl Theodor and his wife Elisabeth Augusta of Palantine (Duchess Maria Anna’s sister) was also childless. For the political drama involved, see Stefan Mörz, Die Letzte Kurfürstin: Elisabeth Augusta von der Pfalz, die Gemahlin Karl Theodors (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1997), 59–77.

24 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Esposito, op. cit. (note 9). On recent works on biopower and sovereign power see also Majia Holmer Nadesan, Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 2008).

25 Esposito, ibid., 15.