A review by gellok
The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 by Michel Foucault

5.0

The series of lectures are exceptionally detailed and rich. Foucault spends the opening few weeks wandering through a basic sense of his overall methodology as he closes in on an intelligibility of neoliberalism. This approach lays the groundwork for what Foucault understands as a largely non dialectical nor particularly historicized shift or build from Raison d'etat, the police state, and eventually into neoliberalism as sort of grid in which the individual is understood as a behavioral manifestation of their own enterprise.
His discussions of Germany and the United States are particularly interesting, with the former bringing in a very unique sense of society qua economic development post World War II. An exciting read for the novice and seasoned lover of Foucault.