Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity”

Abstract

In recent years the outlines of a new master narrative of modern German history have begun to emerge in a wide range of publications. This narrative draws heavily on the theoretical and historical works of Michel Foucault and Detlev J. K. Peukert, and on the earlier work of the Frankfurt School, Max Weber, and the French theorists of postmodernism. In it, rationalization and science, and specifically the extended discursive field of “biopolitics” (the whole complex of disciplines and practices addressing issues of health, reproduction, and welfare) play a key role as the marker and most important content of modernization. Increasingly, this model has a function in German historiography similar to that long virtually monopolized by the “Sonderwegthesis”: it serves as a broad theoretical or interpretive framework that can guide the construction of meaning in “smaller” studies, which are legitimated by their function in confirming or countering this broader argument.

Malaria and technological networks: medical geography in the Pontine Marshes, Italy, in the 1930s

“…This view of nature, and use of technology, was not only confined to a fascist, totalitarian society. Dickinson (2004) has argued that studies of biopolitical discourse in 1930s Germany are characterized by master narratives which see German biopolitics as leading to totalitarianism. In contrast to this, he contextualizes German biopolitics and places it within a broader cultural context, establishing links between biopolitics before and after 1945.…”

The Confusions and Exuberances of Biopolitics

“…In a reconsideration of the history of modern Germany, the historian Edward Ross Dickinson outlined how the discourse and practices of biopolitics—public health, social welfare, the language of rights—had worked to transform the postwar state. If totalitarian biopolitics was “a self‐destructive failure”, he claimed that by contrast democratic biopolitics was “a howling success” in Germany and elsewhere (Dickinson , 48). Paul Rutherford () explored how what he called the Eros project, the mutation of Foucault's apparatus of sexuality, had suffused the affluent world of the twentieth century with the imagery and provocations of sex sufficient to establish a new regime of stimulation.…”

Eugenics and Social Security in France before and after the Vichy Regime

“…It also responded to the revolution that was just occurring: couplesʼ control of their fertility, a control that particularly worried the political and scientific elite because it largely escaped their own influence. 70 Forty years later, parenthood had become «deliberate» and «responsible». The new vocabulary was intended to combine the objectives of public policy with the wishes of couples, which the more politically aware eugenicists understood was an important factor in the post-war period.…”