Although neoliberal strategies of government appropriate and utilize older forms of power—sovereign power, pastoral power, and disciplinary power—biopower offers the most effective and appealing set of strategies for governing social life under neoliberalism because it finds its telos and legitimacy in its articulated capacity to maximize the energies and capabilities of all: individuls, families, market organizations, and the state. As a kind of power that concerns itself with representing, explaining, and regulating the life forces of populations, biopolitical forces adapted to neoliberal ends seek to minimize societal risk and maximize individual well-being through scientific engineering and individual technologies of the self. Biopower is seductive because its logics, technologies, and experts offer, or at least purport to offer, tools for societal self-government. Biopower’s mantra of the rational administration of life promises means for realizing the elusive cybernetic fantasy of a society of self-regulating individuals. Under neoliberal governmentalities, sovereignty is disseminated amongst society’s members as the welfare state sheds responsibility for its pastorate by shifting risk and empowerment to its subjects. Thus, the classical liberal fantasy of a society of self-regulating individuals is invoked as a rationale for the dissemination of risk and responsibility achieved by and though biopower’s operations. In essence, the emergence of biopower as a major force in shaping, eliciting, and controlling populations is inextricably linked with historically contingent developments in liberal, and now neoliberal, forms of government.
