Recycling

The idea of biopolitics has proved one of the most generative in social studies of medicine and science, yet until recently it is an idea most readily deployed in relation to the history of Western Europe and the northern, developed nations. This is unsurprising, given that, in Foucault's historical account of biopower, its emergence as a form of politics in the nineteenth century is intimately bound up with the formation of modern, Western European nation-states and the constitution of their national populations.