Ulrich Bröckling

While biopolitics has become a catchword in present debates on applied life-sciences, the Foucauldian origin of the concept is almost forgotten. Foucault, and in his pathways Giorgio Agamben, analysed the efforts towards a political regulation of the population as a biological entity, but did not focus on the specific economic rationality of biopolitics. The contribution highlights this dimension by studying two different approaches to an economic theory of human life: first the concept of "Menschenökonomie", as formulated by the austrian social philosopher and sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid in the years before World War I; second the theory of human capital, whose most famous exponents are the US-economists Theodore W. Schultz and Gary S. Becker.

Published