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What hath biopolitics wrought?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Albert Somit
Albert Somit*
Affiliation:
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901. albertsomit@gmail.com
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Extract

Although there may be some disagreement about the exact date, I think it safe to say that the biopolitics movement was launched in the 1960s. Now, a half century later, it may be appropriate to pose the rather obvious, if somewhat delicate, question: What has biopolitics contributed to political science? Here, I will try to persuade you that a biopolitical approach may have yielded answers to a couple of the most debated issues in political philosophy—one, the granddady of them all, is “What is the nature of political man?” The other, much more recent, but steadily increasing in importance, is “Why are democracies so rare and so fragile?”

Type
Founders' Forum
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 2011 , pp. 95 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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References

1. Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).Google Scholar
2. Somit, Albert and Peterson, Steve, Human Nature and Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), p. 6.Google Scholar
3. Somit, Albert and Peterson, Steven A., The Failure of Democratic Nation Building: Ideology Meets Evolution (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).Google Scholar
4. Degler, Carl, In Search of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).Google Scholar