Man is by nature a political animal
Aristotle, Politics

From one sentence in Aristotle derive two arresting theoretical discourses of the twenty-first century: Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, provocatively reformulated by Giorgio Agamben in terms of the relationship between sovereignty and the body, and the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum as a means of evaluating and promoting development, justice and freedom. Both are characterized by deep reflection on the sources of Western political thought, and by urgent engagement with contemporary social and legal problems. Both are in some sense biopolitical in that they are shaped by the interplay of the same Aristotelian categories—the human and the animal, politics and nature. But they are on opposite sides of the divide that has opened up in the human sciences since the 1960s, and there currently seems no optic through which they might simultaneously be viewed, no way of integrating or comparing their insights.

In part, this reflects a situation in which political debate appears to have fragmented into a multiplicity of single issues. The ancient ‘Who will rule?’ and the modern ‘Who shall have what?’ have been supplemented by an array of questions that deal with matters once exclusively cultural, personal or natural. For previous eras, the relative integrity and unmalleability of cultures, bodies and environments rendered such questions redundant. Now they frequently appear unanswerable from within established political traditions, and incommensurable in relation to each other.

Within this expanded field, biopolitics and the capabilities approach have unusual salience and potential, for both bundle together issues otherwise assumed to be distinct. If they, in turn, could be coordinated, perhaps we could begin to map the new territory.

In the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault remarked that whereas ‘for millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’. Rather than being an ‘inaccessible substrate’ presupposed by political life, the biological life of man had now ‘passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention’.footnote¹

According to Foucault, this occurred through the development of the disciplines of the body and the regulation of the population. The first of these focused on the individual human body, increasing its usefulness and economic integration through ‘the optimization of its capabilities’; the second on the collective body: ‘births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity’ and the environmental variables that controlled them.footnote² The result was that the animal life of man, far from being irrelevant to politics, now became its subject, ‘a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques’.footnote³

Taking his cue from Arendt, Agamben argues that political existence and bestialized life represent distinct types of being.footnote⁴ For the Greeks, he claims, zōē was the term for the natural life of nutrition and reproduction shared with other living creatures, while bios was used to describe ways of living a distinctively human life: