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Michel Foucault Social Security Analysis

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French 20th-century historian and philosopher who spent his life closely analyzing and critiquing the power of the modern western capitalist state, including its police, law courts, prisons, doctors and psychiatrists. His goal was to work out nothing less than how power worked and sought to change society’s current functions of these various systems.

In Foucault’s, “Society must be defended”, he talks about the power over life and how the government helps to dictate public opinion and societal norms. One of these powers is disciplinary power, which is the normalization of individual bodies. This ideal centers on the fact that the body is like a machine and must be controlled in order to reach maximum efficiency. …show more content…
Bio-power is the normalization of the population, the large scale comparison to disciplinary power. The overall goal of bio-power is to maintain the “average” or the standard deviation of a population. An example of this is seen in the medical field with height and weight charts for children, or standardized testing in schools when children get older. This statistical management is controlled by an administration of government, which is closely monitored or surveilled. Examples of surveillance is hierarchy’s, inspections and bookkeeping. Foucault even goes on to say that new technology is being established in order to control the masses. The goal of Bio-power is to help the population as a whole, not just and individual. An example of bio-power that Foucault talks about is with the Nazi regime. The idea is that Jews pose a threat to the masses of the Arian race, therefore it is justified to kill these people in order to optimize the life of the …show more content…
What makes Foucault’s perspective on discipline distinctive, is that disciplines try to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used and if need be, punished. Disciplinary power interprets surveillance in a very literal sense when someone is looking at themselves to make judgement. Disciplinary power deal with the individual and their ability to regulate themselves on a purely micro scale, as opposed to bio-power which takes the macro data of the population in order to make judgment on the individual. The overall goals are different as well, in disciplinary power the goal is to promote the life of the individual, whereas the goal of bio-power is to promote the common

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