Bene vivere politice

Abstract

This chapter approaches the question of biopolitics in ancient political thought looking not at specific political techniques but at notions of the final aim of the political community. It argues that the “happiness” (eudaimonia, beatitudo) that constitutes the greatest human good in the tradition from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas is not a “biopolitical” ideal, but rather a metabiopolitical one, consisting in a contemplative activity situated above and beyond the biological and the political. It is only with Thomas Hobbes that civic happiness becomes “biopolitically” identified with simple survival; for modernity, as Hannah Arendt puts it, mere being alive becomes the greatest human good, and happiness is understood as a subjective “quality of life.” In both models, the political realm is a means to an end. Arendt draws our attention to a neglected third alternative to both the classical/metabiopolitical and the modern/biopolitical ideals: “public happiness” consisting in political participation itself.

Was Thomas Hobbes the first biopolitical thinker?

“…Jussi Backman (2022) makes insightful claims that bear a certain resemblance to both Ojakangas's and Esposito's conflicting stances while still making a unique contribution to the state of the art. He argues that Hobbes should be considered the first veritable biopolitical thinker because although the governance of life as such predates the English thinker by at least some two millennia (à la Ojakangas), the man of Malmesbury was still the first major thinker to recognise that the preservation of bodily life of human beings from (violent death) was to be regarded as the telos of virtually all politics (à la Esposito).…”

“…We must ask what kind of actual mechanisms of biopolitical governing Hobbes offers besides the agreeable intention of wanting to make the pursuit of well-being possible through security (or as part of it). We must also ponder a reversal of this question: do the much clearer, ancient examples of at least seemingly biopolitical governing – for example, the elaborate system of animal-style breeding of human beings devised by Plato in the Republic (Plato, 1935: 5.461) and the Laws (Plato, 1867: 5.735b–763a; see Ojakangas, 2016: 19) – constitute a biopolitical programme even though the Greek philosophers had not yet elevated non-contemplative life to its modern status as the explicit telos of virtually all politics (see Backman, 2022)? Such questions form the central thread of this article, as we try to decipher whether the history of biopolitics begins with Hobbes or whether we should try to place its genesis in some other point in history.…”

“…Indeed, there were fully fleshed-out systems of human breeding and state racism long before Hobbes's time (see Ojakangas, 2016: 19; contra Esposito, 2008: 53–4). This claim seems to hold true even though the notions of supreme happiness and well-being within the pre-modern contexts seem to exceed the strictly biopolitical categories of life because they were connected to the supremacy of a metabiopolitical contemplative life (see Backman, 2022). None of this alters the fact that corporeal life was still the target of radical instruments of de facto biopolitical governing that were used to control both the quality and the quantity of citizens within the Greek city states.…”