Racing and “Managing” Human Populations
Dianna Taylor
Arendt’s work figures prominently within contemporary thinking on biopolitics. Broadly construed as the implementation of state policies intended to promote the overall health of a population, biopolitics is best understood as a manifestation of what Michel Foucault terms “biopower.” According to Foucault, this specifically modern form of power emerges during the latter part of the eighteenth century in response to particular structural changes within Western societies, including secularization, industrialization, and changing population demographics. In contrast to sovereign power, which asserts itself through the taking of life, biopower asserts itself specifically through the proliferation of life at the biological level of the human species. Whereas sovereign power is the power to “take life or let live,” biopower is the power to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”1 Biopower fosters life by intervening within, managing, and protecting it. Techniques of biopower, according to Foucault, “administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”2
The concept of “population” is key to the emergence and function of biopower. Foucault describes how what was a “global mass” of human life—“man as species”3 —comes to be conceptualized specifically as a population, “a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality of where they live.”4 The population provides an identifiable entity that needs to and can be managed and regulated. Management and regulation occurs through the collection of statistics (birth rates, mortality rates, rates of infectious disease, and longevity) that are used to generate data: “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures.”5 States use this data in order to craft policy that “regularizes” the population in ways that protect it from internal and external threats, and in doing so promote life.6 “Regulatory mechanisms,” according to Foucault, “establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis . . . security mechanisms have to be installed around the random elements inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life.”7
Foucault shows that the state’s interest in promoting life does not prevent it from taking life. The health of a population can only be effectively maximized through fostering its biological strength; weak elements therefore can, and indeed must, be monitored and either allowed to simply die out or eliminated. The modern biological conceptualization of race, Foucault contends, is key in providing the necessary justification for such dying out or elimination. Construed in terms of a set of heritable, biological traits, the concept of race provides a way of conceptualizing and identifying a population’s strong and weak elements—of creating a racial hierarchy that in turn opens onto the emergence of modern racism. It is racism specifically, Foucault argues, that introduced into the population a “break between what must live and what must die.”8 Under biopower, weak races (where race is broadly construed to include, for example, criminals, the mad, and individuals possessing “various anomalies”) present a biological threat to the population that the state must contain.9 Racism, Foucault explains, “is bound up with the working of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of race, to exercise its power to take life.”10 Foucault identifies Nazism as a regime that aimed to expose its own population to the “absolute and universal threat of death.”11 Taken to its extreme, the biopolitics to which biopower lends itself is, he argues, suicidal as well as genocidal.12
Arendt’s own analysis of Nazism in The Origins of Totalitarianism illustrates the workings of biopower as well as the at least harmful and at worst suicidal and genocidal potential of biopolitics. Two aspects of that analysis in particular make clear the extent to which the emergence and proliferation of biopower and, hence, biopolitics revolves around the concept of the population. First, the concept is interconnected with the roots of European racism that characterize Nazism. Second, the unplanned movement of populations was a key condition for the possibility of the emergence of a Nazism within which population management figured prominently within a project of racial purification aimed at promoting overall social health.
The origins of Nazism, Arendt shows, can be traced back to nineteenth-century “pan-Germanism,” a movement that reflects what she refers to as “race thinking.” While it manifested itself in different ways within different contexts, in the case of Germany, race thinking “was invented in an effort to unite the people against foreign domination. Its authors . . . wanted to awaken in the people a consciousness of common origin.”13 According to pan-Germanism, Germans were a distinct as well as distinctive “people” who, regardless of their geographical dispersion, were bound together by a common set of inherent characteristics. In other words, Germans were posited as a select group set apart from and superior to the rest of the population. Although pan-Germanism did not appeal to biology in making its claims to distinctiveness and “chosenness,” it can be seen to presage in important respects the modern conceptualization of race as a set of inherent biological traits, and the modern racism that emerges from that conceptualization. According to Arendt, racism proper did not emerge in Europe until the colonization of Africa. Europeans’ encounters with Africans, she argues, produced the notion of radical otherness upon which racism hinges. Henceforth it would be possible to view not only “primitive” non-Europeans who looked very different from themselves as less than (fully) human Others but fellow Europeans as well.14
Nazi racism introduced a break within the European population between biologically strong elements to be cultivated and weak elements to be culled. The Nazis explicitly appealed to science in their depiction of Jews as a biologically inferior race of sub-humans who posed a threat to the superior Aryan race and, hence, the Reich. Anti-Jewish ideology and propaganda were laced with a “language of prophetic scientificality”15 that lent them a sense of inevitability and “infallib[ility].”16 “In Nazi Germany,” Arendt writes, “questioning the validity of racism and antisemitism when nothing mattered but race origin, when a career depended upon an ‘Aryan’ physiognomy . . . and the amount of food upon the number of one’s Jewish grandparents, was the like questioning the existence of the world.”17
While encountering radical Others in Africa contributed an important experiential component in the development of European racism, sociopolitical conditions had to exist within which it could take hold and flourish. Arendt identifies the period between the two World Wars as crucial in producing such conditions.18 A number of formative developments took place during that time, including the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the subsequent creation of new nation-states, and the establishment within those states of permanent minority populations whose rights were protected not by the state itself but instead by an external international body, the League of Nations. These developments, to say nothing of the devastation wrought by the First World War, displaced large numbers of people, which in turn resulted in the mass movement of human populations. Either by choice so as not to be repatriated to a country where they a were minority and with which they neither identified nor within which felt they belonged, or by virtue of states’ refusal to accept refugees and displaced persons, unprecedented numbers of persons became stateless.
Arendt sees statelessness giving concrete form to the radical otherness necessary for the coalescing of racism. While minorities may have chafed at their situation generally and the new identity imposed upon them more specifically, recourse to (albeit limited and atypical) legal protection and (albeit externally generated) rights enabled them to retain some sense of human dignity and worth. Stateless people, by contrast, were not only denied citizenship of a particular state but were deprived of “a place in the world” altogether.19 From an Arendtian perspective, membership in a community, “which makes opinions significant and actions effective,” provides the condition for the possibility of intelligibility not only as a citizen but more fundamentally as a human being.20 Freedom and justice matter only within a shared context that is “willing and able to guarantee” the right to freedom and justice; meaningful speech and action are possible only within a space where it is possible to come together with others in order to deliberate and act.21 “Only the loss of a polity,” Arendt writes, “expels [persons] from humanity.”22
Lacking a community, stateless people were “thrown back . . . on their natural givenness.”23 For Arendt, being able to come together with others for the purposes of action and speech is the condition for the possibility of a meaningful human existence, for it is through these two activities that persons are able to distinguish themselves from others and therefore come into existence as “unique, distinct” individuals. Excluded from a common world of shared experiences within which they can come together with others, stateless people are different from the non-stateless but lack differences—distinguishing characteristics such as a “profession . . . a citizenship . . . an opinion . . . a deed.”24 The stateless person “represent[s] nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance.”25 By reducing human beings to such a level, Arendt argues, statelessness denies personhood, and in doing so, reduces human beings to “the ‘scum of the earth.’”26 They were so far beyond the pale of normal society that they were incapable of any degree of assimilation, rather than being addressed through diplomatic or juridical means; thus the stateless were deemed a security issue to be contained by the police or, worse, a threat that had to be eliminated.
While the threat posed by statelessness was not framed as biological, the fact that Jews were among the first groups who were “unable or unwilling to place themselves under the new minority protection of their homelands,” and thus among the first to become stateless, facilitated the conceptualization of radical otherness (construed as in- or at least sub-humanity) in terms of race and, hence, biology.27 As the ultimat e sub-race, Jews had to be eliminated, and Arendt shows that this elimination was embedded within a broader Nazi policy of population management aimed at purging biologically impure elements from and thereby strengthening the Reich.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt describes how, after stripping Jews of their citizenship in order to expel them from Germany, the Nazis proceeded to “gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps.”28 Initially, the Nazis cooperated with Zionist organizations in order to “encourage” Jewish relocation to Palestine. “Voluntary emigration” was followed by “forced emigration,” which was, Arendt argues, effectively “expulsion.” “The concentration” of Jews in ghettos took place between the fall of 1939 and the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. All three of these policies constitute what Foucault refers to as the “indirect murder” enacted by biopower: “the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.”29 Jews were stripped of their homes, property, money, and rights and left to fend for themselves in squalid conditions devoid of adequate food, shelter, sanitation, and medical care.30 The final stage of Nazi population policy was, of course, the direct killing of biologically inferior elements within society. Such killing was performed in the name of promoting biologically superior elements and, therefore, ultimately fostering life. Arendt’s work is thus consistent with Foucault’s in illustrating that the destructive potential of biopolitics achieves its apotheosis in Nazism. She shows that the suicidal as well as the genocidal character of Nazi biopolitics is apparent in, for example, its idealization of Aryanism, as well as the deprivation and suffering to which it exposed the German people, especially at the end of the War. “The Nazis,” Arendt writes, “did not think that the Germans were a master race, to whom the world belonged, but that they should be led by a master race, as should all other nations, and that this master race was still being born.”31
At the same time, Arendt’s later work illustrates that she considers the biopolitical promoting of life, insofar as it both predates the war and prevails into the postwar period, to be characteristic of Western modernity in general. In The Human Condition, Arendt sees this concern being reflected in the modern attitude toward the human activity of labor. Modern societies, Arendt asserts, have endeavored to extricate themselves from the necessity inherent in labor, which keeps human beings bound to the cyclical repetition of biological processes. At the same time, these societies also endeavor to maximize (even exploit) labor’s productive function. What results from this simultaneous deprecation and valorization is a “society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor,” but which “no longer know[s] of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”32 For Arendt, then, a modern attitude that presents itself as promoting human emancipation ultimately undermines the very conditions for the possibility of freedom: it reasserts and even bolsters conditions that reduce human plurality to the superfluousness of the species being. Key among the “higher and more meaningful activities” such a move threatens to eclipse thinking—a mental activity with the potential to identify and even function in the service of countering the modern developments Arendt describes. Despite her protestations that it is not her concern in The Human Condition, Arendt nonetheless appeals to it in the book’s final paragraph as a possible means of countering what she sees as a potential resurgence of the conditions for the possibility of something like the biopolitics of totalitarianism, which of course emerged from and in turn promoted thoughtlessness. “Thought,” Arendt writes, “is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the condition of political freedom. Unfortunately . . . no human capacity is so vulnerable.”33
Notes
1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I (New York: Vintage, 1990), 138, original emphasis.
2 Ibid., 137.
3 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 242.
4 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France: 1977-78 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 21.
5 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 246.
6 Ibid., 247.
7 Ibid., 246.
8 Ibid., 254.
9 Ibid., 259.
10 Ibid., 258.
11 Ibid., 259.
12 Ibid., 260.
13 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1973), 165.
14 See Origins, chapter seven, “Race and Bureaucracy.”
15 Ibid., 350.
16 Ibid., 349.
17 Ibid., 363.
18 For Arendt’s analysis of this period, see Origins, chapter nine, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.”
19 Ibid., 296.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 297.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 302.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 289.
28 Ibid., 290.
29 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 256.
30 Arendt, Origins, 95.
31 Ibid., 412.
32 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 4–5.
33 Ibid., 324.