Where would you recommend I read more about Foucault as progenitor of biomedical conspiracy theories? I've never heard that accusation before and would be interested in learning more.
"The medical consciousness, he argued, creates a division between a privileged minority who claim to understand the flows of contagion—an epistemic elite of medical experts—and the masses whose health they monitor and manage. Rather than individuals pursuing private happiness within an order of universal laws and rights, what appears here is a herd kept in good condition by shepherds, a secular pastorate that rules in the name of science. . . . Governmentality aims at 'biopower,' that is, power over the biological life and flourishing of the governed, and is fundamentally at odds with liberal conceptions of power as general norms for the preservation of individual rights."
"You could imagine a timeline in which the left was much more skeptical of experts, lockdowns and vaccine requirements — deploying Foucauldian categories to champion the individual’s bodily autonomy against the state’s system of control, defending popular skepticism against official knowledge, rejecting bureaucratic health management as just another mask for centralizing power. But left-wingers with those impulses have ended up allied with the populist and conspiratorial right. . . . conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated enemies, find themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a 'systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates' — even when those ideas belong to their old relativist and postmodernist enemies."
Where would you recommend I read more about Foucault as progenitor of biomedical conspiracy theories? I've never heard that accusation before and would be interested in learning more.
Here's a review of Foucault's critique of biopower (https://ageofrevolutions.com/2020/06/08/the-failed-french-revolution-against-medical-expertise-and-foucaults-philosophy-of-history/):
"The medical consciousness, he argued, creates a division between a privileged minority who claim to understand the flows of contagion—an epistemic elite of medical experts—and the masses whose health they monitor and manage. Rather than individuals pursuing private happiness within an order of universal laws and rights, what appears here is a herd kept in good condition by shepherds, a secular pastorate that rules in the name of science. . . . Governmentality aims at 'biopower,' that is, power over the biological life and flourishing of the governed, and is fundamentally at odds with liberal conceptions of power as general norms for the preservation of individual rights."
Ross Douthat on how the Foucauldian critique of biopower foreshadows the MAHA/MAGA synthesis (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/opinion/michel-foucault.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YU8.2mc7.dwZa2tL_whxQ&smid=url-share):
"You could imagine a timeline in which the left was much more skeptical of experts, lockdowns and vaccine requirements — deploying Foucauldian categories to champion the individual’s bodily autonomy against the state’s system of control, defending popular skepticism against official knowledge, rejecting bureaucratic health management as just another mask for centralizing power. But left-wingers with those impulses have ended up allied with the populist and conspiratorial right. . . . conservatives, the emergent regime’s designated enemies, find themselves drawn to ideas that offer what Shullenberger calls a 'systematic critique of the institutional structures by which modern power operates' — even when those ideas belong to their old relativist and postmodernist enemies."