Biopolitics in Utopian Literature from Plato to Orwell

Plato’s Republic is the first entry in an extensive list of works that depict the political organization of a particular fictional society. Utopian literature, named after Thomas More’s Utopia has been studied extensively and numerous unifying themes have been established within the genre. One penetrating theme, however, has not been the focus of sufficient inquiry. This major unifying theme is the biopolitical control of the population seen unambiguously in the ancient, early-modern, and modern examples of utopian writing. In this essay I analyze some 40 utopian societies from Plato to George Orwell in order to demonstrate that biopolitical control of the population is a theme that pierces the entirety of utopian literature. Understanding the biopolitical aspects in utopian writing gives us a more profound understanding of the genre. Moreover, this move contributes to the ongoing discussion about the history of biopolitics. Michel Foucault wrote about this collision point of power and life, biopower, for only a brief, yet extremely influential period in his career. According to him, biopower is a technique of power aimed at simultaneously controlling the biological life of individual human bodies and the entire population. The individual body is rendered docile and machine-like with discipline while the population political aspects such as birthrate and mortality are regulated with biopolitics of the population, meaning a variety of interventions such as health campaigns. In another instance Foucault called biopolitics an attempt “to rationalize problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race.” Examples of biopolitics can thus range from the liberal democratic state to the total state, which tried to “improve” the quality of the population by eliminating its “undesired” parts. Foucault also discussed utopias, stating that “one thing is certain: that the human body is the principal actor in all utopias”. Even though Foucault is here concerned mostly about real life issues such as tattoos and masks instead of utopian literature, his assessment about the human body as a key to utopia can perhaps be tested further by analyzing the regulation of life in a wide assortment of utopian literature. I compare the utopian works to the categories given us by Foucault: health, hygiene, population, and race. However the most important category is sex, which is, according to Foucault, the key to biopolitics since it binds together the questions of the individual body and that of the entire population. Thus, all references to sex, marriage, childbirth and eugenics should be examined most carefully. Firstly I discus sex and with it all regulation concerning marriage and childbearing. The questions of race are in many cases so entwined with those of sex that it is also discussed here with issues such as eugenics, infanticide, and other ways of “improving race.” Secondly, I examine the regulation of the size of the population by affecting birthrate and by other means. Thirdly, I look at the interwoven topics of health, well-being, nutrition, physical fitness, and hygiene.