In the juridico-institutional regime of power injustice pertains, according to Foucault, to disobedience the law understood as the manifestation of sovereign will. In this regime, it is not so much an individual that is unjust but his act and consequently, the punishment is to be adjusted to this act rather than to one's personality. In the regime of the bio-political, instead, injustice pertains to the character of man. A bad person is not primarily a lawbreaker but an abnormal personality in need of education and therapeutic treatment. This dichotomy in mind, I argue in this article that Plato’s concepts of “injustice” (adikia) and “bad” (kakos) are eminently bio-political. For Plato, injustice is not a transgression of law but a disease of the soul (psukhês nosos). And a state of the soul can be bad or unjust irrespective of what the individual possessing such a soul has done or left undone (Laws 9.863e). Consequently, politics is the art of treating (therapeuô) the soul of man, jurisdiction being the art of destroying a sick soul or, if the soul is curable, healing it, while legislation is what promotes and maintains its healthy condition (Gorg. 464b). “Plato interprets medicine as a form of politics,” says Karl Popper, but at the same time Plato understands politics as a form of medicine and more precisely, as mental hygiene and psychiatry of sorts.
