Crossing Intellectual Boundaries

Abstract

Starting in the mid-1960s, a small handful of political scientists, understandably viewed as eccentric by even the most charitable or their colleagues, began to use biological1 concepts and techniques in their efforts to better explain and study political behavior. Today, barely two decades later, the advocates of “biopolitics,” as the movement was quickly dubbed, number several hundred, drawn from more than a dozen countries; the latest survey of the literature identifies over a thousand items, and biopolitics has been recognized as an “official” subarea of political science by both the International Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association, the discipline’s two largest and most prestigious organizations.