The Prevailing Disease: Foucault on the Institutional Meaning of Epidemics and Compact Models of Power Relations

Abstract

The article focuses on Michel Foucault’s work with the social history of medicine and evaluates its potential for analyzing the political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foucault reveals the bond between quarantine measures in European cities and the gradual perfection of techniques of power. He uses organized anti-epidemic activities applied to leprosy and plague as examples of “compact models” of power relations that he discusses in terms of exclusion and discipline. He reveals complex relationships between the physical body of an individual and what he calls the “social body” of a state. Foucault describes how “health policy” was formed during the second half of 18th century when it drastically changed urban space and became one of the key techniques of government. In Foucault’s lectures published as Security, Territory, Population, he turns to the concept of a “prevailing” or literally “reigning” disease. The countermeasures against the disease enable the development of special techniques applicable to the population in a given historical period. He uses the statistical description of patients suffering from smallpox as an example of how a regime of power and government of the population develops by invoking security and risk assessment. In the concluding section, the author estimates the potential of Foucauldian historical analysis as a tool for anticipating the tendencies inherent in the techniques of power mobilized to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.