Biopower
Etymology
Coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in the 1970s, notably in the first volume of "The History of Sexuality," from the Greek "bios," meaning life, joined to power. He argued that a new form of authority arose that took life itself, at the scale of the population, as its object.
noun · /BY-oh-pow-er/
Power exercised by managing the biological life of whole populations — their health, birth rates, sexuality, and mortality.
What it names
A lens for seeing how modern states govern less by threatening death than by administering life, through statistics, public health, and the quiet regulation of bodies.
Example
Vaccination mandates, census categories, and fertility campaigns are all exercises of biopower, shaping a nation by managing its living bodies.
Related idea
Sharpens the older, spatial metaphor of the panoptic, which disciplines individuals through surveillance; biopower zooms out from the watched individual to the statistically managed population as a whole.