The neg highlights the worst version of biopolitics however empirically it has increased both political engagement and public health

This understanding of the democratic and totalitarian potentials of biopolitics at the level of the state needs to be underpinned by a reassessment of how biopolitical discourse operates in society at large, at the "prepolitical" level. I would like to try to offer here the beginnings of a reconceptualization of biopolitical modernity, one that focuses less on the machinations of technocrats and experts, and more on the different ways that biopolitical thinking circulated within German society more broadly. It is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more relentlessly negative than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, pre- modern elites were constantly triumphing over the democratic opposition. But at least there was an opposition; and in the long run, time was on the side of that opposition, which in fact embodied the historical movement of modernization. In the new model, there is virtually a biopolitical consensus.92 And that consensus is almost always fundamentally a nasty, oppressive thing, one that par- takes in crucial ways of the essential quality of National Socialism. Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive, technocratic, top-down, constraining, limiting. Biopolitics is almost never conceived of - or at least discussed in any detail - as creating possibilities for people, as expanding the range of their choices, as empowering them, or indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of course, at the most simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of modernity that ignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow deeply flawed. To give just one example, infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in other words, one in five children died before reaching the age of one year. By 1913, it was 15 percent; and by 1929 (when average real purchasing power was not significantly higher than in 1913) it was only 9.7 percent.93 The expansion of infant health programs - an enormously ambitious, bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social engineering project - had a great deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to write a history of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an appreciation for how absolutely wonderful and astonish- ing this achievement - and any number of others like it - really was. There was a reason for the "' Machbarkeitswahn" of the early twentieth century: many marvelous things were in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to call it a " Wahn" (delusion, craziness) at all; nor is it accurate to focus only on the "inevitable" frustration of "delusions" of power. Even in the late 1920s, many social engineers could and did look with great satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had the power to accomplish. Concretely, moreover, I am not convinced that power operated in only one direction - from the top down - in social work. Might we not ask whether people actually demanded welfare services, and whether and how social workers and the state struggled to respond to those demands the different dynamics (and histories) of different programs. The removal of children from their families for placement in foster families or reformatories was bitterly hated and stubbornly resisted by working-class families; but mothers brought their children to infant health clinics voluntarily and in numbers, and after 1945 they brought their older children to counseling clinics, as well. In this instance, historians of the German welfare state might profit from the "demand side" models of welfare development that are sometimes more explicitly explored in some of the international literature.95 In fact, even where social workers really were attempting to limit or subvert the autonomy and power of parents, I am not sure that their actions can be characterized only and exclusively as part of a microphysics of oppression. Progressive child welfare advocates in Germany, particularly in the National Center for Child Welfare, waged a campaign in the 1920s to persuade German parents and educators to stop beating children with such ferocity, regularity, and nonchalance. They did so because they feared the unintended physical and psychological effects of beatings, and implicitly because they believed physical violence could compromise the development of the kind of autonomous, self- reliant subjectivity on which a modern state had to rely in its citizenry.96 Or, to give another common example from the period, children removed from their families after being subjected by parents or other relatives to repeated episodes of violence or rape were being manipulated by biopolitical technocrats, and were often abused in new ways in institutions or foster families; but they were also being liberated. Sometimes some forms of the exercise of power in society are in some ways emancipatory; and that is historically significant. Further, of course we must ask whether it is really true that social workers' and social agencies' attempts to manipulate people worked. My own impression is that social policy makers grew increasingly aware, between the 1870s and the 1960s, that their own ends could not be achieved unless they won the cooperation of the targets of policy. And to do that, they had to offer people things that they wanted and needed. Policies that incited resistance were sometimes with glacial slowness, after stubborn and embittered struggles - de-emphasized or even abandoned. Should we really see the history of social welfare policy as a more or less static (because the same thing is always happening) history of the 95 imposition of manipulative policies on populations? I believe a more complex model of the evolution of social policy as a system of social interaction, involv- ing conflicting and converging demands, constant negotiation, struggle, and - above all - mutual learning would be more appropriate. This is a point Abram de Swaan and others have made at some length; but it does not appear to have been built into our theory of modernity very systematically, least of all in German history97 All of these questions, however, still address primarily the activities of tech- nocrats and social managers. We are still asking how bad social engineering is. In fact, this entire discourse seems to be shaped by the fundamental suspicion that trying actively to create a better society is always and necessarily a bad thing - an undemocratic, manipulative, oppressive thing.98 This assumption is rooted in a particular understanding of the micropolitics of expertise and pro- fessionalism. It is frequently argued that modern forms of technical knowledge and licensing create relations of dominance and subordination between experts and their "clients." Thus Paul Weindling, for example, asserted that, "Profes- sionalism, reinforced by official powers, meant that welfare defined new spheres for the exercising of coercion ... The new technocracy of professions and welfare administrators might be seen as erecting antidemocratic and coercive social structures by extending the welfare state." Michael Schwartz, similarly, observed in 1992 that "even in the democratic variant of science there was a tendency to technocratic elitism" and the "scientistic objectification of humanity."99 And Detlev Peukert reminded us that "rationalization as a strategy of experts inher- endy contained [barg systematisch] the danger of the technocratic arrogance of experts, the overwhelming of those affected by the catalog of norms for ratio- nal living derived from the expert knowledge of the professions, but not from the experience of those affected."100 Even more sinister, again, is the tendency of these same experts to exclude, stigmatize, and pathologize those they are not able to "normalize." Zygmunt Bauman has presented the same case with a particular clarity, concluding that since modernity is "about" order, and order always implies its opposite, chaos, "intolerance is . . . the natural inclination of modern practice. Construction of order sets the limits to incorporation and admission. It calls for the denial of rights, and of the grounds, of everything that cannot be assimilated - for the de-legitimation ofthe other."101 At its simplest, this view ofthe politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this "micropolitical" dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy - in Germany left- liberals and Social Democrats - have been also the greatest advocates of every kind of biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half ofthe twentieth century appears to be the great age of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen - including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an ever more restrictive "iron cage" of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems in fact to be at least equally true. Oddly enough, fundamentally our vision of science and the welfare state sounds rather Hke Hberal and conservative critiques of science and the welfare state any time between the 1880s and the 1950s. Critiques of the iron cage of rationality and of the moral emptiness of instrumental and scientific rationality were commonplaces in the milieu of left-liberal social science, or in the milieu of conservative Christian social teaching, at the very moment when the whole complex of biopolitics was being aggressively constructed. Nor is the idea that Auschwitz was a product ofthe Enlightenment particularly new. Christian critics warned of the murderous potentials of Darwinist thought for decades before 1933, and by the 1950s Auschwitz could be taken by many critics of modernity as merely a confirmation of an analysis they had long championed - as when, 101 for example, in 1954 Hugo Miiller saw in the impersonal rules and procedures of the welfare state a glaring example of a process of dehumanization, deper- sonalization, and alienation that began with Kant's commitment to abstract moral imperatives and culminated in a program of mass murder that sacrificed individual persons in the name of the abstraction "humanity."103 And at root our vision shares something important with that of the conservative Catholic min- isterial official Friedrich Rothe, who remarked before the FRG's Federal Council on Youth Affairs in 1957 that the "dissolution of ethical principles" that underpinned and resulted from the expansion of the welfare state was "unconsciously preparing our delivery into the hands of totalitarian forces."104 This kind of analysis may or may not be partially correct; but it seems to me that we should take care not to allow our theorization of modernity to be overly influenced by the perspective of the German Bildungsbiirgertum, who viewed it with profound and not quite disinterested pessimism. In any case, the focus on the activities and ambitions of the social engineers in the literature on biopolitical modernity has begun to reach the point of diminishing returns. In the current literature, it seems that biopolitics is almost always acting on (or attempting to act on) people; it is almost never something they do. This kind of model is not very realistic. This is not how societies work. The example of the attempt to create a eugenic counseling system in Prussia should be instructive in this respect. Here public health and eugenics experts - technocrats - tried to impart their sense of eugenic crisis and their optimism about the possibility of creating a better "race" to the public; and they success- fully mobilized the resources of the state in support of their vision. And yet, what emerged quite quickly from this effort was in fact a system of public con- traceptive advice - or family planning. It is not so easy to impose technocratic ambitions on the public, particularly in a democratic state; and "on the ground," at the level of interactions with actual persons and social groups, public policy often takes on a life of its own, at least partially independent of the fantasies of technocrats. This is of course a point that Foucault makes with particular clarity. The power of discourse is not the power of manipulative elites, which control it and impose it from above. Manipulative elites always face resistance, often effective, resistance. More important, the power of discourse lies precisely in its ability to set the terms for such struggles, to define what they are about, as much as what 103 their outcomes are. As Foucault put it, power - including the power to manage life - "comes from everywhere."105 Biomedical knowledge was not the property only of technocrats, and it could be used to achieve ends that had little to do with their social-engineering schemes.106 Modern biopolitics is a multifac- eted world of discourse and practice elaborated and put into practice at multiple levels throughout modern societies. And of course it is often no less economistic - no less based on calculations of cost and benefit - at the level of the individual or family than it is in the technocrats' visions of national efficiency. In fact, the literature of the past twenty years has made it abundantly clear that a great deal of "official" biopolitical discourse generated by academics and civil servants was essentially reactive. A vast amount of discussion among eugenics, population policy, and welfare experts focused on the concrete "problem" of the demographic transition of the early twentieth century. It was the use of reproductive knowledge and reproductive technology by millions of Europeans to limit their fertility ? the Geburtenruckgang or decline of births, in German parlance ? that was the center of concern. While much of the historical literature stresses the role of science in shaping technocratic ambition, of course actually a large proportion of the technocrats' discourse was concerned with orchestrating a return to more "natural" and less technologically-enabled reproductive patterns. The problem, particularly for the more influential moderate and pronatalist branch of eugenics, was not only how to apply modern science to humanity, but more importantly how to get humanity to stop applying modern science to itself. Atina Grossmann, in her history of the organized mass popular movement for fertility control in Germany in the 1920s, has given us a good example of what this shift in perspective can reveal. Grossmann stresses the technocratic ambition and relatively conservative intent of many medical sex reformers, the power of the "motherhood-eugenics consensus" to shape and limit acceptable definitions of women's social and sexual roles and aspirations in this period, and the preva- lence of the rhetoric of "social health, medicalization, cost effectiveness, and national welfare." And yet, in the final analysis she describes a powerful reform movement that helped to spread contraceptives and contraceptive knowledge widely among the German population. Popular groups were "increasingly insistent that the working class also had a right to the beneflts of scientific progress" (in the form of contraceptive technologies); and while most of the medical establishment opposed the widespread use of contraceptives, the pop- ular movement garnered critical support from radical sociaHsts within the med- ical profession. As Grossmann remarks, "the German case is instructive precisely because it illustrates the fallacies of setting up rigid categories of 'popular' and 'professional.'"107 In short: is the microphysics of modern power/knowledge always the micro- physics of oppression, exploitation, and manipulation? Are technocratic elites always in charge of the imperatives of discourse ? or do discourses have their own logic, which technocrats can define, escape or direct no more (or less) than can anyone else? Discourse may or may not be a locomotive, driving down a predetermined track and dictating individual decisions and fates by its own internal logic; but even if it is, the technocrats aren't driving it, and in fact their schemes may get flattened just as effectively as the autonomy of the average citizen. Biopolitical policy as a field of state activity was often the product of technocratic "readings" of biopolitical discourse. But it was only one small part of a much broader process by which a large proportion of the German population came to define their needs and aspirations in new ways. We need not exagger- ate the degrees of freedom that process generated to be able to appreciate that in some cases, to some extent, and sometimes willy-nilly, discourse and policy were actually a response to that broader process of redefinition ? in short, to "demand-side" pressures. Uncoupling "technocracy" from "discourse" is not yet enough, however. We should also be alive to the ways in which new social practices, institutions, and knowledge generated new choices ? a limited range of them, constrained by all kinds of discursive and social frameworks, but nonetheless historically new and significant. Modern biopolitics did create, in a real sense, not only new con- straints but also new degrees of freedom ? new levers that increased people's power to move their own worlds, to shape their own lives. Our understanding of modern biopolitics will be more realistic and more fruitful if we reconcep- tualize its development as a complex process in which the implications of those new choices were negotiated out in the social and discursive context. Again, in the early twentieth century many more conservative biopolitical "experts" devoted much of their energy precisely to trying - without any discernable success - to control those new degrees of freedom. For most social liberals and Social Democrats, however, those new choices were a potential source of greater social efficiency and social dynamism. State policy reflected the constant negotiation and tension between these perspectives. Nor should we stop at a reexamination of knowledge and technology. It might make sense, too, to reexamine the process of institution-building, the elaboration of the practices and institutions of biopolitics. No doubt the cre- ation of public and private social welfare institutions created instruments for the study, manipulation, or control of individuals and groups. But it also generated opportunities for self-organization and participation by social groups of all kinds. Grossmann's birth control movement was but one instance of the explo- sive growth of the universe of associational life in the field of biopolitics, which itself was only one small part of a much broader development: the self-creation of a new, urban industrial social order, the creation of a self-government of soci? ety through myriad nongovernmental organizations. In these organizations, cit- izens were acting to shape their own lives in ways that were often fundamentally important as part of lived experience - ofthe "life world." Of course there was nothing inherently democratic about these organizations or their social func- tions ? many were authoritarian in structure, many cultivated a tendentially elitist culture of expertise, and some pursued exclusionary and discriminatory agendas. Nevertheless, they institutionalized pluralism, solicited participation, enforced public debate, and effectively sabotaged simple authoritarian govern- ment. Again, National SociaHst totalitarianism was in part a response precisely to the failure of poHtical, social, and cultural elites to contain and control this proHferation of voices, interests, and influence groups.108 Private organizations, further, were not the only ones that helped to build habits and structures of participation. The German state deliberately recruited citizens and nongovernmental organizations to help it formulate and implement welfare poHcy. It had to, for no state could possibly mobiHze the resources nec? essary for such a gigantic task. And of course often the poHcy initiative came from the other direction ? from private organizations engaged in elaborating biopoHtical discourses of various kinds, and working to mobiHze the authority and resources ofthe state to achieve the ends they defined for themselves. That was an intended consequence of the creation of a democratic republic. As S. N. Eisenstadt wrote in 2000, an important part ofthe project of modernity was "a very strong emphasis on the autonomous participation of members of society in the constitution ofthe social and poHtical order."109 Again, the massive, state- orchestrated mobiHzation of the German population in the Nazi period or in the German Democratic RepubHc (not least in welfare organizations) should remind us that such mobiHzation is not necessarily democratic in nature; this is a point made amply for the Weimar period too by, for example, Peter Fritzsche.110 But obviously, it could be, and in fact, before 1933 and after 1949 in the Federal RepubHc of Germany, very often was We know that eugenics, public health, and welfare all appealed across the polit? ical, religious, and ideological spectrum, and around the world, in the early twentieth century. We know that strategies of biopolitical management that were in important ways fundamentally similar were adopted throughout the European world ? in Sweden, Italy, France, England, the United States, even arguably in the Soviet Union ? in this period, and in the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the two postwar German states. "The social" as a discursive field is modern, it is not a peculiarity of any national his? tory. National Socialist racial policy was an extreme case of a general phenom? enon. These patterns pose a simple but important question: what was the relationship between biopolitics and regime form? One answer might be to argue ? as Michael Schwartz and Peter Fritzsche have suggested ? that regimes that arise for reasons having little to do with this aspect of modernity "choose" their biopolitics to suit their needs and princi? ples. Victoria de Grazia, for example, has suggested that differing class coalitions determine regime forms, and that regime forms determine the "shape" of biopolitics.111 This is obviously not the approach that has predominated in the literature on Germany, however, which has explored in great depth the positive contribution that modern biopolitics made to the construction of National Socialism. This approach may well exaggerate the importance of biopolitics; but, in purely heuristic terms, it has been extremely fruitful. I want to suggest that it might be equally fruitful to stand it on its head, so to speak. One could easily conclude from this literature that modern biopolitics "fits" primarily authoritarian, totalitarian, technocratic, or otherwise undemocratic regimes, and that democracy has prevailed in Europe in the teeth of the development of technocratic biopolitics. Again, however, the history of twentieth-century Germany, including the five decades after World War II, suggests that this is a fundamentally implausible idea. A more productive conclusion might be that we need to begin to work out the extent and nature of the positive contribu- tion biopolitics has made to the construction also of democratic regimes. Why was Europe's twentieth century, in addition to being the age of biopol- itics and totalitarianism, also the age of biopolitics and democracy- How should we theorize this relationship? I would like to offer five propositions as food for thought. First, again, the concept of the essential legitimacy and social value of indi- vidual needs, and hence the imperative of individual rights as the political mechanism for getting them met, has historically been a cornerstone of some strategies of social management. To borrow a phrase from Dedev Peukert, this does not mean that democracy was the "absolutely inevitable" outcome of the development of biopolitics; but it does mean that it was "one among other pos? sible outcomes ofthe crisis of modern civiHzation."112 Second, I would argue that there is also a causal fit between cultures of exper? tise, or "scientism," and democracy. Of course, "scientism" subverted the real, historical ideological underpinnings of authoritarian poHties in Europe in the nineteenth century. It also in a sense replaced them. Democratic citizens have the freedom to ask "why"; and in a democratic system there is therefore a bias toward pragmatic, "objective" or naturaHzed answers ? since values are often regarded as matters of opinion, with which any citizen has a right to differ. Scientific "fact" is democracy s substitute for revealed truth, expertise its substi- tute for authority. The age of democracy is the age of professionalization, of technocracy; there is a deeper connection between the two, this is not merely a matter of historical coincidence. Third, the vulnerabiHty of expHcitly moral values in democratic societies cre- ates a problem of legitimation. Of course there are moral values that aU demo? cratic societies must in some degree uphold (individual autonomy and freedom, human dignity, fairness, the rule of law), and those values are part of their strength. But as people's states, democratic social and poHtical orders are also implicitly and often expHcitly expected to do something positive and tangible to enhance the weU-being of their citizens. One of those things, of course, is simply to provide a rising standard of living; and the visible and astonishing suc? cess of that project has been crucial to aU Western democracies since 1945. Another is the provision of a rising standard of health; and here again, the democratic welfare state has "delivered the goods" in concrete, measurable, and extraordinary ways. In this sense, it may not be so simpleminded, after all, to insist on considering the fact that modern biopolitics has "worked" phenome- nally well. Fourth, it was precisely the democratizing dynamic of modern societies that made the question of the "quality" of the mass of the population seem - and not only in the eyes of the dominant classes - increasingly important. Again, in the course ofthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the expected level of the average citizens active participation in European political, social, cultural, and economic life rose steadily, as did the expected level of her effective influence in all these spheres. This made it a matter of increasing importance whether the average person was more or less educated and informed, more or less moral and self-disciplined, more or less healthy and physically capable, more or less socially competent. And modern social reform ? "biopolitics" defined very broadly ? seemed to offer the possibility of creating the human founda- tion for a society ordered by autonomous participation, rather than by obedi- ence. This too was part of the Machbarkeitswahn of modernity; but this was potentially a democratic " Wahn," not only an authoritarian one. Fifth, historically there has been a clear connection between the concept of political citizenship and the idea of moral autonomy The political "subject" (or citizen ? as opposed to the political subject, who is an object of state action) is also a moral subject. The citizen s capacity for moral reasoning is the legitimat- ing postulate of all democratic politics. The regulation of sexual and reproduc- tive life has long been understood in European societies to be among the most fundamental issues of morality There is, therefore, a connection between polit? ical citizenship on the one hand, and the sexual and reproductive autonomy implied in the individual control that is a central element ofthe modern biopo? litical complex, on the other. The association in the minds of conservatives in the late imperial period between democracy and declining fertility was not a panicky delusion; panicky it certainly was, but it was also a genuine insight into a deeper ideological connection.113 Perhaps it should not be surprising, therefore, that the first great homeland of eugenic legislation was the United States ? the first great homeland of mod? ern democracy. In fact the United States served both as a kind of promised land for racial and eugenic "progressives" in Germany, and as a worst-case scenario of "regression into barbarism" for those opposed to coercive eugenic mea? sures.114 Nor should it be surprising that, apart from Nazi Germany, the other great land of eugenic sterilization in Europe in the 1930s was Scandinavia, where democratic governments heavily influenced by social democratic parties were busily constructing the most ambitious and extensive welfare states in the world.115 The lesson is not that modern democracy is "dangerous" or destructive, much less that it is crypto-fascist ? that, as Jacques Donzelot put it, the 1930s was the age of "social fascism" and our own age that of "social sector fas? cism."116 The relevant message is, rather, that it is time to place the less familiar history of modern democratic biopolitics alongside the more familiar history of modern totalitarian biopolitics. The dream of perfectibility ? Machbarkeits? wahn? is central to modernity. But social engineering, the management of 113. This is an issue addressed in Edward Ross Dickinson, "The Men's Christian Morality Movement in Germany, 1880-1914: Some Reflections on Sex, Politics, and Sexual Politics," Journal of Modern History 75 (2003). 114. Weingart et al., Rasse, 287 (quotation), 363-64; Richter, Katholizismus, 201; Weiss, "The Race Hygiene Movement," 26. 115. See Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland (East Lansing, 1996). 116. Philippe Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York, 1979), 174-75, 187. This content downloaded from 107.77.193.110 on Mon, 20 Jul 2020 18:38:36 UTC All use subject to http 48 BIOPOLITICS, FASCISM, DEMOCRACY society, can be organized in different ways. HistoricaUy, totalitarian biopolitics was a self-destructive failure. Democratic biopolitics has, in contrast, been ? not in any moral sense, but poHtically ? a howHng success. For the historian interested in modernity, that story is no less interesting or important than the story ofthe implosion ofthe Nazi racial state.