Socialism was the very foundation of biopolitical technique, it devolves into the cult of the superman sacrificing individualism for a national organism which causes the deepest entrenchment

Initially biopolitics was influenced by reformist ideas because it was inspired— even partially—both by the Socialist movement and the newly emerging feminist movement. When, in 1869, Francis Galton wrote the first treatise on social eugenics entitled The Hereditary Genius, he was clearly influenced by liberal individualism. The aim was the total, harmonious development of the individual and improvement of the living conditions of the working population. Eugenics appeared as a mixture of social protection, of benevolent coercion and of rhetoric, a strategy for institutionalising social protection, welfare in all countries. Thus biopolitics sought to maximise the health and well being of the population by offering new living and working conditions, overseeing the hygiene practises of individuals and promoting the right conditions for healthier living through town planning, control of epidemics and endemic illnesses, as well as by improving the conditions of work in industry. Furthermore this public health and hygiene programme sought to instil habits that would improve both the physical and moral health of each individual through public education, family involvement, and by state intervention in the field of the most common social areas of health disease. Many disciplines took care of public health. Social medicine was the most important of those disciplines. It was the outcome of a close union between the conquests of experimental sciences, such as medicine and of sociological disciplines. The targets of such ‘beneficial and harmonic unity’ were social diseases where ‘medicines, hygienists, lawyers and economists should come together’.9

A voluntaristic view: crowds and masses as a challenge to the biopolitics In the late 19th century a new vision of society emerged that challenged the optimistic view of theories of evolution, which envisaged slow, almost imperceptible improvements within society through state policies. Biopolitics played a crucial role in this reformist approach to controlling the balanced development of all parts of social organism, an approach that accorded with the views of both liberal democrats and moderate socialists. The conflict between ‘necessarism’ and voluntarism was crucial at this stage in the development of biopolitical strategies. While necessarism was based on the awareness of regularities that support economic evolution, voluntarism asserted that economic relationships depended on human will and human consensus. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the voluntaristic view of nationalism was developed by a number of writers who sought to influence public opinion and consensus by using a new rhetorical style. They encouraged intellectuals and the reading public to rebel against reason, rationality, positivism, erudition, materialism, democracy and historical method: such things must be spurned. The cult of the superman, leader, ‘duce’, of a small and aristocratic elite, gradually usurped the place of positivist utilitarian individualism. The new individualism was heroic and marked by virtue, in the sense that individuals had to sacrifice their interests to broader national values. Only a true genius, a leader, a dictator would be able to embody the mystic soul of the nation. Such a person would be the true manager, the mind behind the higher goals of the collective organism. Italian nationalists based their thinking on ‘elite theories’ elaborated by Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto who inspired nationalists to argue that only aristocracies are able to decode the ‘obscure (unknown) destiny’ of the nation and transform it into political action. The nation is an organism that lives and develops within its own boundaries, its qualities being determined by those who have gone before.