Abstract

The article analyzes the possibilities and limits of the categorical apparatus and methodology of biopolitics as a concept of socio-humanitarian knowledge in describing the demographic dynamics of society. This article reconstructs the genealogy of the concept of biopolitics, traced in the meaningful development of this concept in the works of M. Foucault. M. Foucault offered his original vision of biopolitics when he linked its emergence and evolution with the evolution of European liberal law and the modern liberal state. Foucault’s biopolitics is, first of all, practices that grow out of an understanding of the role of the population as the main state resource; the other side of this is the transition from the coercive power of the sovereign to the bourgeois practices of “self-care”. However, the latter turns into a basis for legitimizing neoliberal practices of removing the state from the sphere of social regulation and discrediting the idea of a “welfare state”. The conclusion of the study is the statement that the concept of biopolitics, as it was formed in the works of the founders of this direction of socio-philosophical analysis, is a negative (critical) version of social ontology, since the assertion of the biological processes of the life of society as its basis actually contradicts the principle of human sociality. The applied result of the study is the identification of three strategies of biopolitics in the context of a pandemic social crisis.