ABSTRACT
Themes surface throughout Carl Schmitt’s complex 1950 work that appear to suggest a broad range of connections to Foucault’s notion of biopower and to various developments of the concept by others. Lacking space for any sort of overall assessment of these affinities, I will merely identify some passages that seem to offer the possibility of fruitful discussion. These passages concern the respective treatments by Schmitt and Foucault of the relations between ‘pastoral power’, ‘economy’ and the origins of modern political order. I will suggest that Schmitt recognized quasi-biopolitical dimensions of political order, though his analysis of their significance moved in different directions to that of Foucault. The divergences as well as the convergences, however, may help us see more clearly some of the questions left unanswered by a broadly Foucauldian approach to biopower. Given the limited length of these ‘reactions’, it will be necessary simply to bracket some very important issues to do with the ‘materialization’ or ‘concretization’ of any potential links between Foucauldian and Schmittian approaches to biopolitical questions. In particular, issues of the ‘scale’ of political relations are unavoidably raised by the basic fact that Schmitt focuses upon global orderings while Foucault concerns himself chiefly with ‘national’-level biopower. However, scale will be unceremoniously left aside here in favour of a somewhat old-fashioned conceptual comparison of textual passages. If the conceptual argument holds any water, then it may be worth pursuing issues such as that of scale further.
