ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that eighteenth-century investigations of insects—whether for the purposes of natural history or for its concrete application in pest management—provided a site for the construction of the new abstraction that would come to structure the as yet nascent field of political economy: the “population.” The Physiocrats, a group of thinkers gathered around the court physician François Quesnay, are often considered to have formulated the first coherent theory of political economy. The abstract debate on the relation between population and territory was made visible and concrete in writings on insect pest control. The chapter shows that the emergence of “biopower”—and the concomitant creation of a new kind of human subject as both an individual and part of the population—as conceptualized by Foucault is not thinkable without the re-conceptualization of animality that took place at the same time. The abstract debate on the relation between population and territory was made visible and concrete in writings on insect pest control.
