A study of the critical theory of "civil society" from the perspective of post-Foucaultian biopolitics. This book pursues the possibility of an affirmative politics of life based on what Arendt called natality, a "surplus of life" that resists the oppressive government of life found in the capitalist political economy, in the liberal system of rights, and in the bourgeois family, and that offers a normative groundwork for a new "republic of the living."