Mika Ojakangas is Professor of Political Thought, Rhetoric and Culture in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

1. Introduction

2. Foucault on Biopolitics

3. Aristotle's Biopolitics of Population

4. Plato's Biopolitical State Racism 1: The Republic

5. Plato's Biopolitical State Racism 2: The Laws

6. Platonic-Aristotelian Biopolitical Justice

7. Decline of Biopolitics in Late Antiquity

8. Rebirth of Biopolitics in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

9. Conclusion

This book focuses on the Greek origins of biopolitics, arguing that, contrary to Foucault's view, biopolitics is not exclusively a modern idea, but is as old as western political thought itself. Ojakangas discusses Plato and Aristotle, in particular their most famous books on politics and administration: Plato's Republic and Laws, and Aristotle's Politics, demonstrating that they not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics, but that these bio-political topics are the very keystone of politics and government. This book shows that, without the renaissance of this world, it is possible that western politics would never have become biopolitics.