Jean Bodin, Population and Biopolitics

The purpose of this paper, which is a draft of a forthcoming dissertation chapter, is to pinpoint Jean Bodin’s contributions to the theory of population politics, which is a part of the political philosopher’s oeuvre left virtually untouched by previous research. This goal is achieved by comparing Bodin’s ideas on the quality and the quantity of the population to the ones of the classics, those of the medieval thinkers and those of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries. Thomas Robert Malthus’ 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population was the first truly influential and explicit work on the concept of population. Since population is one of the key concepts to Michel Foucault’s political thought, especially regarding his theories on biopolitics and governmentality, one would imagine that he would have studied the concept’s genealogy more extensively. However as Mitchell Dean and others have noted, Foucault does not dwell on the subject and fails to detail its history. Even though Malthus was the first to bring the concept of population explicitly to the matrix of economics it would be unwise to claim that biopolitics could not have existed before this recent moment in history. Bodin’s work marks a shift in what is today called population politics. He discusses the quality and quantity of subjects and takes a profoundly different position than that of his own contemporaries and the medieval and classical thinkers who traditionally wanted to limit the population to a fixed number. Bodin absolutely disputes the need for such limitations by arguing that one should never worry about there being too many citizens. According to him, the multitude of men is the greatest wealth and power. He believes that a larger population is necessarily better since a heavily populated commonwealth is a more balanced one and, therefore, has less sedition, while revolutions tend to occur in less populous commonwealths. A heavily populated commonwealth has more people in the intermediating position between the rich and the poor or the good and the bad. This large “middle-class” stops the people from polarizing into two opposing factions. In a similar fashion Bodin talks about the risks of censuses. Among other problems, it would be easier for the disenfranchised people to count their own numbers and revolt. For Bodin, more life means stability and power; therefore life should be maximized, not limited. Bodin also has several piercing ideas on issues such as race and controlling the quality of the population, which are matters that are today considered as biopolitics.