Abstract

Economy belongs to positive biopolitics, as life-increasing biopower. Economy is then a kind of power-management, which rules behaviour according to governed subject's own inner aims (a system of ruling deriving from pastoral government), and also an economic agency managing natural needs. For these reasons economy is the preferred object of biopolitics. The Author suggests that in his Courses of '78-'79 Foucault describes the displacement of classical antagonism between political government and economical agency towards libertarian and anti-statist forms. A form of pastoral government is still present in actual bioeconomics.