Today’s word is “Biopower” (also sometimes referred to as bio-techno-power), first used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe how a state controls its citizens, not through negative means (such as the threat of death or physical coercion), but through more positive means such as by promoting a better life, namely by emphasising the protection of life. As the word implies with “bio”, it has a specific biological aspect to it.

According to Foucault, biopower is how capitalist and democratic societies controlled their citizens, and it was “an indispensible element” for the “development of capitalism” because it helped adjust “the phenomena of population to economic processes”.

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