The Fourth Age of Security

Frédéric Gros (1)

1 CEVIPOF - Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (Sciences Po, CNRS)

In this essay I discuss what I call the four ages of security. My reconstruction of the four great ages of security owes much to the work of Foucault, and I will address the idea of biopolitics through the lens of the fourth age of security. The four ages of security refer neither to social or political practices, nor to representations or mentalities. They stand for four great historical problematizations of security that Foucault marked out, but did not fully develop. For that matter, the concepts of “security” and “biopolitics” were never objects of any sustained conceptual elaboration on Foucault’s

Keywords: Security; Historical problematizations of security; Biopolitics

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Philosophy; Humanities and Social Sciences; Political science

Frédéric Gros. The Fourth Age of Security. Vanessa Lemm; Miguel Vatter. The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, Forham University Press; Forham University Press, pp.17 - 28, 2014, 9780823255986. ⟨hal-03583127⟩