The Nature of Nurture Politics

1. The Nature of Nurture Politics Hobbes and Rousseau

2. Biopolitics • Bios = life • Biopolitics = the bringing together of life and politics • For Esposito, ‘no power exists external to life, just as life is never given outside of relations to power. From this angle, politics is nothing other than the possibility or the instrument for keeping life alive.’ (Bios, 46)

3. Immunity • Hobbes = Immunizing yourself fearfully against others • Rousseau = Immunizing yourself to protect your ‘liberties’ • Immunizing in this context means ‘taking out of common’ and protecting oneself from what might be ‘common’: community, society, etc. But it also means defending oneself from that which is deemed as dangerous to what is immunized. • By looking at the ‘restricted-policy’ document it becomes clear how the Coalition are aiming to perpetuate assumptions about fear and liberality. • It also becomes clear how they directed by a paradigm of immunization.

4. Biopolitics and Immunity • As the realm of politics retracts from social life (funding cuts to the welfare state in support of ‘Big Society’ for example – or to comprehensive schools in favour of academies), certain immunities take over from others. • Individuals are no longer immunized against predatory private business interest - man is no longer protected from economic wolves in relation to basic necessities such as food, shelter, education and health (companies like Tesco, buy-to-letters, and the privatization of healthcare are particularly interesting to consider here). • As society immunizes itself against state intervention it becomes subject to other ‘diseases’.

5. Immunity • Immunity is complicit in community; for Esposito you cannot have one without the other. However, if the immunitary paradigm takes over, what it is protecting sometimes becomes rather difficult to determine. • Putting a microscope over the immunitary paradigm allows us to see how it frequently breaks down liberal communal values in favour of biological life and individual or group specific liberties. ‘Human nature’ frequently plays a big part in deciding what to immunize against.

6. What is immunized against? • The Nazis immunized themselves firstly against Jews, Gypsys, homosexuals, the disabled and so on. But this immunisation was also to include the non-German (or even non-Aryan as far as eugenics was concerned) in general. • The Aryan race was theoretically to be immunized against all others. • Neo-liberal capitalism (or free market liberal democracy) immunises itself against state sector workers, single mothers, the poor, the unemployed, the unemployable (including many disabled people), non-commercial enterprise, high taxation for the wealthy, and, in a general sense, anything that gets in the way of making more money. • The individual is to be immunized against anything that would restrict its ability to gain capital (this is not the same as giving everyone equal opportunities to gain capital). • Try to think what ‘competition’ immunizes itself againt.

7. Immune thoughts… • Diplomatic immunity? • Problems of antibiotics? • How does this relate to rigidity, plasticity and flexibility? • How does it relate to the supplement? • Have a look at this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/07/cutting-disabled-ill-people-benefits

8. Social Contracts • Esposito highlights fear (in Hobbes) and guilt (in Rousseau) as being the 'natural' motivators for law-making. • For Hobbes the natural disposition of man against all or ‘homo homini lupus’ (man is a wolf to man) is his prime move in the indidivual’s submission to the sovereign. • In return for the protection of his life by the sovereign the individual gives up his rights

9. Social Contracts • For Rousseau, the most important aspect of the legitimating of the social contract is making sure the people themselves (the community) have control over the laws and rights that operate for them. • Man is not naturally sociable or aggressive for Rousseau, he is primarily self-interested, which sometimes goes against sociability or agression

10. Self-interest and competition? • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC19fEqR5bA • Is this kind of perspective in line with both Rousseau and Hobbes or neither? • Is it their perspectives on human nature or their perspectives on the social contract that this exhibits? • Or, again, both? • How might these perspectives affect how we think about childhood and education? • Is there any community left today in education or childcare? • Or are we all immunized against community? • And is this how we should educate our children to be?