Seen from a purely existential perspective, the accusations and the protests are not entirely unjustified. Who would deny that the coronavirus restrictions have been oppressive and suffocating? What Melburnian doesn’t want to be released from lockdown? There is, however, an enormous difference between how lockdown feels as a lived experience and what it represents as a political reality. While accusations of a police state make for powerful rhetoric, they ultimately do little more than testify to the poverty of our political concepts in the face of the unprecedented. The more we learn about this highly contagious and uncommonly lethal virus, the more old verities like ‘liberal is good’ and ‘authoritarian is bad’ lose their power to illuminate or guide. Though it is not really to the credit of Tony Abbott, the strange amalgam ‘health dictatorship’ says a great deal about the peculiar nature of the power we have fallen under and the difficulty we have in making sense of it. Health dictatorship? That would be a strange dictatorship indeed. Fortunately, there is a much better word for it: ‘biopower’.

Although the term biopower will no doubt sound foreign to many ears, Covid-19 has given Australians (and many others around the world) a firsthand experience of it. Coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, biopower refers to the political regulation of life itself. In lectures given at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, Foucault linked the advent of biopower with the emergence of statistics (literally the records of the state) during the eighteenth century. As the state acquired the technical capacity to measure births, deaths, morbidity, longevity, and many other essentially biological phenomena, it finally became possible for it to know, or paint a picture of, the health of the population as a whole. Assembled serially in time, statistical information allowed governments to detect irregularities in various ‘life processes’ – birth rates, death rates, morbidity rates – and intervene in them as necessary in order to re-establish their natural equilibrium. Corresponding to the moment when the biological came under state control, suggested Foucault, it was the advent of biopower that truly marked the threshold of modernity. If the ultimate expression of state power had once been found in the ancient sovereign right to take life away (‘to put to death’), it was now found in the capacity to administer, multiply, and optimise it (‘to make live’). Modernity, on his reckoning, was the age of biopower.

For Foucault, one of the clearest markers of this entry of power into life was to be found in the domains and sciences that suddenly took on political significance. The only reason, on his account, that sexuality rose to prominence as a public issue in the nineteenth century was because it served as a critical locus of life processes. As a point of connection between the organic life of the individual and the biological life of the population, sexuality assumed a strategic importance that made it more or less impossible for the state to ignore. If one could control sexuality, noted Foucault, one could, as it were, ‘take possession of life’. Similarly, it was precisely because the biological was drawn into the ‘apparatuses of security’ in the nineteenth century that medicine (especially the branches associated with public hygiene) emerged as the great handmaiden of power. As a repository of knowledge about both the individual organism and biological processes, medicine became an indispensable aid to a power whose principal goal was to optimise the health and, with that, the productive power of the population.

Doubtless the general public, which has now spent the better part of a year wrestling with the coronavirus, will need little convincing of the entwinement of medicine and government that is constitutive of biopower. The daily newspapers tell the story: when it comes to the pandemic, it is not just column space that the politicians must share with the epidemiologists, it is authority as well. If the former command the rules, it is the latter who command the statistics. By now the public is also well accustomed to seeing their state and federal politicians joined by their respective chief health officers on the nightly news as the latter report on infection reproduction rates, modes of transmission, tolerable case numbers, and geographical hotspots. The numbers are dictated and, in their stubborn facticity, reveal themselves as the real dictator behind the dictator. ‘You can’t argue with this sort of data,’ said Andrews in justification of his refusal to ease the tight restrictions under which Melbourne is suffering. ‘You can’t argue with science.’ And nor can you, more or less. Medicine is not like an ideology, a view from ‘the left’ or ‘the right’, to which one might take an in-principle objection. But therein lies the difficulty – for both the public and the opposition. How is one meant to respond to restrictions on liberty imposed on the authority of science? Where does one turn for guidance?

 A protester at the Freedom Day protest at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne on September 5. (Michael Currie/Alamy Live News)

Thomas Hobbes might not be a bad place to start. As the first political theorist in the Western tradition to attempt to put politics on a scientific basis, Hobbes began from the premise that human beings were but ‘bodies in motion’ whose restlessness ceased only in death. On his thoroughly materialist account, motion was the only reliable sign of life and all human activity could be attributed to two fundamental drivers: desire and fear. To the first could be attributed our locomotion towards things (attraction), and to the second our locomotion away from them (aversion). Freedom, on Hobbes’s famously negative conception, was to be found in the absence of external impediments to this motion; that is, in the silence of the laws.

At first blush, this negative conception of liberty seems to cast doubt on the merit of rules. Yet the equivalence Hobbes drew between absolute liberty and total lawlessness revealed politics as a delicate balancing act between freedom and security. Left to their own devices, he noted, bodies in motion would inevitably come into conflict, either because they desired the same thing and fought to satisfy themselves or were fearful of one another and killed to secure themselves. Unless one was prepared to tolerate endless war among these bodies (and Hobbes wasn’t), one had no choice but to regulate their movement. In his famous work Leviathan (1651), published in the midst of the English Civil War, Hobbes elicits our support for an all-powerful sovereign who plays the role of the traffic cop, directing bodies around each other by way of those hand signals called laws. For him, the whole art of government lay in facilitating movement while avoiding collision.

Convinced by his experience of the Civil War that security was a more important value than liberty, Hobbes was happy to grant the sovereign considerable discretionary power to prevent collisions between those bodies in motion (including the censorship of opinions and doctrines that fomented dissent and brought citizens into conflict with one another). But if there is much in Hobbes to justify the label of authoritarian, he might be better seen as a highly risk averse actuary for whom the pre-eminence of life over liberty was a no-brainer. What good was the latter without the former? In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, governments around the world are rediscovering the wisdom of that order of priorities. Having, with the help of the epidemiologists, become apprised of the biological risks associated with bodies in motion, they have been willing to suspend basic rights in order to limit movement and save lives. Calling up emergency powers long forgotten, but always held in reserve, even in democracies, they have introduced hitherto unseen controls upon the body in motion to ensure their citizens do not become the unwitting vectors of a disease which needs only the merest of contacts (not a violent collision) in order to kill.

Current attempts by governments to control the body in motion through evening curfews, social distancing, home schooling, intimacy bubbles, travel restrictions, hotel quarantines, and all the rest go well beyond anything Hobbes imagined and thus reveal something about the distinctive nature of our current predicament. For Hobbes, the regulation of motion had no higher purpose than to stop trespasses. By clarifying what political subjects could rightly claim as their own – or, as he put it, by defining ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ – the sovereign made it clear both where the body in motion needed to stop and where the regulation of it needed to stop. Motion that did not harm, which did not result in collisions over ‘mine’ and ‘thine’, did not need to be proscribed and was in fact the basis of the vitality of the state.

Since it is exercised over life itself, biopower greatly extends the need for regulating the body in motion. Concerned with the political subject, not as a potential trespasser but as a site of biological processes – in this instance that of viral transmission – it is forced to proscribe motion that does not generate collisions over ‘mine’ and ‘thine’, but which still does significant ‘harm’. Though they commit no trespasses against other individuals, bodies in motion can easily compromise attempts to safeguard life at the level of the population – not least of all, of course, in a pandemic. Hence the harsh penalties currently being imposed on actions which, under normal circumstances, would be considered the sacred right of every democratic citizen: leaving home, going to work, staying out after dark. A dictatorship this would surely be, were it not for two things: the lack of arbitrariness in the restrictions and the great reluctance with which they are imposed.

The coronavirus pandemic has shown us just how far democracies can be taken from their fundamental principles by the logic of biopower. But there is nothing inherent in this peculiarly modern form of politics that opposes it to the free motion of the body. On the contrary, since it is only by way of circulation that life continues (and, in fact, continues to proliferate and expand), biopower is actually disposed towards a kind of laissez-faire. As Foucault noted, one of the surprising discoveries of statistics was that the biological processes operative at the level of the population have their own regularities and are inclined to achieve their own equilibrium. In the absence of an exceptional event like the current pandemic, the best thing a government could do to optimise the life (and, with that, the economic power), of the population was to leave things more or less alone. Its mission was not to contain bodies and lock them down, but to ensure that they were always in motion and their circulation maintained. The reason pandemics create a crisis for democratic governments is because they place them in the paradoxical position of having to protect life from itself. In the state of emergency, life must be refused what allows it to flourish – circulation – precisely so that it can survive.

Provided, therefore, he continues to follow the logic of biopower, Premier Andrews will be true to his word and will repeal the lockdown measures as soon as the infection numbers allow. Andrews is no dictator. He is just, like Hobbes, very risk averse. And who could blame him? In relation to the coronavirus, ‘once bitten, twice shy’ is not such a bad motto – as the emergence of second and third waves of infections around the world is beginning to show. With circulation comes infection and with infection comes restriction. It’s a vicious circle. This is not to say, of course, that there is no room for reasonable disagreement. When Andrews claims that you can’t argue with the data, he is only half right. The next phase of the pandemic is likely to see more scrutiny of the statistical modelling, greater precision in the classification of cases, and increased differentiation in regimes of restriction. Victoria, by necessity, has already set itself apart from the rest of Australia. Further distinctions are being made between rural and urban areas, and others relating to council wards or safe and dangerous workplaces may yet come. All of which will put pressure on the idea, crucial to national unity, that ‘we’re all in this together’. For the moment, a combination of faith in science, a sense of civic responsibility, and, of course, fear of death has prevented most healthy people from gathering for their freedom. Unlike dictatorships, biopower has logic on its side and logic is a great instrument of compliance.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.