Nacimiento del biopoder

Abstract

Biopolitics needs a biopower that holds it, otherwise biopolitics remains as an ordinary politics. In the birth of biopower the invention of vaccines and, particularly, the work of Louis Pasteur was certainly decisive. The supporters of vaccines used to present them as valuable contributions for the community. Nevertheless the adversaries who think that vaccination campaigns are despotic procedures led by the governments also emerged from the start. Resistance to campaigns were oartuculary challenging in societies where liberalism –both, politics and economics- ruled the scene, as happened in United Kingdom and United States. The article reviews this history and considers that the creation and the development of vaccines represent a paradigm of the advocacies and resistances to biological mesures that affect the human life, i.e., a pardigm of the biopower.