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Bio-Political Economy
A Trail-Guide for an Inevitable Discipline

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.
Institute for the Study of Complex Systems
119 Bryant Street, Suite 212
Palo Alto, CA 94301 USA

Phone: (650) 325-5717
Fax: (650) 325-3775
Email: pacorning@complexsystems.org

© Research in Biopolitics (Volume 5),
Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson, eds.,
JAI Press, 1997, 247-277

"True innovation occurs when things are put together for the time that had been separate."

Arthur Koestler

"Bioeconomics" is a promising new interdisciplinary initiative, centered in economics, that resembles the more mature biopolitics movement in political science. Like biopolitics, bioeconomics is not associated with a monolithic vision; it is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of theoretical and research interests. The unifying thread is the linkage between economics and the life sciences, just as the term biopolitics has won acceptance as a broad label for various life science connections within political science. Here I will link these two interdisciplinary efforts together by proposing an analytical paradigm that combines bioeconomics and biopolitics (with a minor in anthropology). In this paradigm, an organized society can be characterized as a "collective survival enterprise," a conceptualization which involves a hierarchy of organized survival-related activities, from individual hygiene to the life-and-death decisions of governments. The focus of this paradigm -- the "core" theoretical issue -- is the biological problem of survival and reproduction for the human species, which can be operationalized provisionally with a framework of explicitly defined and measurable "basic needs." (Some 13 primary needs and a number of variable "instrumental" needs are identified, some of which are supported by a large body of research.) Accordingly, bioeconomics (as here defined) is concerned with the relationship between economic activity and the satisfaction of basic survival needs. Likewise, biopolitics in this paradigm is focussed on the cybernetics of the survival enterprise -- organized "survival strategies" and behaviors. The proposed interdiscipline -- which might be called "bio-political economy" -- involves the inextricable relationship between economic and political factors with reference to the overall survival problem. The ethnographic literature is already rich with relevant case studies, and there are numerous case-studies in contemporary public policy as well. Although there are some formidable analytical challenges associated with this paradigm, it is argued that many useful insights can be obtained by systematically exploring economic and political processes conjointly from a biological survival and basic needs perspective.

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