Abstract

In this dissertation, I seek to answer two critical questions. First, what transformations have occurred in American political culture such that, in 1798, when the U.S. Congress enacted one of the first pieces of health-related legislation the heart of the debate was whether providing for the health care of the citizenry was a legitimate object for governmental action, but when, 200 years later, Congress debates health care legislation the issue is no longer whether the state should take action but what action the state should take? Second, what form would a Foucauldian approach to this question take and what answers would such an approach produce? Accordingly, the dissertation has a two-fold focus: an analysis of Michel Foucault's methodologies of archaeology and genealogy and of his thought concerning discourse, power, and government; a deployment of that analysis in an investigation of the production of American political culture since the founding of the American Republic in 1787--1788. In other words, the critical problem the dissertation addresses concerns the development and application of Foucauldian critical methodologies to the analysis of American political culture. Chapter One introduces both the investigation of Foucault's thought about political culture and the critique of American political culture through an analysis of Understanding AIDS, a brochure the federal government sent to every household in the nation in 1988. The second chapter offers a close reading of Foucault's genealogy of Western political culture in order to establish a theory of bio-political culture. Chapter Three extends this investigation by reworking Foucault's theory of discourse and by deploying that theory in an archaeological analysis of the political discourse circulating during the debate over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. In the final chapter, I offer a genealogical analysis of the emergence of American bio-political culture during the first decades of the twentieth century, based upon Foucault's concept of power and power-knowledge relations. I conclude the dissertation by considering how the theory of political culture and the methodology for reading political cultural discourses and practices which I have developed might be used to analyze other state bio-political campaigns