3.a In his Collège de France lectures of 1975–76, Michel Foucault struggled to explain the complex and overlapping regimes of domination that followed on sovereign power after the sixteenth century. The sovereign concern with law and land was replaced in the seventeenth century by a disciplinary power focused on the norm and the body. Then, belatedly, as in the lecture course itself, a new force arose: biopower, with its practice, biopolitics. Biopolitics maintained normalization but extended the norm's regulatory scope from solitary bodies to entire populations—that is, to life itself. Birth and death, health, the size of the populace, and other factors became 'statistical," the concern of the state, and revealed themselves as the essence of the political. Discipline remained, but it perdured as the Ge-stell of biopower, to employ a term Foucault certainly knew but does not use. Kings were killed, but symbolically the monarch's head remained on the shoulders of the state; depersonalized, sovereignty witnessed, distantly and as if from above, the novel deployment of a double right over the death and the life of the subject (Foucault 2003, 36–40, 242–43).