Biblical imagery presents the shepherd and his flock as representations of kingship and statecraft. Unlike the ruler as a warrior, whose primary role is to defend his subjects through violence, the pastoral depiction focuses on care and protection. However, the shepherd’s care for the flock can entail sacrifice of its own members. Interrogating pastoral power as it emerges in the contemporary nation-state shows the catastrophes that result when a politics of care is distorted into a politics of sacrifice. Scholarship on care, salvation, and political theology illustrate how to preserve a true politics of care.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli opens her book Economies of Abandonment with a description of Ursula K. Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Povinelli employs this metaphor to illustrate how liberal states, in their efforts to safeguard the liberty and rights they profess, do so by sacrificing others and exposing them to harm and death. Her work reveals the unequal distribution of benefits and suffering among various social groups under contemporary liberal policies.
Le Guin’s short story is set in the idyllic city of Omelas, whose prosperity and happiness rest on a public secret. The people of Omelas owe their happiness to the suffering and hardship of a child who is trapped in a dark and filthy enclosure. The people must accept this state of affairs if they want to live happily and enjoy the fruits of their ideal society. Through this story, Le Guin offers her audience a strong image to critique utilitarian ethical and political thinking. However, it also presents a vivid picture of our current social condition. The well-being and prosperity of our societies come at others’ expense.
Povinelli uses Omelas as a metaphor to illustrate how, under the contemporary neoliberal paradigm, letting die and killing are both employed to assert market dominance (22). She provides the example, “[i]f a social welfare program, for instance, can be shown to lengthen life and increase health, but cannot at the same time be shown to produce a market value, this lengthened life and increased health is not a value to be capacitated” (22).
This logic is epitomised by the cuts to social programmes in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which will leave countless people destitute and at risk. In a dark homage to the pastoral figure, Povinelli uses the film Killer of Sheep to illustrate the difficulties and challenges faced by marginalised groups who navigate a system designed to block their access to social mobility and who are the primary victims of the cuts to social programmes.
These measures, which have become a permanent feature of twenty-first-century politics, threaten the survival of those on the margins. In Argentina, Javier Milei has implemented similar measures, and during the financial crises of 2008 and 2012, these policies were the norm in many countries. These cuts are presented not as punitive measures but as a cure or medicine to save the economy, the state, and the people.
These processes reveal the unfolding of mechanisms of state power over vulnerable segments of the population and are therefore considered as a display of biopower or biopolitics. Categories of people such as low-income migrants, irregular migrants, asylum seekers, and low-income households are redefined as precarious lives and placed at risk and uncertainty to safeguard the economy or the health of the general population.
This was evident during the Covid-19 restrictions, during which certain jobs like food packing and processing, supermarket cashiers, and care workers were designated as essential and considered necessary to be put at risk for the benefit of the general population. As stated by an editorial published by The Lancet, “What constitutes an essential worker in the USA varies by state, but black and Latino Americans make up a large part of the essential workforce and have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19.”
Policies that sacrifice those on the margins in the name of the salvation of the nation are a manifestation of thanatopolitics. Whilst biopolitics is concerned with the management and ordering of life, thanatopolitics revolves around the administration of death. In these sacrificial events, we experience a merging of the two, whereby the lives of the collective or of certain categories of the population are “safeguarded” through the deaths of others. The administration of life happens through the administration of death.
I argue that this mechanism embodies a distinct logic of power: pastoral power. Michel Foucault identifies this form of power in his critique of power and the rationalisation of power. In his lecture Omnes et Singulatim, Foucault illustrates how the state can govern all through a process of individualisation, or knowledge of each individual.
More crucially for this discussion, he argues that the figure of the sovereign as shepherd is not of classical origin but is found in Near Eastern cultures, such as Ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Hebrew culture, and later in Christianity. Both Foucault and Giorgio Agamben after him focus on the Christian pastorate as their source material and therefore develop their notion of pastoral power from there.
Pastoral power is associated with the figure of the pastor or shepherd, who has authority over the flock to guide them towards their salvation successfully. According to Foucault and Agamben, this imagery has become paradigmatic of “economic” thinking, whereby pastoral power is interpreted as oikonomia psychon, economy of souls, a framework transformed in modernity into the government of individuals and people. This paradigm enables the development of forms of paternalistic discourse within the context of governance and state administration.
Seen as the antecedent of governmentality, the function of pastoral power is to guide and conduct souls toward salvation. Pastoral power is about the economy of souls; it is concerned with the conduct and fate of every individual and is associated with the establishment of the ecclesia. This form of power is presented as a benevolent force that cares for everyone and is interested both in the way that every individual lives their life and in making every individual responsible for themselves by inducing them towards self-regulation and self-governance, thus creating a conduct of conduct: the behaviour of controlling and directing one’s own behaviours.
Pastoral power functions as a totalising force that brings everyone into the fold and under its control; this means that no one is excluded, thus placing them under the jurisdiction of the shepherd who now has decisional power over them. This is most prevalent under late capitalism and the dominance of a market economy, whereby everyone is willingly or unwillingly part of the market and therefore may be considered as a potential sacrifice.
The Omelas style of governance seen in public spending cuts normalises the exercise of a pastoral power that enables and provides the necessary sacrifices from the flock it tends. In other words, salvation of the economy and the market can only be achieved through the sacrifice of a third party, like the child in Omelas. As shown by Wendy Brown, individual lives are subordinate to the “vicissitudes and exigencies” of the macroeconomic, “an order larger than oneself” that may necessitate the “destruction or deprivation of life in the name of sustaining or regenerating that order” (211-215).
Therefore, I argue that, in addition to the purpose of producing a conduct of conduct, the aim of pastoral power as identified by Foucault and Agamben is also to provide the “necessary” sacrifices. These are necessary to guarantee the prosperity and success of the whole— be it society at large, a business organisation, or the economy. Unfortunately, today we see a similar logic at play: state actors and policymakers choose members of the flock to sacrifice to the market (Mammon) or to assuage the needs of the rest of the flock or manipulate the overall outcome.
Alastair Roberts argues that although liberal states trace their foundations in contractarianism, they remain embedded in a politics of sacrifice. In our historical imaginary, the liberal state is presented as a beacon of freedom and protector of human rights; however, like the shepherd who protects and cares for the flock, the liberal state engages in sacrificial rituals and is willing to victimise members of its own flock. Javier Milei’s austerity measures included mass layoffs and reduced public spending, leading to widespread poverty. Here, the population is sacrificed at the altar of economic and financial stability in a similar way to what was done in Greece after 2008.
Under the guise of caring for the community, administrations enact measures against members of the same community. Published reports show how the Macron administration has used the establishment of housing shelters and social services across France as a means of forced relocation and accommodation. In these situations, it is evident that sections of the population and, in some instances, specific individuals are targeted to serve as scapegoats to be sacrificed for the benefit of the state or the community at large.
Those sacrificed may be political opponents, civil society members— especially human rights advocates–– minorities, or the impoverished. The rise of political groups like the AfD in Germany or the Reform UK party have further normalised discourse of sacrifice and scapegoating and have led mainstream parties to adopt such language and measures. In this atmosphere, saving the nation from economic, migratory, and political crises becomes possible only through the sacrifice of selected groups.
Even within state attempts to care, new forms of control or exclusion— what Miriam Ticktin calls “regimes of care”— arise (68). Ticktin highlights how France’s humanitarian policies enacted in the name of “care and compassion” reproduce “racial, gendered, and geopolitical hierarchies” and thwart possibilities for structural transformation (3-5).
Despite the centrality of sacrifice in pastoral power, I argue that through a political theological approach we may uncover and develop a pastoral power based on care and hope. Povinelli already points towards the possibility of developing forms of “counterdiscursive potentials” (185) in pastoral power. She refers to the figure of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who is representative of the figure of the shepherd, but, instead of making a sacrifice, he protects his flock by sacrificing himself in an act of “sacrificial love” (185-186).
Nancy Pineda-Madrid emphasises interdependent and social dimensions of care and salvation. She argues, “Salvation is always also social. When we strive to bring the crucified peoples of our time down from the cross, we not only give an account of our hope, but we may also catch glimpses of God’s saving presence revealed in human acts of resisting injustice and evil. Through these acts our interrelated nature becomes more visible. We see how we are bound to one another” (125).
Her idea of social salvation resonates with The Care Manifesto, which envisions a politics of care as a social project based on mutual recognition and respect for life, a social imaginary in which individuals recognise their interdependence. This vision leads towards the possibility of a new form of ethically driven and human-centred politics, one whose primary ambition is solidarity and care.
Therefore, states adopting a politics of care should reject state violence and focus on establishing and supporting care infrastructures that prioritize the marginalised and those who have been historically targeted and violated by the state. This formulation of a politics of care attempts to avoid the dangers of a politics of sacrifice.
This kind of political theology is expressed in the work of figures like Martin Luther King Jr., who, in his argument on the worth of persons, declared that “[d]eeply rooted in our political and religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth” (118) and that human civilization is the result of mutual cooperation and a responsibility to care for each other (122). This political thought provides new possibilities for the democratic process because it replaces a discourse of blame and sacrifice with one of hope, inclusion, and communal salvation.
Pastoral power may offer the possibility of a politics of hope and care, one that prioritises people over abstract notions like the market or national security. In this form of politics, human life at an individual and social level is given centre stage and prioritised. Salvation should not come at the expense of others, and the state’s role is not to sacrifice in the name of care but to care through structural transformation. A caring state would reject acts of violence and create structures of care in which the interests of everyone are considered and social benefits are distributed in a just manner among all groups.
