Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory. Bios-his first book to be translated into English-builds on two decades of highly regarded thought, including his thesis that the modern individual-with all of its civil and political rights as well as its moral powers-is an attempt to attain immunity from the contagion of the extraindividual, namely, the community.

In Bios, Esposito applies such a paradigm of immunization to the analysis of the radical transformation of the political into biopolitics....