The term "biopolitics" had long been in use when it was brought into vogue in Academia by Michel Foucault to designate the liberal administration of health, hygiene, food, sexuality, the birth rate, etc., through various flexible and continuous measures such as nsurance pressures, proposed hygiene rules, incentive policies, with a view to controlling individuals and populations. The French sociologist Jacques de Mahieu (1915-1990), who used it as early as in the 1950s, gives it a quite different meaning: "In the course of our research, we shall see that the ethnic problem, when it has we shall see that the ethnic problem, when it has such, there is a question of the same order, which is already hinted at in everyday language. We say of a human being, as we do of a horse, that it "has breeding". This does not mean that he belongs to a particular ethnic group, but rather that he is distinguished by certain characters within his ethnic group. Once we have established that these characters are hereditary, we will have to admit, willingly or not, that within racial groups, there are categories of the same biopsychic nature as ethnic communities, in the true sense of the word. And once we have seen that these categories are of social importance, we will have to supplement ethnopolitics with genopolitics, and consider all hereditary processes, insofar as they play a part in the life of human communities. This is what biopolitics is all about."