And here again a number_of historical analyses are taken up again, like the famous problem ofthe Westerri economic takeoff in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. To what was this due? Was it due to the accumulation of physical capital? Historians are increasingly skeptical about this hypothesis. Was it not due precisely to the existence of an accumulation, an accelerated accumulation, of human capital?

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 1212