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      In general, there are no a priori constraints dictating that some matters are intrinsically political and others are intrinsically not. As a matter of fact, these boundaries are drawn differently from culture to culture and from historical period to historical period. For example, reproduction became an intensely political matter in the 1890s in the US amid a panic about “race suicide.” By the 1940s, however, it was widely assumed that birth control was a “private” matter. Finally, with the emergence of the women’s movement in the 1960s, reproduction was repoliticized.¹¹

      Yet it would be misleading to suggest that, for any society in any period, the boundary between what is political and what is not is simply fixed. On the contrary, this boundary may itself be an object of conflict. For example, struggles over Poor Law “reform” in nineteenth-century England were also conflicts about the scope of the political. And as I shall argue shortly, one of the primary stakes of social conflict in late-capitalist societies is precisely where the limits of the political will be drawn.