Mark Pennington, Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at King’s College London, spoke at Wabash College’s Stephenson Institute for Classical Liberalism on October 28.
In his new book, Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom, Pennington argues that Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power, biopolitics, and self-creation are more aligned with key modern liberal concerns than is often assumed. Rather than using Foucault to dismantle liberalism, Pennington draws parallels with thinkers like Friedrich Hayek to explain how Foucault aligns with the stream of modern liberal thought.
A main element is Foucault’s notion of “self-creation”: the idea that there is no fixed, inherent self, granting individuals the freedom and responsibility to continually remake themselves through experimentation and disruption. This resonates deeply with liberal ideals of autonomy, but Pennington warns of encroachment on the “space” for such recreation. Pennington uses “situated entrepreneurship” to describe this spin on Hayek’s knowledge-dispersed view of entrepreneurship as innovation.
Pennington contends that this liberty is endangered by the misuse of disciplinary power or states that surveil, normalize, and correct issues via “expert knowledge.” He illustrated this with the COVID-19 pandemic, where scientific experts used disproportionate authority, framing their insights in ways that amplified control and facilitated quick responses.
Pennington delivered a compelling case for “post-modern” liberalism that’s humble about centralized knowledge, celebrates decentralized experimentation, and guards against expert control in areas like public health, justice, and sustainability. It’s a fresh defense of liberalism rooted in thinkers like Hayek in a time of technocratic distrust.
