CSGS Director, Professor Mark Pennington will discuss his newly released book, Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom (Oxford University Press): Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom | Oxford Academic
The event will be introduced by Professor Robin Douglass from King’s Department of Political Economy.
Location: Bush House Central, 8th Floor North, King's College London. See here.
Abstract
Mark Pennington’s book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. It demonstrates important commonalities between Foucault’s ideas and those of a neglected ‘postmodern’ stream in liberal political and economic thought. These ideas draw on a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science sceptical of socio-economic ‘scientism’ and ‘expert rule’; and an understanding of freedom as an open-ended process of ‘self-creation’ in the face of cultural power relations—a freedom threatened by alignments between state power and more decentralised manifestations of power. The book proceeds to deploy Foucault’s critical social theory to problematise four overlapping ‘bio-political’ or ‘pastoral’ dispositifs in contemporary societies focused on social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and law and order. What unites these political configurations is a desire to correct ‘pattern anomalies’ – a desire that produces an immense apparatus of surveillance, classification and the ‘policing of truth’ which ‘over-governs’ individuals and their space for creative freedom. Though the book does not engage the question of whether Foucault himself moved towards endorsing this form of liberal social critique, it throws considerable light on how key Foucauldian concerns may be addressed within the liberal tradition and why Foucauldians may have reason to embrace a postmodern liberalism.
Those attending the launch will be eligible for a 30% discount on the cover price, if they visit the OUP website and use the discount code: AUFLY30
Speakers
Mark Pennington is Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at King’s College London where he directs the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society. His previous books include Planning and the Political Market: Public Choice and the Politics of Government Failure (Bloomsbury, 2001); and Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy (Edward Elgar, 2011).
Robin Douglass is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He is the author of Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will and the Passions, Oxford University Press, (2015) and most recently Mandeville’s Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy and Sociability (Princeton University Press, 2023).
