The Libertarian Case for Postmodernism
Political economist Mark Pennington draws on the ideas of Hayek and Foucault to show how expert rule and government surveillance are making it harder for people to think freely and live on their own terms.
What if one of the sharpest critics of centralized power, bureaucratic surveillance, and top-down social control wasn't a libertarian economist but a French postmodernist? And what if one of the economists most vilified by the left wasn't a cold-hearted market fundamentalist but a thinker obsessed with the limits of knowledge and the dangers of planning?
Today's guest is King's College London political economist Mark Pennington, author of the new book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom. A self-declared postmodernist libertarian, Pennington explores the common ground between Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek. He talks with Nick Gillespie about how Foucault's critiques of expert rule, scientism, and the construction of subjectivity can bolster the classical liberal fight for freedom—and how Hayek's warnings about the pretense of knowledge might offer the left a way to resist domination without defaulting to centralized authority.
If you're a libertarian who thinks Foucault is just woke nonsense—or a progressive who sees Hayek as a neoliberal villain—this conversation will blow your mind in the best way possible.
0:00 – Intro
1:20 – What is a postmodern Austrian political economist?
5:07 – Scientism and Hayek
10:45 – The limits of postmodernism
17:46 – The intersection of Foucault and Hayek
30:12 – Systems of control and surveillance
37:39 – Foucault's warnings on government authority
49:57 – Creating a postmodern liberal political economy
1:01:29 – Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
1:08:21 – Have we learned anything from Foucault and Hayek?
Upcoming Events:
The Soho Forum Debate: Glenn Greenwald vs. Anna Gorisch, August 12
________________________________________________________________
Transcript
This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: Mark Pennington, thank you for talking to Reason.
Mark Pennington: Thank you. It's great to be here Nick.
So let's start, you know, before we get into a discussion of your book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy—the new book, which is absolutely fascinating, and I think anybody interested in libertarian politics or in Foucault—and I think there's you, me, and about five other people that are in that intersection, but everybody should be.
But I want to read your Twitter bio and have you explain it a little bit to me. You are a "Professor of Political Economy at King's College London." OK, I understand. Everybody gets that. And then you say: "Post-modern Austrian political economist, Foucault Fan, Hayek Fan, classical liberal individualist."
And, you know, as somebody who's—I've been working at Reason since 1993. I went to grad school for literary and cultural studies from 1988 to 1993. And when I see "Post-modern Austrian political economist, Foucault Fan, Hayek Fan, classical liberal individualist," I just see all of the people that I went to school with—my professors and students and colleagues, classmates—their heads kind of exploding. This is an interesting mix.
Let's start first with the idea of: What does it mean to be a postmodern Austrian political economist?
Well, I think it refers to the idea that people who call themselves postmodernists are skeptical of universal truth claims. They're very skeptical about the access claims, as they would say, of scientific reason.
And as Lyotard, Jean Lyotard, says, "To be postmodern is to be incredulous toward metanarratives."
Absolutely, absolutely. And I see an important thread in— not in all of Austrian economics—but especially the thread that's been influenced by Hayek, but you can also see it in people like Ludwig Lachmann, George Shackle, and Don Lavoie, as being very compatible with this kind of a view.
There's a kind of radical skepticism of scientific claims. That doesn't mean that you throw out all claims to scientific reason, but it means you have a very particular understanding of what scientific rationality might imply.
And so, I mean, in a way—or the way that I think about this, because I see myself in that postmodern Austrian school of economics—it's really kind of emphasizing the limits of our knowledge rather than the extent, especially as that applies to public policy and the way that people are overtly or covertly governed.
I think that's right. And I think what underlies that, but which often doesn't come out—even as much as I would like it to—in some of the writers that I just mentioned, is that human beings are fundamentally, if you like—if we can use the word fundamental in this context—they're creative agents.
And it's that creativity that generates instabilities in the world. And it's the fact that there are these instabilities that means that our potential to discern lawlike relationships in human societies is very limited. So I see that as ultimately being about human creativity.
And this is an area where I think there should be—although there isn't—there should be much more overlap between Austrian economic analysis and a lot of the kind of work that takes place in the arts and humanities.
So the critique of scientism.
Yeah. And this term, "scientism"—when I think of how I started to develop an interest in libertarian thought, and I'm a mere journalist and an English major, so I don't think about it as rigorously as political economists and philosophers—but I had stumbled across Hayek's 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, where he talks a lot about scientism.
Which he sees as the kind of mechanical application of laws and axioms in one field to others. But that whole book is a critique of Enlightenment modernity that thinks, "Well, we've kind of figured out biology and chemistry and physics, and now we can just port all of that knowledge"—where the rules are clear and we can understand action and reaction—"and just port that over to human society."
And he goes through a bunch of particularly French and other continental thinkers who literally say things like, "Now that we know how physics works, we can direct human social advancement and speed it up or slow it down."
And for him, that's the beginning—it's the French Revolution and rationalizing society—that leads to the gulag. You know, both of the kind of Nazi version, but also of the Soviet—and this mania for planning.
Where does that kind of arrogance—or where does that—maybe that's too strong a term, because most of the people involved in this are not bad people. Francis Bacon didn't want to control the world when he was articulating an Enlightenment view that we're going to map every part of the known universe and understand it, and then we can control it, right? Knowledge is power and we'll get to that in terms of Foucault.
Where does that hubris come from?
That's a difficult question. I think there'd be different elements to my answer. One part would be, actually there are bad actors who can be empowered by scientism. So people whose actual real motive is to gain power over other people will use scientific reasoning as a kind of ruse for doing that.
But I think there is also a more unintended consequence from certain forms of scientific rationality. So the way I think about it is, if you have a narrative which sets up some kind of notion of expertise, you create a set of actors who have an interest in sustaining those claims to expertise. So people's income, their status, can be dependent on that expertise.
And that can mean that you have—unintentionally, perhaps, it's not something that was intended by the people who created these narratives—but you can create a kind of logic which counts against pluralism of thought. Because if you're an expert, the last thing you want is there to be too many other sources of expertise.
Because the more sources of expertise there are, the less likely it is that people will take note or feel that they should be governed by any one expert or set of experts. So the tendency is in many scientific fields—this is true certainly in social science, but also even in natural science—is once a certain view of what the expertise says gets established, there tend to be disciplinary dynamics that start moving out other sorts of opinions.
So we have that kind of gradual crushing of pluralism, which nobody's actually intended, but has sort of arisen from internal logics within these kinds of scientific narratives and the positions they create.
Gee, if only we had a recent global phenomenon that helps illustrate what that's like. But I mean, in the public health field, and the way that COVID was discussed, right?
Where dissent was not, certainly not, patriotic or scientific. It was a sign of derangement or a moral failing. Right? Because this is part of the problem too, is that the people who have the expertise are like, "I'm not doing this because I believe in this theory particularly. I'm a scientist. These are the facts. And if you disagree with me, you're not just in error, but you are actually putting other people at risk."
And what I found actually fascinating about the COVID pandemic was it wasn't only members of the public or lay opinion who were subject to this kind of condemnation. It was scientists themselves who fell outside of the mainstream view.
People who'd been considered to be mainstream scientists suddenly found themselves demonized because they were expressing a view that, actually, just months before this thing happened, was considered to be the conventional wisdom about how you respond to a pandemic.
Well, and I guess you guys at King's College have a lot to answer for, right?
You know, how do you feel—this is that aside—how do you feel as a classical liberal individualist working at a place called King's College? I mean, I guess it's better than Imperial College, but come on, you know.
Yeah, these are matters of degree. Matters of degree.
But to go back to your earlier statement about postmodernism—you're not saying that all knowledge is fake, or you know, it's often instrumental. And one of the reasons why we got to an age of expertise—first in the sciences maybe, and then in industrial sciences—that clearly benefited people.
I mean, being able to rationalize the production and distribution of goods on the planet, but especially starting in Europe and North America, we went from being poor to being a surplus economy, where people lived longer, got richer. I mean, medicine—scientific medicine—worked. Scientific food production worked. Certain forms of social organization that were based on kind of Enlightenment thinking really delivered the goods, literally and figuratively.
So what are the limits then? Because when you say—you invoke the term "narrative" to talk about knowledge and information or expertise—it's both kind of true, right? Because oftentimes it will do what it says it's going to do. "I have studied how these crops will respond to this type of fertilizer and this type of watering and this kind of cultivation, and boom, I've solved world hunger." I mean, like, that happened.
How do you deal with, from a postmodern point of view, the idea that sometimes this expertise—or oftentimes this expertise—is actually doing something that is observably beneficial or in line with the thinking process?
Well, I think the important thing here to recognize—and this is true not only of the postmodernists but also of people like Hayek, whom you've already mentioned—is that they are not opposed to Enlightenment thinking as such. What they're concerned about is a kind of overreach of that thinking.
And by overreach, they're concerned about notions that people can access a kind of pure notion of truth that isn't always, in some sense, entangled with attempts by people to gain influence over others, to exercise power. So you recognize that power is always involved but still believe that there are certain scientific theories that we've got reasons to actually take seriously and to believe.
But what you're going to emphasize is that because—and this is especially true, I think, in the human and social sciences, as opposed to natural science, though it's even true in some areas of natural science—because the knowledge concerned is often really quite opaque, it's often hard to detach the truth claims from the attempt by actors to gain influence over others. So separating out those elements is often very hard in what are often complex phenomena.
I think it's easier in the natural sciences, because there is a case to be made that for certain kinds of natural phenomena, they are the kind of phenomena that can be looked at almost through a laboratory-like process, where you've got a sort of stimulus-response model operating on what are elements that have no agency as such of their own. But it's very different when you're looking at human phenomena.
And this is something Hayek obviously stresses throughout. I guess it maybe is distilled in the most popular form in something like The Road to Serfdom, but his entire work—and again, you know, I think it's partly just an accident of me reading The Counter-Revolution of Science first—but like, that to me is the key to everything about him. You've got to take it easy when you start saying, "Human society follows these rules, so we need to get rid of the people who aren't following the rules."
Right? It's very clear. This is the place where Hayek, in a way that maybe more of my audience is comfortable with, intersects with Karl Popper too. The idea that we know with each increase in knowledge, we gain some knowledge, but we also understand that we understood—on some level we understand less and less of the world. So you've got to be careful when you start talking about social engineering, which itself is a fantastic concept, right? Coming out of the 19th century, really. Like, we know how to engineer locomotives, so let's engineer whole towns and whole civilizations.
Well, the Hayek–Popper conversation, I think, is an interesting one in terms of these debates. Popper considers himself to be a critical rationalist. You can understand that critical rationalism to be a form of, kind of, radical skepticism, which in many ways sounds quite similar to a lot of postmodern themes. So postmodernists, I would consider, are radical skeptics. They want everything to be on the table. They want a sort of permanent spirit of criticism.
I think there's a debate between Hayek and Popper about what that critical rationalism means in different settings. Popper is very much of the view that the critical rationalist spirit is reflected in a kind of hypothesis-testing mode, where you are looking for laws but you're never quite sure whether you have access to them. You're looking about specifying scientific tests for particular sorts of theories.
Now Hayek is sympathetic to that, but he comes back by saying, "There are certain kinds of phenomena that cannot be subject to this kind of testing, even in the natural world." And the example he gives is evolution by natural selection.
So evolution by natural selection is a kind of natural science theory, but it isn't one that can be tested in a kind of positivist, hypothesis-testing way. What it is is a narrative that explains certain things about the world. And the reason we might accept that narrative is that, given other things that we believe about the world, we might find it more convincing than, say, an intelligent design theory. But it is not one that we can test—
Which itself is a narrative as well.
Exactly, exactly. But we can't test it in a kind of laboratory-type sense in the way that maybe other aspects of natural science that we could subject to those kinds of techniques.
I will—because I feel a need to do this almost every time I bring up or hear people talk about Karl Popper, whose most famous work is The Open Society and Its Enemies—and there's a joke that his students, who he was quite a harsh taskmaster with, always referred to that as, "The Open Society by One of Its Enemies."
But now this brings us to Foucault, because Foucault, like Hayek, he acknowledges at various points the way in which scientific thinking or Enlightenment thinking and rationalism and various kinds of developments have produced material wealth and even certain forms of political freedom or liberation.
Although, exactly, "Can you be liberated in a Foucauldian world" is a different type of question. But it's very much about narrative, and it's about how we talk about things.
So how do you see Foucault and Hayek kind of intersecting in the way that you were just talking about?
Well, I think it relates to the idea that there is no God's-eye view of the world. Hayek's critique of scientism is very much based on the idea that a lot of the relevant knowledge is dispersed. It's subjective. There's no entity that can actually perceive all of the knowledge that's relevant to what he calls complex phenomena.
Now for Foucault, there is also a kind of perspectival aspect to knowledge. But he—and this is where there's a difference between the two of them—he wraps that up much more in the Nietzschean notion that each individual action in the world is kind of pursuing a sort of will to power, trying to put their perspective into the world. And then, through the interaction of multiple wills to power, you get kind of emergent systems of power or forces emerging, none of which actually represent the truth, but that in various ways can operate to constrain people.
Now, I think those two views are compatible, even though they're working from somewhat different premises. But they're united in the idea that there is no godlike spectacle.
Right. So there's really only emergent phenomena. Or in Hayek, there's an emergent phenomenon, and we kind of stumble through the world figuring things out. And then in Foucault, it's that appeal to the God's-eye view is a power move to kind of shut down dissent or to sacralize a particular system of knowledge, which equals power, ultimately.
Let me ask you this. When you talk about it in these terms, it is so obvious. And I can remember, again, as a lowly graduate student, I had read Thomas Szasz, who is the great critic of the medicalization of society, a psychiatrist who himself was a critic of psychiatry, and famously in 1961 wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness, which argued that people we call crazy—it's not science. It's a way of kind of marginalizing people that we find annoying or dangerous for various reasons.
As it happened, as a grad student, I had read that because Thomas Szasz—who I became friendly with a bit—he had been a Reason contributing editor since, I don't know, the early 1970s. And of course, he was merely saying something that seems obvious: that when doctors or lawmakers tell you "do this" or "don't do this," it's not always in your interest. It's in their interest. They have partial knowledge, but they want to control you.
In 1961, a guy named Michel Foucault published a book called Madness and Civilization, which I encountered when I went to grad school because Foucault is the dominant figure in social science and humanities discourse of the last half of the 20th century—and persists into this one.
And in Madness and Civilization, I was reading this, and we'd be discussing it in class, and I was like, "God, this sounds a hell of a lot like Thomas Szasz"—talking about how the way we define madness and sanity is pretty situational, and there's a lot of power that's going on behind the scenes.
My question to you is: Why don't more Hayekians understand the similarities to Foucault? And why don't more Foucauldians be like, "God, you know, this guy Hayek is"—you know—they're not the same thing. There are significant differences that we'll get to. But, "geez, these guys are walking pretty arm-in-arm."
Yeah. In a way, I don't really understand it. So all I have are kind of guesses.
I think you can't separate some of this out from the sort of cultural history of the last 50 or 60 years or so. So there's certainly a sense—I wouldn't say this is true of Hayekians as such—but certain people more broadly in the classical liberal or libertarian movement who have a resistance to certain sets of thinkers who came out of what you would call French poststructuralism or what became postmodernism.
And the reason for that seems to be that many of these people—at least at some point in their careers—were associated with Marxism. Even if they abandoned it in its pure form, they still held to what people consider to be a kind of Marxist-type view.
Or, you know, you get this term "cultural Marxism," which has become very widely used and is attributed to these people. So the sense is, even if they were saying something that might be interesting, we can't really associate with it, because these were the bad guys who were supporting communism and all sorts of terrible things.
Right. And particularly in the '68 revolutions—though oftentimes before that—but you know, there's the whiff of a very strong French cheese on this. And it's like, no, we're Americans or we're English, and we dislike that.
And I guess Hayek, in a way, feeds into that because the way he distinguishes—often, I think, in ways that are unfair—between the Continental Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment or the Anglo-American Enlightenment feeds into that. So it's interesting, because in a way that also kind of—you know, Foucault anticipates that kind of critique, right? That this ends up being more an exercise in national identity than it is in intellectual seriousness.
I think that's right, and I think it's a great shame. Because I see—and maybe it's because I've just been reading this stuff for a few years and I've become overly attached to it—but I actually see Foucault in some ways as kind of, almost as a heroic figure, actually.
And the reason I say that is because when you understand the intellectual milieu that he was operating in—he was operating in a social, scientific, or academic community that was dominated by Marxism, dominated by it in France—and yet he managed to find his way to an approach, a way of thinking, that actually challenges fundamental aspects of that whole worldview.
Totally, yeah.
And by the end of his career, he's moving toward really quite, I would say, individualist or liberal-oriented themes. He obviously had to go on his own journey through that, and there's questions about where precisely he ended up, but it seems to me that he was a remarkable figure in terms of the range of thought that he engaged with.
The fact that in the late '70s he was actually engaging with people in the liberal tradition—with Hayek, with Gary Becker, some of these other people—in a way that many others in those traditions just never have. So I think he deserves an enormous amount of credit for actually doing that, and that's the reason why we should listen to some of his ideas—and why, hopefully, people who've been influenced by him might try to get into some of our ideas as well.
Yeah, it always struck me as odd when people would denounce Hayek, and postmodernism more broadly, as Marxists and hence only worthy of our contempt. And it's like, yeah, postmodernism is largely—and rightly—seen as a critique of Marxism, or of not just Marxism, but also Freudianism and Darwinism, or these metanarratives that seek to explain every aspect of human life and organization.
I mean, when I meet people who call themselves postmodern Marxists, I'm kind of like, "You've got a lot of explaining to do." But postmodernism and Marxism—broadly, I think, on the libertarian right—are typically seen as being in the same camp, and that camp should be, you know, in Guantanamo Bay, and we should never hear from those people again, right?
It's totally wrong. Because if you read—I mean, it's actually a book that's almost impossible to read—but if you ever try to read Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, that is a vicious attack on Marxism.
Yeah. Because Marxism is scientism. I mean, it is almost the purest excrescence of scientism. Of a stupid mechanical application of a couple of rules to a system, or to a series of phenomena, that refuse to follow those laws, right?
So, how did you—I want to go into some of the specific insights that you take from Foucault and kind of apply and say, "Here's why we should be thinking about this, especially if we believe in liberalism and individualism." But just briefly—how did you—I mean, you are one of, really, a handful of people. You talk about people like Deirdre McCloskey and certain other Austrian school economists—you mentioned Don Lavoie. You know, Don Lavoie, he is somebody who, I think, if he had lived longer, we would be having radically different and richer conversations about intellectual history.
But, you know, there are some people who have been doing this. How did you create this merger between Hayek and Foucault? How did you encounter both of them?
Well, I encountered Hayek first. He's certainly been the most significant influence on my whole academic or political life, really. And I was very influenced by the essays that you referred to, the essays in The Counter-Revolution of Science.
So I've been kind of immersed in Hayekian thought, but I'm also operating in fields where people were referring to Foucauldian concepts all the time. And I thought, "Well, I need to know something about this guy."
Probably about 25 years ago, actually, I started reading Foucault, and I started to see themes that: Yes, I can see how instead of him being the enemy, there are actually important parallels. There's a certain aspect of individualism in Foucault. He's concerned about systems of control, how they can threaten the individual. This aspect, which is the critique of scientism that we've referred to.
So I engaged with it about 25 years ago, but then I got taken over by various other things. I wrote another book. I became a bureaucrat in the university. I was a head of department for a number of years.
And then the pandemic hit.
And the pandemic and the role of surveillance mechanisms that were taking place throughout that period—it just reignited all of the things I'd been thinking about some 20 years before. And I thought, "This is the time where I need to really systematically go through this material and see how we can link it up."
And that's really when I started writing this book.
And that—in an American context in particular—I think if people know Foucault, or if they've read, actually read, any words by Foucault, it's probably Discipline and Power.
Discipline and Punish.
Oh, I'm sorry. Discipline and Punish. And that opens with this great set piece of a person in the early modern era being drawn and quartered.
He talks about, "OK, this is how power used to work in the pre-modern period." And all of these terms are loosely defined, and he's putting them in quote marks or under erasure—however we want to describe it. But power operated directly on bodies. It used people as examples so that you didn't do things because you knew you were going to be punished—and brutally and publicly. The teachable moment is the public execution, or the public flogging, or the punishment like that.
And then he talks about how in the modern period, what happened was that we internalized a system of control. So that the state, or any other source of power, doesn't need to constantly be checking up on us—because we're doing it for ourselves.
And he talks about Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a model prison in which prisoners were never sure if there was a guard in the tower watching them. So they acted as if they were always being surveilled.
Just apropos of nothing—I was actually in Philadelphia yesterday for an event —where the Eastern State Penitentiary, which is the first penitentiary that was actually built. And it worked somewhat on those models. It's fascinating.
Where does that take us? That idea that there are systems of control and that we internalize them—and that this is one of the defining attributes of modernity.
Where is that in Hayek? Or how does Hayek talk about similar kinds of very subtle and almost occult versions of surveillance and control of the individual? How does it match up with Foucault?
Well, I actually don't think Hayek and people in the Hayekian tradition talk enough about this kind of phenomenon.
There is—I think it's in the 1952 or 1956 introduction or preface to The Road to Serfdom—where he mentions the possibility for a kind of soft despotism. A kind of almost silent system operating, where people become used to being in a very heavily regulated society. And it has a kind of silent, enervating effect on their capacities for agency.
They're so used to being enmeshed in rules and regulations, not being able to do anything without asking permission for anything, that they become sort of passive agents.
Now, I think Foucault looks at that in a much more systematic way. He looks at the multiple sources of this kind of process, the kind of techniques that can be used to generate passivity. And also looking at how—even if the techniques don't actually themselves work in the way the science says—they can still have effects on people's identity and capacity to be self-creating or self-governing agents.
So I think it is a theme in Hayek and some of the people in the Austrian tradition—the idea of a soft despotism as well as a hard despotism. But it's not one that's brought out strongly enough. And actually, that was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book.
Yeah, and I mean we can think about this in terms of—to use modern parlance—things like "wokeness." It functions as a system of control. Not in that you will be publicly shamed, but in your mind, you start wondering, "Should I even be thinking this?" Much less forget about expressing it or anything like that.
And then you were talking about COVID, where a series of rules started to just constantly multiply and creep into like, "Am I washing my hands long enough?" In the early stages of COVID, where people were like, "Sing 'Happy Birthday' while you wash your hands to make sure you get rid of the germs."
It's fascinating too, just to think about Foucault and COVID. Giorgio Agamben, who is one of the great students of Foucault and an Italian philosopher, who became a darling of the academic left—certainly in the U.S., and I'm assuming in Europe as well—when he talked about the war on terror as a kind of linguistic or discursive construction that was governing everything. A "state of exception" that allowed liberal governments to suspend all the rules that normally apply to restrain government because of this vague fear of terrorism.
Agamben was hugely popular. He was an Italian academic. When lockdown happened in Italy, which was the first and most brutal lockdown in Europe, he applied the same thing. He was like, "You know what? From a Foucauldian point of view, there is no COVID pandemic. There's this system of control."
And people on the left here were like, "He's a madman. Why did we ever listen to him at all?" But it was a completely consistent application, I think, of Foucauldian principles and analysis.
I think that's right. And he was basically a victim of disciplinary power. And as you were saying, it's interesting how you can have a Foucauldian basically canceled by other Foucauldians, which is an interesting thing.
But also, going back to what we were saying before, that whole process—it's interesting how people who were in the scientific mainstream were also "canceled" because their views didn't line up with what emerged as the dominant paradigm of how you deal with this at the time.
What fascinated me about the pandemic was actually not—I don't think you should see the pandemic in isolation from many other public health techniques or operations around other fields. If you look at all the rules that public health professionals and various government agencies put out about what you're supposed to eat, whether you should smoke or drink—all of these things are areas where people become accustomed to taking expert advice and doing as they're told.
You also have what seems to be happening more and more now—and Agamben would be interested in this—but also this is something Hayek talks about, which is the discourse of emergency. Everything becomes an emergency.
Everything's a crisis. Which then justifies all kinds of control…
We need extraordinary powers because—when we get back to normal—you'll be able to live your life as a free and autonomous individual. But right now, it's too important.
Maybe you do, but not quite.
Foucault wrote in various places a phrase that is varied, but it's always: "We are always governed too much." That is a very libertarian statement, it seems to me.
Can you talk about that, and how that kind of distills part of the—well, I hate to say "essence" of Foucault, because essences have been banished in his worldview—but how does that get to a continuing insight that Foucault and Hayek, and a kind of libertarian—not just political tradition but a cultural tradition, kind of comes to the fore?
Well, I think it's important to understand that from his point of view, you can never escape government entirely. And by government, he means any attempt to, as he would put it, "conduct your conduct"—to influence the way you behave.
So on his account, this kind of government can happen in any sphere of life. It can happen in the family, it can happen in the workplace, it can happen in the school, in hospitals, as well as the formal apparatus of the state. What he's interested in is how these different forms of power connect with each other and the effects of those sorts of connections.
Now what's interesting from my point of view—this is where I think it links with Hayek—is that various scientific narratives proliferate these kinds of connections. The aspiration of a lot of these scientific discourses is that all of society becomes subject to surveillance. The attempt is made by scientists or people in the state apparatus to connect the techniques they use to all of these decentralized sites, to almost unify them in a governing purpose.
It's not that there is—outside of that—it's not that there is a government-free arena because we're always governed in these ways. But there isn't necessarily an attempt to bring them all together, to link them, to this sort of overall surveillance apparatus. And that's where the scientific temptation comes in.
Foucault has this term that he calls "biopower," which is the attempt to subject entire societies to a kind of surveillance that is supposed to identify various disequilibria which require some form of correction. That means, in the attempt to do that, the state actually recruits multiple actors in the private society and civil society to engage in surveillance.
So, I mean, you mentioned briefly that "wokeness." DEI would be the ultimate example of this.
Where it doesn't govern directly through legislative edicts, but it facilitates all kinds of performance management systems and surveillance systems that are installed within many private or civil organizations. They operate almost like localized power.
But it's not only DEI. You can think of public health. You can think of market interventions operating on the same line—sustainability, sustainable development, environmental, social, and governance initiatives. These are all the same kind of thing. They're an attempt to…
Where they are not simply one-offs or anything like it. You mentioned the phrase "totalizing structures of power." Ecology becomes—it's never an individual choice, but it has to be done. There are certain large laws that are passed, but then at every step, the business has to follow in place. And when you're in the workplace, you have to pursue that goal.
And then at home—don't water your lawn, or water your lawn, etc. But it becomes not really totalitarian in the sense of 1984 or the worst excesses of Stalinism attempted to achieve, but totalizing in the sense that you can never escape what you are supposed to be doing.
I think that's right. Even just to give a personal example of it—and I know this has happened to people in many of the universities now—when you have a publication that comes out, like I've got this book that's just coming out, the minute it goes up on your website or the university website, it immediately gets labeled with one of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.
You're categorized according to how you're fulfilling these social objectives. Even if, as in my case, I'm actually critiquing some of these goals and objectives, you're still categorized by the system in this way.
And it's not totalitarian in a Stalinist sense, but it closes the space within which people can exercise freedom of maneuver. So in universities, if you want to write a research application and that application isn't couched in a way that addresses sustainable development or DEI, you're going to find it much more difficult to get finance than if you go along with those narratives.
From a libertarian point of view—and I realize that's already problematic; that can be interpreted in a lot of ways—but why is that not kind of just, "Well, the market"?
You know, for academic papers, the market is constantly changing, but certain norms emerge from interactions of disparate people with disparate interests. It just happens that if you're in the academic game—or the academic market—like yeah, you've got to put up with that.
It also means if you're selling something, selling a certain kind of food, you're going to start talking about certain attributes or reaching certain levels that will certify to people: "This is edible. This is good for you," etc.
This is one of the critiques of Foucault, I think, is that there's always something sinister that's going on. It's always disciplining people and punishing people rather than just, "Eh, this is how things are"?
That's a good point. We need to recognize that Foucault doesn't think that these disciplines in themselves are necessarily bad.
If you can give yourself your own discipline—to give yourself shape to life—that can be a good thing. What he's worried about is the way that these processes or disciplines can morph or multiply out in ways that become totalizing.
So, if we go back to the examples I was giving—there's nothing wrong with a particular organization introducing DEI. There's nothing wrong with a particular organization introducing some kind of environmental ethics quota. The danger is when those localized efforts are hooked up to some overall societal system which is trying to grade or rank people on a single scale, or direct them into an overarching goal or purpose.
And that is what is happening with a lot of what Foucault calls these "biopolitical narratives," where the whole of society is looked at as a manageable object. The attempt is made to penetrate these managerial techniques into all spheres and to link them to these overall purposes.
So even the market itself in this case is subject to discipline by these mechanisms. So it's not that the market, in this case, is a free sphere, it's a sphere that's already being controlled, or there's an attempt to control it, by these kinds of apparatuses.
Yeah. And in this sense—I mean, no market, no arena—all areas of human activity are contested. And to say they're rigged is wrong, but the idea is they exist in a particular time and place, and there are always constraints. So the question isn't whether that's going to happen. It's, how do we…?
I guess this is a question Hayek would say: What you do is in this is you reduce the size and scope of government, and you create an area of human flourishing. In an essay or an interview, he talked about having parts of cities or dark spaces where nobody's watching. That's really important for innovation and also personal development—just where you're not being controlled.
Foucault, at various points, he critiqued Rousseau's vision of a perfectly transparent society as unlivable. You need these dark spaces.
But in Foucault, there does not seem to be a plan for how we make the world better. Or how we say, "This is a better outcome," or "This is a better system than this," within a Foucauldian frame?
I think that's right. I can come back to answer that in a second, but if I just go back to what you said about the market before. On the view I'm putting forward, it's not, there is if you like, and in some ways critics of libertarianism or classical liberalism are right when they say this: There's no such thing as a free market in the sense of an ungoverned market.
Markets are always governed by social norms or practices. The question libertarians would posing is: OK, we may not have any ungoverned space, but we can still look at different regimes in terms of how much space they allow people to come up with their own rules about how markets are governed.
The rules that govern markets don't have to be totalizing. They don't have to be creating them in a single way. And I think that's the critical sort of point.
And is it good to allow multiple systems and for people to be able to move in between them?
This is obviously, biographically, to a certain degree, part of Hayek's life—but certainly Foucault's—of moving among different societies or different subcultures and things like that. That's a form—freedom might not be the right word—but that's a form of agency and liberation, where you kind of get to pick what market you want to play in or what rules you want to be governed in. Which is also clearly part of liberalism, right? The idea that you can move. You have voice, exit, and loyalty, or whatever.
I think that's right. I'm very attracted to the idea within liberalism of polycentricity, the idea of pluralism in rules.
I think the way you could understand that from a Foucauldian point of view is that if you have many different decision-making centers or rule-making centers. A) you make it more difficult for there to be a process of total societal capture by any one narrative, and you also make it possible for people to see that there are other ways of doing things. They're not frozen into a single grid of understanding.
Foucault uses the term "heterotopia," which refers to some kind of experimental space beyond the status quo that gives people a clue, at least, about some different way of doing things.
So you can think—going back to your earlier example—cases of free enterprise zones as possible examples of spaces that are relatively less governed. They could indicate to people: this is what could happen if we gave up some of these more controlling and overregulated conceptions.
Right. And heterotopia—that concept is another touchpoint with standard libertarian thinking. It's very much like the utopia of utopias that Robert Nozick talks about, or John Stuart Mill talking about running infinite experiments in living.
You disperse and decentralize so that people not only are free to pursue who they think they are and build that identity in that community, but you can also learn from other people's examples—what works, what doesn't—and adapt the parts they like or dismiss the things that you don't like.
In your book, you talk about creating a postmodern liberal political economy—that's really your project here. Explain what that means. And in a way—I'm making you dance for your supper—but explain what you mean by a postmodern liberal political economy in a way that will make postmodernism attractive to conventional libertarians or American conservatives who believe in classical liberalism, and also in a way that engages people on the harder left.
It actually goes back to what you were asking me before. The difference between Foucault and Hayek—and those are the two people we've been talking a lot about in this conversation—is that Hayek has the idea of a constitution of liberty. Given the critique of scientism, given these other sorts of things, are there kinds of rules we can think of frameworks within which this "play of liberties" can take place?
Foucault is—although, as I've said, he shares many elements of that or has his own overlaps—he doesn't want to talk about what the framework looks like. Because he thinks then that you end up with other power plays that can enrich systems in their own right.
Now, toward the end of his career, there is evidence that he started to recognize, "Well actually, there is a place for rights." But again, he was very vague about what they are.
So what I try to say in the book is, you could see postmodern liberals as trying to put forward some notion of a framework that might gel with Foucault's concerns.
You were asking me how that can appeal to conventional conservatives or libertarians—
Yeah and this is one of the reasons I asked how you came across this. Because I'm assuming, if you're an academic in an English setting, Hayek is heavily identified with Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher and postmodernism—you know, they don't seem to get along. Right?
I've yet to meet a Thatcherite—with the possible exception of Johnny Rotten—who would say, "Oh yeah, I'm postmodern." They hate it. Go from there.
Where I think they should have sympathy with someone like Foucault is: Think about what it is that entrepreneurs do in society.
Entrepreneurs are people, I think, who resist rules, resist established ways of doing things. They challenge the status quo. They revolutionize it.
So I use in the book—often I refer to Schumpeter's idea about entrepreneurs as creative destructors. They're creating new ways of understanding that often shatter the current way we understand the world to create something radically new and different. And it's regulation that closes that down. It's regulation that narrows the space within which this kind of creativity and dynamism—the kind Thatcherites claim to favor—actually takes place.
The difference between them is that maybe people like Foucault have concentrated more on the cultural area. They're concerned with destabilizing norms of gender, sexuality, mental health, these other things. Whereas the economic destabilizers—the Austrian school—we talk about the value of creative destruction in the economic sphere.
And what I'm saying in the book is, "Well, if you believe in this entrepreneurial model, you should bring it together in both of those areas. We want cultural and economic creativity going together."
We might also think about the resistance strategies that can be adopted to help people get out from these kinds of systems.
There's a bit of an irony in that many people on the right—and in some ways I would identify with aspects of that myself—who are critical of these systems of control and critical of paternalism, they still look to the idea of some savior to get them out of the mess they're in.
And I think this is what's happening in the United States, where people are looking to Donald Trump as a kind of disruptor-in-chief who's going to save them from the regulatory apparatus. When probably what you should be looking to—if you treat a liberalism—is lots more decentralized experiments from people trying to escape regulatory controls.
Sympathy for evasive entrepreneurs—people who are trying to get around the rules—that is the kind of language I think could potentially provide an overlap between these positions.
And it's ironic—on the left, you will hear people who want creative disruption in the cultural arena or in society. They want to celebrate the breakdown, or the recognition that there are many types of families in society, and there are many gender or sexual orientations.
They're all in on that. But when it comes to the economy, they're like, "No, there has to be one rule that governs everything. There's only one kind of employment contract. There's one kind of muffler that can be built," or whatever.
This is where I think your book is essential. It can really force people on the right and the left to understand that they are kind of bullshitting themselves if they don't think this stuff should be—whether you're a Foucauldian or a Hayekian—this work should be applied to all aspects of human activity.
I think the other thing is you can't actually separate neatly those spheres of entrepreneurship or creative production.
So acts that look economic—it could revolutionizing a new production technique—can have cultural effects. We might be seeing that with AI.
Well, I mean, the internet was not a political technology, but it has a massive effect on everything we're doing.
Absolutely. And likewise, if you have a society where you've lots of cultural entrepreneurship taking place—challenging gender norms or other ideas—that can also feed into economic dynamism.
These things are not neatly separable. It's part of an overall package of what I think a kind of exciting or dynamic model of a liberal society is about.
Do you have any takers for this?
I mean, the book is out, but you've been working on this. I can't speak to a British political or cultural context, but in the United States, there's a palpable sense of political and cultural exhaustion. People know—and part of what you talk about in the book has to do with what you call a "social justice dispositif"—where social groups and political identities have ossified.
We're trapped in these dumb categories: right and left, conservative, liberal, or libertarian and progressive that clearly aren't working anymore, but we don't know how to get to the next thing.
Are you finding takers for what you just talked about? Where if we apply Foucault and Hayek to politics and culture, to technology and business. There's a very exciting and interesting world that is right there, right in front of us. Are people responding well to this?
The response so far has been positive. I can't tell what the political response is because the book's not been out long enough. It isn't even released in the U.K. for another six weeks. It's out in the U.S., back in June, but it's not been released.
But I got a couple of really generous back cover endorsements: one from a big Foucault scholar, Mitchell Dean, who gave me a really generous endorsement, and also Mark Bevir at the University of California, Berkeley.
So academically, I've had a positive response. The next stage for me is going to be trying to engage it more politically. To talk about what would be a model of political entrepreneurship that uses these ideas to engage in the practical world of politics.
That would mean creating cross-identity coalitions that can share in this kind of a way.
What would an example of that be? A hypothetical one, or one that's kind of on the launching pad?
A good example would be—well, two examples.
One could be the school choice movement. You could think of alliances that could form between, say, black conservative groupings in the United States that are sick of a model that, on the one hand, they perceive as teaching values that are alien to some of their fundamental beliefs, but also doesn't recognize the character of black history.
You could also have alliances between those kinds of groups. Another kind of group that may be unsatisfied with monolithic state curriculum, like LGBT groups for example.
Why can't you get a coalition of actors—even though they don't share fundamental moral views—to argue for school choice and a more plural educational curriculum on those grounds? There's all kinds of exciting possibilities there.
Libertarians, talk about the value of choice—why can't we have police choice?
I want to be beaten by people who share my values, right?
I wouldn't go that far. But you could say, for those communities that feel that they've been treated badly—many of them don't want to defund the police. They just want to have more control over them.
So there should be an alliance between fiscal conservatives, who are skeptical of public sector monopolies, and some of these groupings who are saying, "Why don't we get more competition into the police force. Discipline the police, rather than the police disciplining the public?"
That is wonderful. That's exciting. Before we go, let me bring up two—and this kind of twins Foucault and Hayek again—shameful episodes in their careers.
Foucault—and this is one thing conservatives will always point out—they'll point that he was gay and that he probably engaged in pederasty in North Africa, and that he died of AIDS, which, you know, we don't need to say more. Like, there's something wrong with him about that.
But the thing that comes up again and again, politically, is that he endorsed the Iranian Revolution—the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Hayek endorsed Pinochet toward the end of his life. It's peculiar within left-wing discourse but also libertarian discourse in America. People are always like, "You know, Friedman had a problematic relationship with the Pinochet regime." Actually, he really didn't. But Hayek does. Hayek wrote a series of glowing reviews of Pinochet. Even in his repression, saying a kind of libertarian version of "You've got to break a couple of eggs in order to make an omelet, and the economic growth is better— We need to think about that more than political repression."
Talk about Foucault's romance with the Iranian Revolution of the Ayatollahs. Is that a legitimate complaint against Foucault? How did he respond to it, and what happened in his life?
So it is and it isn't.
I think a lot of political thinkers, frankly you've just got to admit it, they sometimes say stupid things. And I think in Foucault's case, I'm not sure I would say it was stupid, but I think what he was doing was very naive.
It's not true to say, actually, that he endorsed the Iranian regime. He was certainly sympathetic to it in the sense that he saw what was going on under the Shah as a kind of repressive authoritarianism which was using the language of modernism as a way of disciplining its own people. He was looking for resources within some elements of Islam that might offer a way out of that.
Now, it was naive in the sense that he didn't recognize—as his own theory should have led him to—that if you try to implement ideas, they can be taken in directions that you don't want them to go. And of course, it's precisely what happened there.
It is interesting, though, that when he saw how that regime was playing out, he did condemn what was happening. Now, you can criticize him and say, "It had to get to the point where gay people were being executed before he properly came out and condemned it," and he should be criticized for that. But I see it more as a reflection of naivete rather than some kind of wickedness.
I've seen some people's writing saying, "Oh, he used to be a communist and then went over to being an 'Islamo-leftist.'"
That's really not an accurate way of understanding what he was doing.
And he distanced himself from it. He might not have written a full-throated reversal of his position, but he clearly knew the Islamic Republic was not an increase in human freedom or anything like that.
There's a famous article that Murray Rothbard wrote in Reason called "The Death of a State," where, in 1975, he lauded the North Vietnamese taking over South Vietnam, as well as Pol Pot taking over Cambodia. He said, "These are great moments from a libertarian point of view because a state has died. And we should always applaud when a state ends."
It's like—yeah, I don't know about that. Maybe take a wait-and-see approach or something.
But Foucault did that. What about Hayek? He is such a powerful apostle of reducing state control, but also other forms of control, economic control, social control, over people's lives. And then, when you look at the way that—at the behest of Margaret Thatcher, who also talked in those terms—he was a gigantic Pinochet supporter. How do you factor Hayek's late-life plumping for Pinochet in the body of his work?
I don't think you can separate it out from the dynamics of Cold War politics, how important that was, and to people like Margaret Thatcher as well.
They were operating in a period where there were people were intent on creating socialist revolutions. In the contexts where we did have experience of seeing the way these revolutions were playing out and the effects they tended to have.
They seemed to take the course which implied, "If you're the enemy of that, then I'm gonna support you." Especially so, which was as well as opposing communism—you're also saying, as in the case of Pinochet, you're going to give rein to a set of economic ideas that people like Margert Thatcher and Hayek had sympathy with.
I think you can't separate it from that, but I think it should be a cause for reflection for anyone who is sympathetic to Hayek or classical liberalism or libertarianism—about whether you should be giving advice to other countries in that situation.
When you could be legitimizing something you shouldn't.
When Donald Trump calls you up to say, "Hey, I like this idea of polycentric policing," you're going to be like, "Thanks, but no thanks. I don't want to talk directly to power."
I mean, it's the age-old dilemma for academics. How far do you stay detached—and then be accused of being in an ivory tower—or how far do you engage with the real world of politics?
I don't think anybody's really figured that out yet. But at the very least, we should be aware of these dangers. And I think in the same way Foucault was naive, Hayek was naive about how his own ideas could be used and the effects they might have.
Final question. We talked about COVID. The 21st century has kind of been a horror show in many ways—going from 9/11, to the war on terror, to a financial crisis, to COVID. All of which redound or echo a lot of the themes that we were talking about: that there is always a state of exception, there is always an emergency. That we need to preserve liberal society by suspending the rules of liberal society because we're in a state of emergency.
Do you feel—from a Foucauldian-Hayekian, postmodern liberal political economy view—do you feel like we've learned any lessons? Are we in a better place to understand how the state, or how corporations, or how other social groups try to govern us when they use the helper language of the state or invoke emergencies?
Are we smarter now than we were on September 10, 2001?
I don't think we are.
It's quite a complex question. In some ways, because of what happened in the pandemic, that has generated justifiable skepticism about some of these forms of political authority.
For example, Sweden was routinely condemned by many countries and scientific authorities. And yet they've actually ended up with a lower death rate than many countries that followed the stringent lockdowns.
That has meant that people are perhaps now going to be more skeptical of these sorts of claims.
But on the other hand, the danger with that is—we see this with Donald Trump and some of the populist right movements—a kind of populist backlash against these kinds of experts that can lead to a different form of control.
It's generating a response which isn't necessarily going to lead to more freedom. It could just lead to a different set of threats to freedom. So I'm very worried about the future in that sense. I want to be optimistic, but often when you have excess in a certain direction instead of moving to a sort of freedom enhancing course you can just get excess in a different direction and that's what worries me at the moment. I think there are signs of that happening in Europe…
Yeah, clearly. Right.
I guess this is a final question, postmodernism—again it's kind of focused on the limits of knowledge rather than the extent of knowledge. Which implies, especially when you're doing public policy or dictating how people are allowed to live, like you'd be a little bit humble. Sometimes people say, "Well postmodern is acid on all of the good things that have come out," of whether we want to call it: the Enlightenment or the Scientific Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. As good postmodernists, how do we continue to believe in knowledge and expertise that is positive, yet we know is ultimately limited and is going to be replaced maybe in our lifetime, maybe shortly after and revealed as incomplete.
Is there a way out of that trap or is that just what postmodernism breeds?
I would like to say, I do identify as a classical liberal or libertarian, and I would say that postmodernism implies that spirit of humility.
You can connect that spirit of humility to the idea that we want interactions, as far as possible, to be based on the consent of the governed. We emphasize consensual relationships—bond-trusted relationships, pluralistic relationships—where there's contestation.
Where you don't have people claiming to have the full truth and imposing their will on others.
If we could just have conversations in that space, I think we might move to a better place. At least that would be my hope.
Well, I absolutely hope you're right, as well.
Mark Pennington, author of the new book—which is not only a masterwork of synthetic thought and original analysis, but one I really think anybody interested in libertarian ideas or who thinks they understand Foucault from a left-wing perspective should read it. The book is Foucault and Liberal Political Economy. Thanks so much for talking to Reason.
Thank you very much, Nick.
- Producer: Paul Alexander
- Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
