Before reading Mark Pennington’s recent book, Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom, it would not have occurred to me that libertarians could learn anything from the social theories of Michel Foucault. Pennington has persuaded me that some beliefs associated with Foucault, and postmodernism more generally, are not devoid of merit. As will be discussed below, however, the beliefs that he identifies as postmodern differ somewhat from the collection of beliefs that I have hitherto associated with postmodernism.
The author aims “to enunciate the elements of a
postmodern liberalism, and to show how this perspective might engage in a
productive conversation with Foucault in ways that expose the illiberalism of
contemporary societies and the dominant forms of social science and political
philosophy that contribute to this state of affairs”.
Before considering Pennington’s claims about what
liberals can learn from Foucault and the potential for liberals to engage productively
with his ideas, I need to clarify how Pennington is able to argue that some of Foucault’s
views are worthy of consideration and what Pennington means by “postmodern
liberalism”.
Foucault’s views
The main problem I have with the postmodernist
movement is its disrespect for reason, truth and knowledge. Stephen Hicks suggests
that Foucault’s views illustrate the direction and tone of the postmodern
intellectual world:
“Michel Foucault has identified the major targets: “All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.” Such necessities must be swept aside as baggage from the past: “It is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth, or Knowledge”.” (The sources of the quoted passages are cited in Hicks, 2004.)
Hicks explains that Foucault reduces knowledge to an
expression of social power and urges that we play the brutal power politics
game on behalf of the traditionally disempowered.
Pennington recognizes that Foucault has often been
accused of undercutting the basis of his own critical analysis:
“If all knowledge is reflective of an arbitrary ‘will to truth’, then what of Foucault’s own truth claims?”
More specifically:
“If all truth claims are understood as merely a way of exercising power over others, then how are people to know which if any of the ‘intolerable’ practices they find themselves in are worth challenging or resisting, let alone what might replace them.”
However, Pennington observes that there are many Foucaults,
“reflected in the shifting emphases, styles of analysis and reinterpretations
of his own words”:
“Towards the end of his life … notably in essays such as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, Foucault softened the power/knowledge coupling, adopting a stance that does not deny that there are better and worse forms of argument or that there are some more or less valid forms of knowledge; rather, he emphasises the importance of uncertainty, of keeping all truth claims under scrutiny, and of being aware of the routinised social processes that might block that very scrutiny.”
If postmodernism is characterized by the idea that truth
claims merely reflect the exercise of social power, perhaps it could be said that
towards the end of his life, Foucault’s views became somewhat less postmodern.
Postmodern
liberalism
In outlining the elements of “postmodern liberalism” Pennington
notes:
“This ‘postmodern’ liberalism has not previously been coherently articulated, but strands of it are detectable in the writings of F. A Hayek, those of Deirdre McCloskey, and elements of the contemporary Austrian school of economics, as well as in the context of political philosophy apart from Hayek in the works of Michael Oakeshott, Gerald Gaus, and Chandran Kukathas.”
I have considerable knowledge of the views of some of those
authors and great respect for all of them. I am not comfortable with their
views being labelled as postmodern, even though some of them might not object
to that label.
Pennington seems to me to be distancing “postmodern
liberalism” from postmodernism when he acknowledges that it is possible to
assess “the comparative plausibility of competing narrative explanations” and “social
scientific truth claims”.
In his concluding chapter Pennington notes that the
elements of “postmodern liberalism” include, among other things, a “philosophy
of social science sceptical of socio-economic positivism and the efforts of
conscious control it fosters”.
It seems to me that Pennington’s philosophy of social
science could appropriately be labelled “unpretentious liberalism”. It stands
apart from the pretence of knowledge and scientism associated with socio-economic
positivism, without endorsing postmodernism’s disrespect for reason, truth and
knowledge.
I hope the book will attract many readers who identify
as postmodernists and that they will be captivated by the concept of postmodern
liberalism. However, those who (like me) are allergic to postmodernism, may
find the book easier to read if they substitute the words “unpretentious
liberalism” whenever they see “postmodernism liberalism”.
Should libertarians attempt to influence
culture?
Before considering what libertarians can learn from
Foucault, it seems appropriate to acknowledge that there is nothing new about
the idea that libertarians should take an interest in culture.
That is apparent in the consideration of interactions
between culture and political institutions in a discussion between Chris
Matthew Sciabarra and me entitled, “Should Libertarians be Attempting to
Influence Culture?” which published on this blog in September 2024. The
discussion began by
considering John Stuart Mill’s concerns about the “tyranny of the
prevailing opinion and feeling” and moved from there to considering Sciabarra’s
interpretation of Ayn Rand’s view of power relationships. Sciabarra
presented a Tri-level Model
of Power Relations which was first derived from his reconstruction of Ayn
Rand’s critical analyses of social problems, outlined in Part Three of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Sciabarra, 2013).
In introducing his discussion of Rand’s view of power
relationships, Chris Sciabarra commented:
“Winton suggests that Enlightenment humanism has been preoccupied with reason and reality, while postmodernism has been preoccupied with the use of power. Hence, it is startling that Rand, who most certainly placed herself in the reason and reality camp, also emerged with a critique of power relations.”
The question under discussion provoked responses from
several libertarians and classical liberals. The response of Douglass
Rasmussen, joint author of Norms of Liberty (Rasmussen and Den Uyl, 2005)
is pertinent to this essay:
“Is there not a difference between saying libertarianism qua political philosophy should attempt to change culture and saying that a libertarian concerned in advancing libertarianism should attempt to change culture? The former concerns what the political/legal order should do, and the latter concerns what individuals should do.”
As I see it, attempting to understand the consequences
for liberty and individual flourishing of interactions between culture, markets,
social movements and government regulation does not obviate or preclude attempts
to define the nature of a political/legal order that can ensure that
individuals can flourish in different ways without colliding.
Foucault’s
liberalism
From
my perspective, one of the most interesting aspects of Foucault’s philosophy,
as discussed by Pennington, is his account of discourses as a kind of
spontaneous order phenomenon. Foucault
challenges the role of individual or collective agency in the operation of
power regimes. Power works through chainlike or network effects. As people adopt
certain discourses they influence the actions of others.
Power does not emanate from a single point in a
network. It emerges from diverse and at time contradictory attempts by actors
to assert their place in society. There is no identifiable author of power
relations. As Pennington puts it:
“The discourses and disciplines producing people’s patterns of thought, positionality and interests are largely unintended consequences of the multiple attempts to affect the conduct of others.”
States of domination arise when a set of discourses
align or crystalize with each other and with the juridical power of the state. Scientific
discourses can pose a problem where people come to be classified relative to
various norms (e.g. as deviant, perverted, insane) and subjected to discipline (which
may include social punishments). In addition, bio-power operates through interventions
to change social, economic or environmental conditions in the name of improving
population health or providing security.
Pennington suggests that “it is with Foucault’s
concept of bio-power and especially its economic manifestations where the most
significant possibilities for a dialogue between the Foucauldian and postmodern
liberal perspectives lies”. Late in Foucault’s career he “seems to favour an
environment that preserves a ‘pluralism of rationalities’ so that people might
remain alert to the possibility of multiple ways of their being governed and
not being frozen into a particular classificatory grid and the roles and
positions it creates”.
In my view, Foucault’s decentred account of power
relations is often more plausible than theories which reduce the exercise of
power to holding of positions in political office. A decentred account is
consistent with the
conclusion of my recent series of essays on political entrepreneurship. Even
though it is possible to identify the policies adopted in some countries with
the ideologies of authoritarian political leaders, I suggest:
“The problem of ensuring adoption of government policies that more consistently advance economic and personal freedom cannot be reduced to the question of how to elect better political entrepreneurs to national leadership positions. Institutional change is a complex process involving social movements, media organizations, and interactions between individual citizens, as well as local and national politics.”
I concur with Pennington that Foucault’s view of power
relations provides support for an unpretentious liberalism which is deeply
skeptical of economic and philosophical approaches which presuppose
that the welfare of the population can be secured by a form of expert rule.
In Part II of his book, Pennington uses his
theoretical lens to examine complex
networks of institutional, physical, and administrative mechanisms and
knowledge structures associated with social justice, public health, ecological
sustainability, and crime and punishment. He critically examines various
overlapping systems of power - some focused on managing populations and others
focused on guiding individuals. (In this paragraph I have relied on Claude, Anthropic's
AI assistant, to help translate the technical Foucauldian phrasing in
Pennington’s summary – words including “dispositifs”, “bio-political” and “pastoral”
- into plainer English.)
These systems share three features: (1) an excessive
faith that social and economic life can be understood and controlled with
scientific precision, (2) a belief that some central “steering” intelligence
can identify and fix deviations from expected patterns, and (3) a bureaucratic,
top-down way of handling risk. The author demonstrates that these features tend
to shrink the space in which individuals can act freely.
Conclusion
So, what can libertarians learn from Foucault?
Pennington's answer, as I read it, is not that libertarians should adopt
postmodernism's skepticism of reason and truth - that skepticism, taken to its
logical end, undercuts the very possibility of arguing for freedom over
domination. Rather, what is valuable in Foucault is his decentred account of
power: the recognition that domination need not flow from a single source or a
deliberate design, but can emerge from the unintended convergence of
discourses, institutions, and expert classifications. This is a lesson that liberals
have sometimes neglected, having focused their concern about over-government on
the formal power of the state while overlooking the more diffuse mechanisms in
social justice, public health, ecological policy, and criminal justice that narrow
the space for individuals to govern their own lives.
What Pennington calls postmodern liberalism – I prefer
to call it "unpretentious liberalism" - captures what is worth taking
from this encounter: a liberalism skeptical of the pretence of expert knowledge
and socio-economic positivism, without embracing postmodernism's disrespect for
reason and truth. Pennington's Foucault, particularly the later Foucault of
"What Is Enlightenment?", is compatible with this project because he
does not deny that some truth claims are better than others - he simply insists
that we remain alert to the ways power can masquerade as expertise, and that we
preserve a plurality of ways of being governed rather than being frozen into a
single classificatory grid. That, it seems to me, is a genuinely liberal insight,
however unfamiliar its Foucauldian packaging may be to libertarians who have,
like me, generally kept their distance from postmodern thought.
References
Hicks, Stephen R.
C., Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy
Publishing, 2004).
Pennington, Mark, Foucault
and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom (Oxford
University Press, 2025).
Rasmussen, Douglas
B., and Den Uyl, Douglas J, Norms of Liberty (Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2005).
Sciabarra, Chris Matthew, Ayn Rand: The Russian
Radical, Second Edition (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013).
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