083: Classical Liberalism and Michel Foucault (w/ Mark Pennington)

Note: There were some issues with my guest's audio that make a few of his answers difficult to hear. So he kindly wrote out his answers and sent them to me. Those appear below in the show notes.

Liberals, particularly classical liberals and libertarians, have too narrow a view of power. They focus on government force, or the threat of government force, and ignore all the other ways power is exercised in society. And the way classical liberals and libertarians imagine the fully autonomous self is at odds with our deep cultural embeddedness and the social construction of our identities, our ways of seeing, and the concepts through which we come to understand ourselves and the world.

That's the argument my guest sets out in his new book, which asks classical liberals and libertarians to take seriously the analysis of power, knowledge, and identify set out by the French theorist Michel Foucault. And, as Mark Pennington further argues in Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom, taking Foucault seriously strengthens the foundations of liberalism and makes it better able to respond to illiberal critiques.

Pennington is Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King's College, University of London, and is Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society.

We discuss Foucault's ideas, and introduce them for listeners who know nothing about his theories. And we show how they can point to liberal conclusions, including individual rights and a free market economy. Mark's book is the book I've been wanting someone to write a long time, and it not only doesn't disappoint but is, I think, one of the most import books in the liberal tradition in decades.

Produced by Landry Ayres. Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Written Answers

21:59

If we have seen that ideas of scientific truth have changed across different periods that might make us think twice today about thinking that we have got something like access to a scientific truth.

25:00

Traditions are often historically contingent – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be sceptical about radical ideas about how they might be reformed.

26:24

Philosophers use the term ‘immanent criticism’

27:00

It isn’t really a properly conservative approach to say that there are pure ‘natural’ types – that is much closer to what I would call a scientific naturalism which isn’t compatible with ‘true’ conservatism let alone with the sort of liberalism I would like to advocate.

32:00

Human beings are not like atoms that can be tested in a laboratory. That doesn’t mean we can’t say anything useful about human beings and their relationships, but we have got to have this scepticism about, for example, claims made about human nature – these have often been wrong and that this scepticism is especially important in contexts where those claiming scientific expertise use this to claim to exercise political authority over others. So, a big concern in Foucault is about the alignment between claims to scientific expertise and state power. This is what Foucault was concerned about - as are many Foucauldians. It is not saying you should ignore science but that you should be wary of monopoly claims to that expertise arising. If we look through the history of science and the number of ideas that have been subject to radical change then it should give us reason to be sceptical of anyone who claims today to have discovered some notion of absolute scientific truth.

34:35

One way to think about social justice might be to focus on the distribution of income and wealth; and another aspect of social justice might be to focus on the identity aspects of it such as issues of cultural status across different groups.  What I think is common across these two discussions is the belief that – or at least this is what I think is the dominant narrative on social justice in today’s world is the belief that society can be manipulated or managed to produce desired outcomes.

36:38

The first would be a kind of scepticism of the assumption underlying these dominant views that societies are legible or manageable objects in this way.

40:12

This is all about, in various organisational settings, people being told that they must meet certain targets or goals about the people that they work with or the various practices around speech they should be using – this sort of thing.

41:11

And in many ways can reproduce some of the categories that people in the gay liberation movement for example and some racial justice movements wanted to challenge. 

41:42

Some discussions around DEI reinforce certain stereotypes about gay people and other historically disadvantaged groups that reproduce various stereotypes.