Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom

TY - BOOK

T1 - Foucault and Liberal Political Economy

T2 - Power, Knowledge and Freedom

AU - Pennington, Mark

PY - 2025/4/14

Y1 - 2025/4/14

N2 - This book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. The first part demonstrates important commonalities between Foucault’s ideas and those of a neglected ‘postmodern’ stream in liberal political thought. These ideas draw on a social theory emphasising a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science highly 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 decentred manifestations of power. Part II deploys the tools of Foucault’s critical social theory and those of a postmodern liberalism to problematise four separate though overlapping ‘bio-political’ or ‘pastoral’ dispositifs in contemporary societies focused on social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and law and order. Where the Foucauldian and the postmodern liberal approaches point towards the value of a cultural and economic ‘creative destruction’ that destabilises existing modes of thought and ways of being, the pastoral dispositifs that seek to ‘monitor and correct’ multiple pattern anomalies are shown to stifle the space for that creative freedom. Though the book does not engage the question of whether Foucault himself moved towards endorsing liberal political economy, 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 reconstituted or postmodern liberalism.

AB - This book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. The first part demonstrates important commonalities between Foucault’s ideas and those of a neglected ‘postmodern’ stream in liberal political thought. These ideas draw on a social theory emphasising a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science highly 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 decentred manifestations of power. Part II deploys the tools of Foucault’s critical social theory and those of a postmodern liberalism to problematise four separate though overlapping ‘bio-political’ or ‘pastoral’ dispositifs in contemporary societies focused on social justice, public health, ecological sustainability, and law and order. Where the Foucauldian and the postmodern liberal approaches point towards the value of a cultural and economic ‘creative destruction’ that destabilises existing modes of thought and ways of being, the pastoral dispositifs that seek to ‘monitor and correct’ multiple pattern anomalies are shown to stifle the space for that creative freedom. Though the book does not engage the question of whether Foucault himself moved towards endorsing liberal political economy, 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 reconstituted or postmodern liberalism.

KW - Foucault, Michel

KW - liberalism

KW - subjectivity

KW - freedom

KW - social justice

KW - public health

KW - sustainability

KW - crime

M3 - Book

SN - 9780197690529

BT - Foucault and Liberal Political Economy

PB - New York Oxford University Press

CY - New York

ER -