Foucault Was Always A Libertarian
A conversation with Mark Pennington on the Rasheed Griffith Show
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Show Notes
What if the most subversive libertarian of the twentieth century wasn’t Hayek or Nozick, but Michel Foucault? In this episode, Rasheed and Mark Pennington dismantle the worn-out cliché of Foucault as the Left’s philosopher of suspicion and instead expose how his late work aligns disturbingly well with the libertarian project. Forget the caricature of Foucault as the theorist of discipline and surveillance. In this episode, he appears as the radical voice warning that freedom erodes not just under authoritarian violence but under the bureaucrat’s file, the planner’s map, and the expert’s soothing discourse of “safety.”
By pairing Hayek’s critique of the “pretense of knowledge” with Foucault’s genealogy of “regimes of truth,” the conversation makes an explosive claim: both thinkers diagnose social engineering as a theological fantasy, a bid for God-like authority over human complexity. And if Hayek valorizes entrepreneurial discovery, Foucault demands a relentless critique of the categories that normalize us into docile bodies. The convergence? Freedom is not a polite legal boundary but a restless act of self-creation: always experimental, always at risk, and always opposed to those who claim to know better.
This episode pushes further: into Milei’s Argentina, where Foucault is suddenly a touchstone for right-wing politicians; into the culture wars, where “identity” becomes just another disciplinary cage; into Judith Butler, recast as an unwitting libertarian entrepreneur of the self. The provocation is clear: maybe libertarians abandoned Foucault too quickly, and maybe Foucauldians ignored how close their master was to undermining their own collectivist pieties. What if the true scandal is that Foucault, at his most dangerous, was never the enemy of liberalism — but its most radical ally?
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Mark Pennington | Mark Pennington @ King’s College
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Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) - Mark Pennington
This transcript was automatically generated by AI and lightly edited. We don’t catch every error, so if you spot one, send a message/email via progress@cpsi.org.
Rasheed: Hi, Mark, and thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Mark Pennington: It's really good to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Rasheed: So we're going to be primarily talking about your new book, about "Foucault And Liberal Political Economy". I have it here on Kindle. The physical copy wasn't available yet when I started to read it, and I've been waiting for this book for probably over 10 years. And my friends that know me very well always know I'm saying, "Hey, there's so much Foucault when you think about classical liberalism, and no one seems to actually be synthesizing these ideas".
So I'm like, "Okay, this book has to be probably the most important book this year, in my opinion".
Mark Pennington: Very high praise. Thank you very much.
Rasheed: So, to get into the conversation, I always remember this quote from A.C. Grayling: "What is philosophy? It's too much of a smooth cliff. You can't really get up too easily." What is Foucault and liberalism? It's kind of the same idea. So I want to ease into it a bit carefully.
To start off, I'm curious about your view on this aspect. So I know you did your PhD work on the UK planning system and public choice economics and so on. I'm curious, if you had to bring your early work on planning together with your new work on Foucault, what fresh perspective does this synthesis give us about housing and urban planning in the UK today or in Europe, for that matter?
Mark Pennington: A really interesting question. So that work that I did on urban planning was really looking at the system of land use regulation in the UK from a kind of public choice theory perspective. Which, in some ways, I've kind of moved away a little bit from in more recent years.
But the key idea there was that many of the rules and regulations are not there as a kind of public interest manifestation. They're a product of what public choice theorists called "rent-seeking behavior". So it's interest groups trying to influence the regulation to benefit themselves, often at the expense of other groups. And also people working in bureaucratic agencies who are often engaging in programs of effective self-aggrandizement by maximizing the number of regulations that they supervise and the size of their bureaucratic agencies. And it's a kind of nexus between those forces, the interest groups, and the bureaucracy that produces a system that chronically restricts the supply of housing. So you've got various interest groups that benefit from restricting housing supply, and you've got a bureaucratic structure that also benefits from this regulatory apparatus. Now, if I were applying the perspective, I, developing this book to that very question, I'd be looking at the planning system as a form of what Foucault calls "power knowledge". It's a kind of power knowledge complex. So I'd be looking at the way in which these actors, the bureaucratic actors, and various interest groups deploy various examples of what Foucault would call discourses, actually justify aspects of the regulatory regime. And I'd also be looking at the way in which these discourses, and the kinds of systems of classification. That goes along with their work to effectively exclude or marginalize certain kinds of actors. So they fix both people and, in this particular case, conceptions of the way in which land ought to be used into categories that actually block various forms of experimentation. To give an example of that, in the UK, with that land use planning system, we have a very strong green belt policy. Particular areas are designated as open space. The notion that certain areas are, if you like, naturally almost always be open space is constraining because it fixes a category of the kinds of land uses, but also the kinds of people that are associated with those land uses that should be allowed to be in certain kinds of spaces. That can have all kinds of exclusionary effects. So when you have interest groups, what are often called "not in my backyard" interest groups, people who don't want new housing in the area where they live. Sometimes that is just because they don't wanna see more housing for understandable reasons, perhaps if they've got a nice view. But it might also be because they want to exclude the types of people who might come in to occupy that housing. So that kind of lens, I think, is more the one that I would be deploying if I were using this Foucauldian framework.
Rasheed: Hayek criticizes the pretext of knowledge in scientific planning, and Foucault maps how expert discourse crystallizes into regimes of truth. Do these critiques converge on the same warning, or does analysis of power reveal hazards even within Hayek's market epistemics?
Mark Pennington: That's an interesting question. So I think the area where Hayek's ideas and Foucault's ideas overlap is the idea that there is no God-like perspective on the world, no one who can have access to a kind of totalizing understanding of the world. And by that I mean of other human beings and of the way they interact in various social settings. Now, in Hayek's case, it's the idea that there are what he calls complex phenomena, where the number of variables and the character of their interaction, intertwined with the creative aspect of human agency, means that there are no stable law-like relationships that can be observed and manipulated in a predictable way by planners. So in Hayek's view, the knowledge that is relevant to social coordination is always dispersed. It's subjective. It's often contradictory. Even at the individual level. People aren't necessarily sure of which actions they should take. Now Foucault, he is very influenced by Nietzsche's ideas on a sort of Perspectivalism. So it's the idea that each person tries to exercise what Nietzsche calls "a will to power", by sort of imprinting their perspective on the world. That perspective is only ever partial. It's only ever reflecting your own experiences or your own attempt to influence other people. But people will often use claims to scientific truth, to try to claim that their partial perspective is actually something like a God-like or objective perspective on the world. So you could combine those by saying that, both Hayek and Foucault would see people who claim to have the knowledge to be social planners or social engineers as claiming that they have a kind of God-like expertise to enable them to manipulate and manage society. Which for different reasons both Foucault and Hayek are suggesting that they don't actually have. Now you also asked a question there about whether Hayek's own views about market epistemic the coordinating properties of markets. Could we consider those as an example of a kind of power-knowledge claim, now on a Foucauldian view? Yes, they are. Because all claims to truth about social coordination are examples of that. I think the reason that the kind of claims that Hayek makes are not as susceptible to that kind of critique as are the claims of the, would-be planners or social engineers, is that central to liberalism or at least the kind of liberalism that Hayek supports, is the notion that all truth claims including the ones that liberals make, should be open to contestation and to competition. So on the Hayekian view, in a sense, there's nothing wrong with people engaging at a local level in kind of experiments in socialism, if you like, that challenged the claims of liberalism. What the objection is to is a kind of totalizing attempt to introduce those kinds of practices on a society-wide basis.
So liberalism itself should always be open to contestation. We shouldn't necessarily, I think, try to prevent people from experimenting with non-liberal methods, provided they don't try to extinguish. The potential for other people to continue engaging in liberal practices.
Rasheed: The way I see it, Hayek prizes freedom because it lets unforeseen knowledge surface. And Foucault values critique, his idea of critique. Because it opens space for unanticipated knowledge and ways of being, his terminology. Is this openness to the not-yet-known the common core between these two projects?
Mark Pennington: I think it very much is. So you can think of Hayek's understanding and many other people in the kind of Austrian tradition, of what entrepreneurs do as a practical instantiation of Foucault's notion of critique. Critique in the Foucauldian sense is always taking place within a tradition. Or within a discourse or a set of practices that you can never completely escape from your whole mind, your thought processes are constituted by these discourses, but that doesn't mean that you can't spot ambiguities or gaps within them or contradictions within them. That's what critique is for Foucault. Likewise, Hayek and the Austrians would see entrepreneurs as looking at various market practices or gaps within the price system, within sets of prices, or contradictions between particular sets of cultural ideas, and looking to use those as spaces that create something new or different. So you could think of what entrepreneurs do as challenging the status quo and being a form of practical criticism in the business world, but also potentially in the cultural and ethical sphere as well.
Rasheed: This idea of Foucault and critique. I'm gonna come back to it later because it's one of the things that I think is most overlooked. And I realized that also when even Stephen Cochrane-
Mark Pennington: Yeah.
Rasheed: The historian did some classes with Foucault at Berkeley. He has maintained this idea of Foucauldian critique throughout his entire work since then.
But we'll get back to that. So I do want to go to another point. Deirdre McCloskey recuperates justice as one of the virtues among many and knows justice as a strict side constraint on coercion, but Foucault treats justice as a historically contingent tribunal of truth.
Can these three be made compatible inside, liberal order, or do they clash?
Mark Pennington: Well, I think it depends on how you ground the notion of justice. So, if you take it from a kind of very strong, Nozickian or rights-based libertarian perspective, which emphasizes notions of self-ownership, that there's something about the person that means that they own themselves, which is rooted in some particular capacity for reason, a form of liberalism is in line with Foucault. Because he would want to say that there's nothing really essential about people. That means that any particular set of rights might follow from that. He might see certain forms of liberalism in that sense as being excessively individualistic. So they'd be prioritizing very much. Rights that are based on a notion of self-ownership. What I think he would be more sympathetic to is based on, his notion of a kind of pluralism of rationalities, that given that our understandings of ourselves are actually always historically contingent, we should be open to the possibility of there being, multiple constructions of individuality, some of which may be if you like, more individualistic, some of which might be more communalistic. And although he isn't, he doesn't specify. And this is arguably one of the reasons why some people have problems with me, doesn't actually specify what that looks like in practice. I think there are many commonalities there with the final part of Nozick's anarchy state in 'Utopia', what Nozick calls the meta 'Utopia', which doesn't depend on the rights-based or self-ownership foundations that he sets out earlier in that book. So the meta, Utopia is talking about a pluralism of communities, you have some that are more individualistic, others that are less individualistic, and people can kind of move in the gaps between these different sorts of communities or cross into different sorts of communities. That is, I think, precisely the kind of social environment that is compatible with KO's notion of freedom. So for Foucault, freedom is about self-creation, the capacity to reinvent yourself, to experience different ways of being, which could be more or less individualistic, more or less communalistic, so that there wouldn't be any one ideal type of human life.
So I think the meta Utopia idea in Nozick is very compatible with that, and any form of liberalism that emphasizes a kind of radical pluralism that tries to found its notion of what justice is around that notion is also compatible with it. So I would say if you're looking for the tradition that is probably closest to that in a more philosophical sense, in a deeper philosophical sense, it'd be a kind of Hayek-Hume synthesis where what they call rules of justice are not justice in the sense of reflecting some deep, underlying moral truth.
It's more like a kind of compromise to cope with the fact that in the world around us, people radically disagree about many things, and therefore, we need some basic rules of interaction to facilitate social existence in the face of deep-level ethical disagreements.
Rasheed: So on that notion of the self and the creation of the self, there's a famous poet from the Caribbean named Derek Walcott, in England also, I guess. And he has this poem called "Love After Love". The very last line is "Sit, feast on yourself, feast on your life." And that always reminds me of this quote from, well quote, and idea from Foucault.
So when Foucault says "The self is not given to us," he echoes his earlier claim that subjects are power effects. And in asking us to create ourselves as a work of art, I think the famous life from Foucault, is he shifting from an oncological diagnosis to an ethical imperative, or simply making explicit what was always implicit in his genealogy?
Mark Pennington: I think those two ideas are very closely related. So he certainly has the idea that our conceptions of ourselves at any point in time are largely powerful effects of the various discourses. Or what somebody like Hayek, or Michael Oakeshott would talk about as being the traditions or conventions or norms within which we are always embedded. So even the way we think is conditioned by these cultural practices or routines that we didn't actually invent ourselves. So we're always products of that. Now, Foucault believes that we do have a capacity for agency, though we are always shaped by these discourses or practices, we're not determined by them. The notion of self-creation is the idea that you can play with the rules or discourses within which you're situated to create something new and different. You can reinvent yourself. He's looking at that from a kind of, if you like, ontological or descriptive understanding of what happens in human societies. But people do reinvent themselves. But he also, I think, does believe that there is a kind of ethical imperative for this as well. So his ethics are about giving people the space to engage in this freedom of self-creation, enabling people to make their lives a work of art, as you mentioned. So there is an ethical aspect to this, but that ethical aspect is intimately entwined with his ontological view that we are always power effects of the kind of social systems in which we find ourselves.
Rasheed: Tyler Cowen, in his "Complacent Class", laments the emergence of the risk or risk-adverse stagnation in people. So Foucault diagnoses this idea of normalizing power that breeds docile bodies. Do you think they talk about the same thing?
Mark Pennington: I think they may well be doing so. So I mean, this goes back to the previous point. These self-creative acts that Foucault is talking about, where people make themselves a work of art, often entail risky behavior. They involve acts of transgression, in various ways, where people challenge aspects of the status quo in ways that can often be quite dangerous. putting yourself at physical risk because of the challenges or active resistance that you might be engaging in. So there's a very active sense of Foucault about what freedom entails. It's not a passive state; it's an active state where you are challenging aspects of the status quo. Now, what he calls a normalizing society is a type of society that deadens that actually fixing people into categories and limiting their capacity to engage in these acts of resistance. You can think of the way in which many western societies have, if you like, encased themselves in various safetyist or precautionary narratives, around public health, environmentalism of various kinds, as examples of this. They are telling people that they should be risk-averse, that risk-taking is something to be fearful of rather than to be something that is embraced. So increasingly people are sort of encasing themselves in various forms of control, which give the illusion of safety in many ways actually produce not greater safety, just subjects who lack resilience in the face of the inevitable changes or challenges that will confront them in their lives.
Rasheed: So to put it crudely, maybe you won't agree, but classical liberalism broadly defends-
Mark Pennington: Yeah.
Rasheed: negative liberty, freedom from coercion. Does the microphysics of power suggest subtler forms of coercion that libertarians generally overlook speaking?
Mark Pennington: Yes and no. So the classic critique that a lot of people who are influenced by Foucault make about the focus on negative liberty and classical liberalism would be that if you simply focus on intervention, in terms of acts of direct violence against people or infringements on property rights, you are ignoring all the other ways, decentralized ways, the way that you're brought up in the home, in the education system, other sites that can lead to feelings of, constraint or unfreedom. So norms around gender or sexuality would be the obvious example of this. That if you simply focus on freedom as non-interference. In the classical sense, you'd be ignoring how people can be constrained, their freedom limited by the circulation of discourses or narratives that mean that certain actions, around gender and sexuality, are considered to be beyond the pale that marginalizing certain actors. Now that is a classic reading that often Foucauldian critics of classical liberalism give. It's not clear that it's the one that Foucault himself would endorse, at least not the late Foucault. So he makes very interesting remarks about the only guarantee of freedom being freedom. And I think what he's getting at there is the idea that we can never escape from these decentralized forms of constraint, or if you like, cultural interference that actually shape our very sense of who we are. A potential benefit of negative freedom is that it leaves individual subjects with the greatest space to find out for themselves how to challenge those norms or practices that they're situated to engage in acts of rebellion. Whereas ironically, positive theories of freedom that claim to want to liberate people from cultural processes that may discriminate against people who've got certain sexual orientations, or gender identifications, or racial or ethnic identities, actually end up imprisoning those people because they construct them as passive agents who aren't actually capable of challenging the power relations in which they find themselves. So I think a really interesting example of this, which is one I mentioned in the book, is to look at what Iran has been doing in the recent past to challenge incredibly restrictive theocratic practices. Now, those challenges that those Iranian women have been engaging in have been crushed by direct violence from the Iranian regime. But the point is that those women, even though they're in a very constrained situation, have had agency; they've been able to challenge themselves without requiring some external liberator to come in and free them from what they see as forms of cultural oppression. And that is true, I think, in more liberal societies for many groups, whether it's gays, lesbians, people in ethnic minorities, or other actors, that they've often got space in a liberal regime to figure out their own ways of actually challenging the power systems that they find themselves in without requiring some external agent to liberate them.
And the process of supposedly liberating, liberating them, actually just pigeonholing them into various kinds of categories and routines that end up just perpetuating stereotypes about various group identities.
Rasheed: Foucault's governmentality thesis says that, modern state regulates conduct through welfare, health, and security. Does that genealogy strengthen the libertarian warning against mission creep, or does it suggest that even in a night watchman state, it inevitably grows pastoral tentacles?
Mark Pennington: When Foucault speaks about governmentality, he refers to the interaction between different types of power. So some of that power could be what many people usually associate with power, which is sovereign power, like the power of the state to issue commands or orders elsewhere. It could be examples of what he calls disciplinary power, which targets specific individuals who are considered to be troublesome actors in some sense. And then thirdly, he talks about bio power, which actually overlaps with what you call security mechanisms there in your remarks. So by that, he's talking about narratives that target the whole population as the focus of control or the focus of government. He has interesting things to say about that biopower when he's discussing liberalism. So he basically distinguishes between forms of this biopower that are very constraining, that lead to the proliferation of regulations and controls over people in the name of improving the welfare of the population. And you can think of public health as being something like that. And those elements within, if you like, neoliberal or liberal discourses, which emphasize the importance of various kinds of controls and operating instead through incentives and signals, which enable people to coordinate with others but without actually subjecting them directly to disciplinary types of power or to command control techniques. And he seems to think that things like the price system or various market-like processes, and you get this through his engagement with people like Gary Becker, are forms of power that nonetheless allow subjects greater freedom of maneuver than some of the other types of power techniques that are operative. I think to go back to the core of your question, does liberalism completely avoid those kinds of power? No, it doesn't. Because all societies have these power mechanisms operating. But I think if you are giving a kind of liberal reading of Foucault or trying to square aspects of liberalism with some of his concerns, the argument would be that the types of power that operate in liberal societies are less controlling. They are less pastoral than the types of power that might be operated in other types of regimes. And that's how you could make a kind of Foucauldian case for certain forms of liberal rule.
Rasheed: So I want to move now into what I would call the applied Foucauldian analysis of the world. And, you know, people would not normally know this, but the most important place right now for Foucault is Argentina and generally right-wing politics in Latin America. Again, very, a very funny case.
I'll get to why that is the case. So perfect, because you could then kind of help me understand it.
So I was actually going through, preparing for the interview. I was going through some of the old Foucault essays, and I remember I found a note where Foucault actually quotes Jorge Borges-
Mark Pennington: Yep.
Rasheed: - the Argentinian writer, in the beginning of " Order of Things", in one of his frameworks for thinking about how to actually structure knowledge and so on.
So Borges is also a well-known writer. He's not well known for politics. He's a very strong libertarian in the literally Nozick level of things. There's actually a very good book, in Spanish, about Borges and economics and so on that kind of discusses these ideas. And of course, now one of the most popular figures when it comes to Argentina or far-right politics or right-wing politics is Javier Milei from Argentina. So interestingly, Milei talks quite a lot about Foucault. People don't know this, of course, and I will get to why this is, and why he actually thinks his interpretation of Foucault is correct. So in this book from 2018, called "Libertad Libertad Libertad", which of course means liberty, and you will see it as of course libertarian, talking about liberty, blah, blah, blah.
This is actually a line from the Argentine national anthem. So he grounds his view of liberalism as an Argentine quality. Now he opens the book with a very stark quote from Borges, where Borges essentially said, "the state is the enemy of the individual." Very strong, very strong words.
Okay? Now, what I find most interesting about this book, at least in the introduction, is Javier Milei-
Mark Pennington: Mm-hmm.
Rasheed: - mentions Foucault. He said Foucault knew it. " First, you need to change the people." So he mentioned this, it's become a long leader, but he mentioned this in the context of his politics. He views when, for example, in an interview when he was doing the election for president, his circuit, an interviewer asked him "what's the most important problem in Argentina, the politics or the economics?"
And Milei said it's morality. And in his view, you cannot have good politics or good econ policy if the people treat it as an actual moral pursuit. So he's using Foucault in this context here to say, "Well, nothing you do in politics matters unless the people themselves are different people." And. I'm curious because I think this is a wrong interpretation of Foucault in the sense that Foucault wouldn't say first you change the people, as Milei suggests. He would say, "Well, you have to change the institutions, the truth, values, the structure in which the people themselves inhabit, and that will allow them to change. And that's how you start off the future. "So the thesis or the people or the bodies need to be actioned upon, I think it's correct.
But do you think this idea of "well, the people need to change first" is actually a good interpretation of how Foucault himself would set it out?
Mark Pennington: That is a really interesting question. I mean, I wasn't familiar, and this is one of the problems of being a British person; we don't read other languages. I wasn't familiar with these connections at all. I think the answer to your question is a difficult one.
'cause you can read this in two different ways. So Foucault makes a statement, I think it's in one of the late essays, I think it may be in the essay, ‘The Subject and Power,’ which is one that kind of summarizes his previous works. And it was written in the early 1980s. He says that he has a line where he says the problem is not individualism, but the type of individualism linked to the state. Now what he means by that is that it's not that individuals don't exist, it's that the way we see ourselves as individuals in today's world has often been shaped by these systems of classification that often come down from the state or that link the state apparatus with various other sites in society that, and actually constrained people, within various constructed categories. Now, in a case like Argentina, or other very heavily regulated economies, and I think actually this is also true increasingly of Europe and the United States. You actually do have forms of individuality that are linked to the state. So we have the distinction between, if you like, the regulators and the regulated, between those who are the nudgers and those who will be nudged. Now, perhaps what people like Milei are getting at is that people in societies like Argentina have become so used to seeing themselves almost as passive agents who were just there to be manipulated by the state authorities, that it's that kind of construction of themselves, which needs to be challenged. So when you say that Milei says that we need to change the people, what he's getting at is the idea that we need agencies see themselves in a much more active sense as being, if you like, entrepreneurial actors, not actors who have to ask permission, or to engage perhaps in bribes, just if they've got to do anything, but people who see themselves as being more self-directed. Now, the question, and this is the difficult part, I think, is where does that come from? Foucault, I think, would be very resistant to the idea that creating a new, more entrepreneurial self is something that can be generated from the top down, a kind of political liberator, the form of maybe Milei or anybody else. What will be required is a much broader set of cultural changes where people start to see themselves in a more kind of entrepreneurial or free light. I don't think that perspective would exclude a role for some form of political change at the governmental level. So maybe having a kind of inspirational figure like Milei or somebody else could be a part of that process. But you wouldn't want to get into a situation where you've got a kind of cult of personality because that would actually be reproducing the very phenomena that you're wanting to challenge, which is the idea that people can't lead their own lives, they need leaders or pastors to put them on the right path when that freedom is something they have to discover or create for themselves I think for Foucault.
Rasheed: You used the keyword, which is what I want to talk about for the next few questions. It's “culture”. So this, the culture war, is a very big conversation in Europe and in the US. It's a much bigger conversation in right-wing Latin American politics. So there is a book, here it is. It's called "The Culture War."
Mark Pennington: Yeah.
Rasheed: It's essentially, rules for a new right wing in Latin America. And this was written by another Argentinian, very important to Milei, named Agustín Laje. He's a close advisor of Javier Milei, and he is also a YouTube influencer. He has over 2 million subscribers on YouTube and, big TikTok following. And he is what he called a public intellectual in Argentina and essentially the Hispanic world for the right wing, even here in Madrid.
He's always here giving lectures and so on. Now he talks a lot about Foucault too. And so in this book about the Culture War, essentially he talks about Foucault, essentially about Foucault and the power he Foucault. He says that Foucault talks about the words we use, the knowledge we have, and the science we teach.
Those are terms that he calls power and discourse. But Agustín Laje says, "I mean, the exact same thing, but what I mean is culture." So he's actually using the Foucauldian framework to tell people why the culture war is so important for right-wing politics in Latin America, in Argentina, and so on. This, to me, is the core tension because, in this case, not Foucault per se, but can libertarianism fight a culture war given the negative liberty, negative coercion, ideas of libertarian thought?
Mark Pennington: Well, I think it can, but I think you've obviously gotta be very careful about how you use the term culture war. So when I hear that, I find it very hard to separate it from all of the kinds of debates around identity politics that are raging in Europe and in the United States. Now the way I think I might want to embrace an element of what you might call a culture war would be trying to emphasize what we were mentioning earlier about this notion that at least in Foucault's view, have the capacity to make themselves works of art or to use some of the language that he uses late on, to be entrepreneurs of the self, that they can reinvent themselves. And what you could think of as being, if you like, a kind of positive culture war rather than a negative one, is to be talking about the spaces that enable that self-entrepreneurship, that self-creation to take place and to unfold. And perhaps in many societies that have been very constrained by sort of paternalistic discourses which see them as just passive agents who've got to be manipulated by their rulers and by their betters. That's exactly the kind of cultural war, if you like, you need to be fighting. But what you're challenging there is the idea that there are rulers and ruled, that people have to have their lives directed by planners or regulators rather than having the capacity to direct their own lives. But going back to the point about identity politics, and this connects to what I was saying a little bit earlier in the conversation in the European and the North American context. I think there's an argument from a Foucauldian position for a culture war, which challenges the current terms on which the culture war is being waged. Because that culture war, as it's unfolding in the US and Europe, is a collectivist one. It's about reinforcing notions of group identity, it's around sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, these sorts of things, and whichever side of it people are on. It's about keeping people in sorts of categorizations. I think a Foucauldian view would be much more individualistic, it would be about enabling people to break outta these categories, to create new identities across differences so that we can have new forms of individuality emerging rather than keeping people stuck in collective categories, which in different ways are reinforced both by the social justice warriors on the left and by, if you like, the reactionary right wing response to those culture warriors.
Rasheed: I think that is correct, and I think that is how Milei views it. And you, you know it because obviously one of his core theses is he created a new ministry called the Ministry for Deregulation and State Transformation, which was headed by a very, very good economist. And he closed down a bunch of other ministries, from 22 Ministries to 8, and the core one being this Ministry of Deregulation.
And you can see it because they're saying, we are gonna take away all of these state structures to allow people to obviously be entrepreneurs of themselves. And it's almost also the same Foucauldian idea of technologies of the self as well. We're gonna free up this space so you can have more of that for your own view. That's a very different approach to culture war than in terms of the US or Europe, as you just said.
So to tie this in, I have another question. So there's another book I want to highlight since this book. This is actually about Gramsci and Milei. So again, in Argentina, it's amazing.
These people go on the night news and talk about these topics. This theorist Aravena, this is his PhD thesis.
So he doesn't use Foucault at all. He does mention Foucault in the book. He says that Milei, however, has a more Gramscian approach. So his view is this, he says that Milei and the right, but he really means Latin American right, has mastered Gramsci's war of position, turning schools and media into trenches.
And now my question is this. I'm not sure I agree with that, but if liberals or libertarians jump into the same cultural trench warfare, do they preserve freedom? Or do they risk installing a new soft discipline of their own? Is this the same tension here in the Foucauldian system? On one level, you have to actively do something to get rid of these barriers to yourself.
But you could also, in the same sense, risk installing new disciplinary actions as well. And I'm not sure to what level one could come out in, obviously I have my views, but I'm not sure exactly, really, how clear those views are. And just to add in one more point before I get to the question, there's another theorist here in Spain, he's very popular, where he talks about culture war also in this much more nuanced way, where, when Foucault said politics is war by other means.
A theorist I mentioned here in Spain said, "Culture wars are always lost." And in some sense that's true. But at the same time, I think Foucauldian critique has to be true also, you need to actually actively use power as a production and actually pursue these ways to allow people the space to do them, to create themselves as a work of art.
So anyway, that's a lot to say, but how do you see this very meta tension, being able to play out as politics?
Mark Pennington: I think on the Gramsci point, I mean, obviously I'm not familiar with these works that you mentioned, but I would imagine the concept that they're interested in there is the Gramsci notion of hegemony, there are sort of hegemonic ideas, which are quite similar to some of Foucault's concepts. Like when Foucault talks about a dispositive or an apparatus, in some ways, that's quite similar to Gramscian hegemony. Now the Gramscians, of course, what they want to do is, as they would understand it, they see there being, or the left wing Gramscians, if you like, a kind of liberal or capitalist hegemony in the culture, and you want to replace that by taking over various cultural institutions. So you basically install a kind of leftist, sympathetic, or socialist hegemony. Now that is very much because it's these powers residing in institutions of the states, still quite a top-down kind of view of how you change a society. That is the type of view that you could see now unfolding in the United States. The way in which people in the Trump administration are trying to install a new hegemony, if you like, within US educational institutions. So there's direct interference in the university sector, from a whole group of people around the Trump administration who are trying to install a more conservative, friendly hegemony, if you like, in that system. Now, I don't think from a kind of Foucauldian position that that is the way you would want to go, because it is very much emphasizing the idea that we need external liberators. So you are right, I think that if you want to free up spaces in heavily regulated systems, you do need some deregulation of the state.
You can't avoid engaging with the state apparatus. You've got to maybe do some of the things that Milei is doing, which is abolishing certain government departments, abolishing certain ministries. But there's a difference between doing that, and I think what is happening in the United States where you then try to penetrate aspects of private and civil society to, install your own ideas or your own practices, because then that becomes a very top down sort of project, which is actually denying the agency for people to engage in their own forms of resistance or entrepreneurship or whatever you want to call it.
Does that make sense?
Rasheed: It does. It does. As we were talking, I remember a tweet that was made last year. I just pulled it up. Mind my crude translation. So this is Milei as president of Argentina, posting a long tweet about Gramscian sociology. He said that the most wonderful thing about the culture war brought into politics based on the principle of revelation is that when one points out the sacred cows of Gramscian structure, it automatically creates a dividing line between those who live off the privilege of the state and decent people. It's funny because there are a bunch of biographies about Milei that came out last year.
I have all of them here on my shelf. None of them discusses this theological Foucauldian analysis that he has with the world. It's a very odd blind spot.
Why is it that, given Milei is viewed by essentially everyone as a libertarian capitalist, strong Hayekian, strong person of von Mises, he knows it. They know all these connections, but yet again, the libertarian or the European liberals among us still do not understand the Foucauldian aspect, even though he literally mentions Foucault.
He talks about Gramsci. Even his framework of policy is the same thing. It is a continuing example of this disconnect between libertarian thought and Foucault, as essentially your book points out.
Mark Pennington: It probably is, but I'm obviously part of this, I think, which reflects what I was saying before. I think people, certainly in the circles I work in, would simply be unaware of these connections. I had no idea until you mentioned it to me conversation about what is going on in Latin America.
It's a great example, the fact that people like Milei, and some of the other people you've been speaking about, are using Foucault's ideas or Gramscian ideas, but using them in a very different context from which many other people in those traditions have used them. They've been traditionally associated with more kind of radical left politics. That's a wonderful example of how once ideas get out into the world, the theorist is not in control of what happens to them. They can be appropriated, reinterpreted by other actors. And that is arguably what you are describing in the case of Latin America. Now, the bigger point I think you're getting at is why is it perhaps that certainly in Europe, and I think this is true in North America as well, people in the classical liberal movement or the libertarian movement more generally, haven't really engaged with, people like Foucault. and I think, I said that in this, in another interview I did recently. I don't think you can do this without the kind of cultural history. You've been talking about cultural wars, but the kind of cultural history of Europe and North America over the last 50 or 60 years, where many people in the libertarian movement are very formed by the backdrop of Cold War politics. And as they see it, lots of people who are postmodernists like Foucault or post-structuralists, whatever you want to call them, were people who had some kind of association with the Marxist left at one point. Even though they, in many cases, abandoned those connections and in fact developed concepts in Foucault’s case that fundamentally challenged Marxism, are still in the eyes of many of these people tarred with that Marxist aunt brush. And therefore, people just don't want to go near those sorts of ideas. There are all kinds of prejudices that people have about, "Oh, you just shouldn't read these French thinkers." And I think it's very misguided because there are really productive ideas that can be taken from these thinkers, irrespective of whether or not they move towards liberalism. In the case of Foucault, I think there is a good case to be made that towards the end of his life, he was moving towards something like a liberal position. But frankly, even if he wasn't, he still has fascinating ideas about the way power is used. It's manipulated the way it controls us, which can be of use to libertarians, and it's a great shame that they haven't engaged with it more.
And this is one of the reasons I wrote my book to try to show how that engagement can take place.
Rasheed: Beyond your book and also your book is very important here, but what else would be useful to have the libertarian crew actually engage, not superficially, I mean, really engaged by understanding proper biopolitics and night watchman state-
Mark Pennington: Yeah.
Rasheed: collisions. What would that take?
Mark Pennington: Can you explain that a little bit more? I'm not quite sure. Are you talking about what other thinkers, those kinds of liberals, might engage with?
Rasheed: In the sense of this. You have a very popular figure in politics, and you have a lot of academics who talk about the figure a lot. And he talks about these things a lot. But even then, that wasn't enough to encourage more column libertarians to actually think about Foucault and other people like that still.
So I'm saying, is this a problem in just the educational path when it comes to these things, where one could say, you do an econ degree, don't do econ history? You definitely don't do any kind of Foucauldian either. But I'm curious how you would want to improve the awareness of, not only Foucault, but if your term is what?
Postmodern liberalism? How does that now become a more widely used concept for thinking?
Mark Pennington: Well, it's very difficult because you've got obviously in an academic environment, which is the one I'm most familiar with in universities, social science in particular. You've got this very strange divide between economic disciplines, economics itself, you might potentially include business studies or areas like that also, they tend to be the areas that attract more, if you like, libertarian oriented people. Because economic theory is perceived as something that is relatively speaking, more sympathetic to markets than some of the other fields. The irony there, of course, is that the kinds of economic models that dominate economics departments are actually very technocratic, very scientistic, very anti-individualistic, very anti-creative, in many ways. On the other hand, you've got the situation where in the arts and humanities and the non-economic areas of social science, that's where you have, if you like, many of the more creative or entrepreneurial understandings of culture and the way that culture shapes us that are anti. But these fields tend to attract people who at least identify themselves as being more left-wing, being concerned with more left-wing sorts of issues around cultural freedom, for example. And I think what's required is an attempt to bridge these areas. And I think the great potential of the kind of Austrian economic type tradition that I'm very sympathetic to that although this hasn't happened, it has the potential to bridge these areas. Because, on the one hand, it is an economic form of analysis. But on the other hand, it's a form of economic analysis that embraces the creative aspect of human beings, embraces the idea of uncertainty, flux, change, disequilibrium. And I think the trick is to show that this kind of economic understanding can speak to the concerns of the arts and humanities. And I hope my book is a kind of small step in making that bridge more apparent. But it's not only me who's doing this, I think Deirdre McCloskey's work is very much an example of someone who's economically informed, but she's using an approach that should have appealed to people in the arts and humanities. And I think it's only when those kinds of bridges can be created and people can start to tentatively, if you like, from either side, put their feet on those bridges that we might start to get the movements that you're talking about.
Rasheed: Interestingly, he credited a professor here in Spain, in Madrid, for his knowledge of Austrian economics. And he actually directs a very popular economics graduate program here in Madrid about Austrian economics, and most of the well-known Spanish thinkers about Austrian economics have actually gone through that program.
Every time Milei talks about his ideas of economics, he credits Austrian thinkers, obviously, as people know first. But the reason was because of this particular school here in Madrid that does the lectures actually from my think tank. We put them online, and that's how Milei actually watched them in Argentina.
It's very interesting. So I think that probably is one of the best options one has, and I'm hoping a lot more of that becomes the case. Ironically enough, we're living in that Foucauldian nightmare of the discipline constraint of academia, causing this.
Mark Pennington: And I think what's very important is that people who are classical liberals or libertarians who do have this understanding of Austrian economics, what they shouldn't do is to attack the people in the arts and humanities as being economic ignoramuses. I mean, this is what often does happen. There is an element of truth in that, in the sense that many people in arts and humanities are resistant to economic forums of explanation, even if I think the kind of Austrian kind. And I think what people in the Austrian tradition need to do is to reach out to these people in more sympathetic ways to say, "Hey, look, we have an understanding of economic theory that is actually compatible with many humanistic understandings that many people in the arts and humanities are interested in exploring."
So instead of dismissing these fields, which I think is often what happens, people in the tradition need to think creatively about how to engage these people. Because it's in the areas of arts and humanities or the non-economic social sciences, these are the fields that have had enormous influence in the cultural sphere and ultimately in the political sphere over the last 20 or 30 years. And if Austrian economics and classical liberalism are going to have a kind of broader revival, we need to engage people in these fields, not to treat them as a kind of inherent enemy.
Rasheed: I think Tyler Cowen has a comment, and he told me, or maybe he was public, I don't remember where he said, we need to have some more defenses of postmodern thought because it's too easy to say, "Oh, it's so silly." But it's so important, and a lot of it is so relevant. But there are very few defenses, not even speaking from a right-wing or a libertarian perspective, which I think your book obviously contributes to.
But on a broader scale, there's so little defence from, call it more serious, but sympathetic audiences of these ideas that is just either the people who will co-op Judith Butler without actually understanding things she wrote, or people will say, everything Butler wrote is bad. There's no in between.
I didn't think that way. Austrian economics, Austrian scholars could really be this pivot point between these different schools.
Mark Pennington: I think they can. There's a paper I read recently, which was arguing that Butler's conception of gender fluid, sort of notion, is very compatible with, kind of, Austrian ideas around entrepreneurship. So you can think of people who are inventing these kinds of multiple gender identities as kind of cultural entrepreneurs who are saying there are multiple different ways for people to be men and women.
You don't have to get into the debate about whether sex is real or socially constructed. Just to recognize that even accepting that there are two sexes, men and women, what that actually means to people and how they express that could be done in multiple ways that in the past have been overly constrained. And that people who adopt different comportments, different styles of dress, want to express gender in different ways, they are being creative entrepreneurs in a sense, in a way that somebody like Butler should be able to engage with.
Rasheed: I fully agree with that. I've been there for a long time, like Butler is one of the most important libertarian thinkers there is. However, I am crucified every time I say that, but it's fundamentally true.
Mark Pennington: I watched a very nice video that she did about, about 18 months ago, on gender and what she was trying to get at. And the whole thing is about her saying we want people to have more spaces where they can be free to express themselves in different ways.
Rasheed: Exactly.
Mark Pennington: It's very libertarian. You don't have to buy into all her silly economic ideas. In fact, I think what we need to do with people like Judith is to say, "Well, look, if you've got all this emphasis on pluralism, dynamism, and gender, why don't you have the same view about the economic system?"
"Why do you want a top-down, centrally planned system where bureaucrats decide things?"
Rather than wanting a kind of equivalent of what you're talking about in the area of gender and sexuality?
Rasheed: It's the same idea where there are a lot of popular libertarian public intellectuals that themselves have pretty bad ideas with econ policy, bad monetary policy, you have some core libertarian ethos, but your actual economic operation, operation knowledge is so poor that to me is irrelevant. But the core thing is so important. But when Butler talks nonsense about economics, it's like, "Oh my God."
Rasheed: I have one last question to kind of sum everything. When you are trying to talk about postmodern liberalism, why do you think that choice of terminology was the most appropriate to use?
Mark Pennington: In some ways, it's deliberate, it's deliberately provocative because many people who are liberals, postmodernists, or who identify themselves as liberals, see postmodernism as the enemy position. I want to explain to those people that that isn't the case. There are many liberal friendly or libertarian, even friendly themes within postmodernism. But equally, people who identify themselves as postmodernists often see postmodernism as being antithetical to liberalism. And I'm also directing my comments towards them to show that, actually, the liberal spirit. If you like, and I hesitate to use the term true, but if you like the true, postmodern spirit, so I'm, I'm using liberalism as a deliberately provocative phrase to provoke or to engage.
I hope creatively, and I genuinely mean that two different audiences, the liberal audience and the postmodern audience, to show that they've got much more in common or they should recognize they've got much more in common than is, than is often thought to be the case.
Rasheed: Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I really enjoyed this conversation.