Book Review: Foucault and Liberal Political Economy

In Foucault and Liberal Political Economy, Mark Pennington argues that Michel Foucault’s oeuvre provides many conceptual resources for bolstering defenses of individual freedom that reject Enlightenment rationalism while supporting institutions of private property often dismissed by “Left” Foucauldians. The book’s intended audience includes liberals who haven’t read much of Foucault and Foucault readers who haven’t read much liberal political economy. Bridging this gap is important and admirable.

Foucault’s social theory, and the postmodernist strand of liberal political economy that Pennington defends, “share an anti-​essentialist ontology, a situated account of human agency, and a non-​reductionist understanding of social order” (62). In Chapter 2, Pennington explores how the Foucauldian “death of the subject” has often been misinterpreted to imply a denial of individual agency. But Foucault only means by this the death of an idealized abstraction that portrays the individual as an essentially goal-​rational and fully autonomous agent, Homo economicus, that always knows its own preferences and seeks the proper means for maximizing their satisfaction. Foucault denies this impossible actor while highlighting a limited but potent individual agency that can choose to refigure itself in light of social categorization. He thereby rejects structurally reductionist views, such as the materialist determinism of Marxists prevalent in the intellectual circles of his time.

A key Foucauldian claim is that unavoidable social power can be both destructive and creative: “Power is a productive force that creates the sense of individuality” even as reigning discourses and disciplines can be “internalised to the point that they may be experienced by individuals as if they reflect an essential or natural aspect of themselves or of the world” (27). Our awareness of ourselves and our place in the social world is inevitably shaped by our enculturation into the operative beliefs and values—the discursive practices—of our communities and perceived authorities.

However, we can remain free to work within the constraints of prevailing discourses to challenge them and secure terms for greater recognition and status. For instance, some people whose sexuality authorities had categorized as “deviant” appropriated the discourse of natural sciences to argue for the natural basis of homosexuality, irrespective of whether these claims were true. Thus, agents can “choose whether to act as ‘docile bodies’ merely accepting and perpetuating the traditions in which they are embedded, or they can challenge or resist aspects of them through entrepreneurial action” (36).

We lose these freedoms the more “governmentality” is involved. Foucault and postmodern liberals observe an entangled political economy where some discourses may dominate through spontaneous orders of decentered power dynamics intersected by markets, civil societies, and states, often in unintended ways. Power becomes domination when “an otherwise fluid, plural, or contradictory set of discourses align or crystallize with each other and with the juridical powers of states” (32). States are often able to dominate when their control is given legitimacy by previous spontaneous mechanisms of social control.

The two approaches can complement each other with unique insights: “[P]ostmodern liberalism has an account of socio-​economic ordering without sufficient appreciation of discourses as spontaneous orders that activate or constrain different forms of subjectivity and agency” (44). Freedom is self-​expressive, not just a matter of non-​interference by states or private actors. On the other hand, postmodern liberalism can explain how the fluidity of discursive power relations will be affected by how much room non-​discursive institutions allow spaces for cultural resistance that “unsettle established routines and ways of thinking” (50).

Discourses constrain the framework of our self-​conceptions and subsequent choices, but they themselves don’t act, agents do. The forces that shape us are in fact the product of many other actors’ embedded choices, so we aren’t mere epiphenomena riding along some structural process independent of human agency. We can act bottom-​up to challenge and refigure the forces that shape us, just as they act downwardly on us. Agency is shaped by structures while structures are shaped by human action. In some ways, Foucault intimates a defense of individualism more radical than any suggested by Enlightenment liberalisms or neoclassical economics, wherein freedom remains the handmaiden of instrumental rationality, and there isn’t a role for individual choice when this freedom just is satisfying one’s fixed and determinate preferences robotically with “perfect” strength of will.

In Chapter 3, Pennington discusses affinities between Foucault and postmodern liberalism on the topics of scientism, science, and expert rule. Both share skepticism of universal truth claims in the social sciences. Humans are creative and fluid agents that defy law-​like explanations. However, the narrative of scientific expertise creates incentives to sustain those “power/​knowledge” structures in which experts are seen as authorities on human nature, whether they are psychologists diagnosing certain statistically anomalous behaviors and orientations as “deviant,” or economists claiming the need to pursue desired statistical aggregates or regulate collective action problems, lest alleged disasters occur when people are left to act on their own.

This disciplinary dynamic often involves monopolizing dominant expert views rather than welcoming pluralism. Such experts are loath to acknowledge peer dissent, as this would weaken their own claims to truth and ability to influence others. Artificial consensus exacerbates the failure to regard the degree to which human knowledge lies beyond the grasp of statistical accounting because much of it is “tacit or inarticulate and is embedded in the daily routines and creative practices of multiple enterprises, investors, workers, and consumers” (75).

Readers familiar with Austrian economics—often considered a cornerstone of libertarianism—may notice some surprising parallels. Hayek rejected positivist claims that we could gain knowledge through pure sense data. With his emphasis on the complexity of both the world and the human mind, Hayek argued that all knowledge is a matter of subjective and fallible interpretation. Even embeddedness in a mind-​independent external world doesn’t mean that we have direct access to it or our own minds. This epistemic gap belies confidence that humans have fixed natures that can be identified and managed.

Hayekian postmodern liberalism shares with Foucault “a social constructionist stance questioning the scientific status of positivist and natural science methods that attempt to discern law-​like relationships in the social world and that justify a form of utilitarian expert rule” (62). Positivist narratives imply unfounded certainty, or at least uncontestable epistemic authority, for their truth claims. While we can’t in principle rule out discovery of a human nature or ways to make many reliable social scientific predictions, these would still be discoveries that haven’t yet happened, not a priori presumptions that sacralize claimed expertise as authoritative. By contrast, postmodern liberalism defends a science focused on the comparative plausibility of competing narrative explanations in which all human experiences of the world must be interpreted through webs of belief that “prove themselves not in relation to absolute truth but as contingently better guides to action than available alternatives” (81).

None of this implies epistemic nihilism or crude relativism: “[W]hile they are unlikely ever to fully represent reality, the beliefs people hold must have sufficient correspondence with that reality to enable them to act satisfactorily in the physical and human world” (84). Nor are Foucauldians and Austrians coyly exempting themselves from the knowledge limitations they otherwise espouse since postmodern liberalism “is explicit in recognizing that all truth claims, including its own, should be exposed to ongoing contestation” (89).

The sciences can make general narrative claims with much explanatory power (e.g., evolution as natural selection), but they can’t make detailed predictions given the complexity of physical and social orders. Nonetheless, the power effects of modernist discourses are totalizing “because they come to encompass an ever-​expanding range of people in the scope of scientific surveillance,” and individualizing because “people increasingly come to identify themselves with … their imagined positions in the relevant classificatory grids” (66). The concept of “power/​knowledge” illustrates how claims of scientific authority and knowledge are “inextricably enmeshed with the exercise of power,” where attempts to “know” others reflect a desire to exert influence and authority over them by imposing a particular social interpretation upon them. Relevant scientific constructions that achieve sufficient social currency, especially if aligned with political authority, thereby exercise power effects that “limit the scope of creative agency by affecting what is considered true, irrespective of whether it is true” (67).

Pennington argues in Chapter 4 that a Foucauldian/​postmodernist liberalism should be wary of egalitarian liberal approaches that emphasize the state’s role in enforcing positive rights. Freedom for Foucault “does not equate to a state where a true or underlying self finds its authentic expression” (105). Freedom instead is the active exercise of resistance to dominant discourses found lacking, including those that aim to impose some egalitarian or democratic ideal on entire societies at the expense of stifling critical pluralism and minority evaluative standards.

“The assumption that there is an impartial ideal of justice or a specific pattern of resource allocation that maximises freedom is deeply problematic” for the Foucauldian and postmodern liberal view (119). The influential egalitarian liberal and socialist theories of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and G. A. Cohen seek to implement “macro-​ordering or totalising principles that may close down the very processes of ethical contestation and reflexivity central to freedom.…” But these discourses center philosophers’ controversial views and speak “for or above others” with respect to the worth of their freedoms. Totalizing egalitarian and risk-​averse discourses undermine the contestation and experimentation needed for ethical creativity and embedded individual freedom. Worse yet, “if people are routinely described in ways portraying their freedom as ‘worth less’ than that of others because they are comparatively lacking resources or opportunities, they may internalise these labels … and cease to exercise their freedom” (128).

Furthermore, the mechanisms needed to transform current societies into widespread compliance with some egalitarian ideal would require state recruitment of civil and private institutions in a massive public/​private discursive and surveillance effort. Bringing about such psychological conformity for those who don’t already embrace the dominant ideal would require extensive use of disciplinary techniques “where subjects are watched or internalise the feeling of being so watched” (125).

Pennington argues that negative rights (perhaps with a basic income guarantee) are better at protecting spaces for people to explore diverse approaches to social challenges. While critics often dismiss such rights, including property rights, as claims rooted in atomistic consumerism, they ignore ways in which spaces of decentralized authority can allow people to act on their evaluative standards or explore new ones in altruistic and non-​consumerist ways. Just as importantly, these spaces allow a “pluralism of rationalities” that encourage experimentation with various approaches to correcting injustices, making health-​related decisions, and addressing environmental or criminogenic issues without the normalizing pressure of a dominant narrative, backed by state power, that assumes people are unable or unwilling to address social challenges on their own.

By contrast, egalitarians assume that injustices require state correction due to “collective action problems” from people rationally avoiding the costs of reducing these injustices. But these assumptions are social constructions about how people will behave, and they aren’t necessarily true. Ironically, they become self-​fulfilling prophecies if many people internalize the narrative that they should be like homo economicus and let governments run the political morality business.

The second half of Pennington’s book discusses applications of the above skepticism of totalizing scientific discourses and the importance of spaces for contestation and pluralism. It explores four aspects of bio-​power, a modern form of police power where the sovereign sees “its own authority as closely aligned with the ‘welfare of the population’” (68). The discussion is rich in detail, so I can only provide a brief detail below.

Chapter 5 explores the political economy of inequality in terms of social justice. The complex intersection of power differentials, whereby unjust practices have emerged, suggests the difficulty of government consciously directing corrections of these practices. Constructivist rationalism tempts some to downplay the intricate dynamics at work. Gender or racial pay gaps blamed on systemic discrimination are often instead attributable to cultural differences not reflecting discrimination. The unintended consequences of labor interventions, such as “comparable worth” regulations, may actually reduce economic opportunities for women and minorities by (say) incentivizing businesses to substitute capital for the labor these regulations make more expensive. Socially constructed categorizations (e.g., “all Black families must reject English language requirements”) overlook how some of these families may view mastery of English not as oppressive but as an ingredient for upward social mobility.

Such efforts to correct allegedly unjust inequalities aren’t necessarily wrong, but, in constraining agency, they often perpetuate the very inequalities they aim to fix in unforeseeable ways. Social justice discourses, which stress grievance and victimhood over individual or collective agency, risk encouraging the already marginalized to think of themselves as helpless and needing the pastoral cure of government power. They also risk allowing those who adopt the mantle of social justice to claim unmerited moral authority and power over the rest of society.

Chapter 6 discusses bio-​power and political economy in the context of public health. The government in the twentieth century came to be seen not only as a resource for combating the spread of communicable diseases, but also as the authority on “lifestyle epidemiology” that could promote a healthy population through deploying civil society and private sector institutions to encourage healthier dietary and lifestyle practices. Recently, nudging practices have used behavioral economic accounts of human cognitive and motivational biases to arrange “choice architecture” in ways that influence people to make “better” decisions in light of their alleged actual preferences. The behavioral law and economics discipline views individuals as “broken machines” often departing from the maximally rational homo economicus, the normative guide for how we ought to act. This approach assumes a dominant paradigm where some get to decide for others what constitutes the proper or “rational” preferences.

A totalizing narrative also captured the response to the COVID pandemic. Initially, scientists in many Anglophone countries opposed lockdowns as a counterproductive response, but they flipped their public opinions once Italy and Spain took the lead, for fear of being seen as “not doing enough.” Lockdowns forced vulnerable patients to be separated from their families even if they were willing to risk exposure. Meanwhile, many other diseases went untreated, while the mental health problems caused by social isolation or lockdown-​induced unemployment skyrocketed. Children of poor families who couldn’t afford homeschooling or reliable Internet lost educational opportunities. The dominant narrative of disease prevention—coupled with media emphasis on death statistics and vivid imagery of ventilated patients in overcrowded hospitals—shamed many people into obeying protocols they wouldn’t otherwise endorse, while precluding authorities from publicly considering the extent of the lockdowns’ costs or the benefits of alternative approaches.

“Emergency narratives” can encourage the sorts of authoritarian control that guarantee worse outcomes than what would likely occur without that control. The future is unknowable, so imposing authoritarianism on an unknown chance that there may be an epidemic or environmental catastrophe likely brings many more costs than benefits.

Chapter 7 explores this emergency narrative in greater detail with regard to the ecological order and sustainability. Here, postmodern liberalism is only diagnostic, not prescriptive. It doesn’t rule out the possibility of catastrophic climate change, but it problematizes risk-​averse approaches that would aim to suppress alternative viewpoints as if catastrophe were inevitable. Pennington observes that Foucauldians who reject naturalistic approaches to psychology and health are in a bind if they also insist these approaches do work for the sweeping claims that make up much of climate science. If they trust the scientific and political experts on matters as complex as ecology, why not also these other arenas?

The book closes with Chapter 8’s exploration of bio-​power and the political economy of law and order. The pretension that we can reliably use environmental factors (e.g., poverty or education levels) and past behavior to predict future outcomes overlooks the free choice of individuals. When measures fail to reduce crime, over-​criminalization of consensual adult activities often becomes the focus of authorities with incentives to pursue lower-​level crimes and easy targets in order to hit metrics. The “tough on crime” narrative and arrest numbers obscure the many pathologies of the carceral system. Remarkably (or perhaps unremarkably), there is no criminological consensus on what factors increase the odds of crime, but experts seeking power/​knowledge, media outlets seeking clicks, and politicians seeking votes still allow simplistic narratives to dominate the public imagination.

Pennington’s volume is well worth reading and keeping close by as a reference. A crucial throughline is how we can’t eradicate power that may stifle self-​recreation, but we can disperse its stultifying effects through decentralized and overlapping networks that encourage discovery and risk-​taking untrammeled by dominant narratives or expert pretense. This positive-​sum approach is a welcome alternative to the false dichotomy of a technocratic liberalism of experts and passive subjects, or a zero-​sum critical theory defending oppressed groups’ need for the state to exact perceived avenues of correction as if these were clearly viable measures.

Future work worth addressing is whether liberal critics of postmodern skepticism—even those acknowledging complexity and the dangers of totalization—can offer plausible defenses for us having more knowledge of ourselves and the social world than Foucault and Hayek claim. Just as it would be inadvisable to assume expertise and central control can solve environmental or public health issues, it may also be inadvisable to assume no such expert solutions exist along narrower margins in dire cases. And so, all we can do is decentralize in hopes of discovering piecemeal solutions while the pandemic or environmental equivalent of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth catches us off guard.

Defenders of Enlightenment conceptions of freedom and rationality may also balk at the claim that rational choice is not “true” freedom. The Foucauldian view of freedom as self-​creation suggests that freedom is acausal, a kind of “Epicurean swerve,” whereas some Enlightenment concepts of rational freedom view it as agent-​causal: the power of agents to make choices, to put forth efforts, in pursuit of clearly defined goals.

Left Foucauldian skeptics who are otherwise open to free markets may not share Pennington’s framing of some contemporary liberal capitalist institutions. They may contest that, while institutional competition could keep corporate workplaces from dominating employees, given the threat of their exit, this assumes a job market where workers have comparable bargaining power with employers. More generally, current specifications of property rights may need reform of (say) socially and legally constructed corporate structures or intellectual property law that many liberals treat as unassailable. All rules must be open to challenge according to Foucauldians and postmodern liberals, including how property and contract law are specified in ways (in)hospitable to the pluralism and radical experimentation these viewpoints also espouse.

On the other hand, Foucauldian critics of property rights risk taking for granted how they provide structures essential for individual self-​creation. Far from being oppressive, many property and contract norms emerged in a long tradition that allowed spaces where individuals could live as they see fit, not always perfectly, but better than alternative institutions that assumed individuals belonged to the king, slave master, or society. The ability to conceive of oneself as an agent capable of self-​creation may not exist outside of an environment where property rights allow individuals not only to live beyond subsistence levels but also to conceive of themselves as individuals.

Pennington’s synthesis of Foucault with postmodern liberalism opens conversations between two camps that should talk to each other more. Many libertarians could better appreciate threats to individual freedom besides interference, while elaborations of situated agency could open a wider audience on the critical Left to the emancipatory benefits of decentralization that only some forms of private property make possible.