What if one of the sharpest critics of centralized power, bureaucratic surveillance, and top-down social control wasn't a libertarian economist but a French postmodernist? And what if one of the economists most vilified by the left wasn't a cold-hearted market fundamentalist but a thinker obsessed with the limits of knowledge and the dangers of planning?

Today's guest is King's College London political economist Mark Pennington, author of the new book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom. A self-declared postmodernist libertarian, Pennington explores the common ground between Michel Foucault and Friedrich Hayek. He talks with Nick Gillespie about how Foucault's critiques of expert rule, scientism, and the construction of subjectivity can bolster the classical liberal fight for freedom—and how Hayek's warnings about the pretense of knowledge might offer the left a way to resist domination without defaulting to centralized authority.

If you're a libertarian who thinks Foucault is just woke nonsense—or a progressive who sees Hayek as a neoliberal villain—this conversation will blow your mind in the best way possible.

0:00 – Intro
1:20 – What is a postmodern Austrian political economist?
5:07 – Scientism and Hayek
10:45 – The limits of postmodernism
17:46 – The intersection of Foucault and Hayek
30:12 – Systems of control and surveillance
37:39 – Foucault's warnings on government authority
49:57 – Creating a postmodern liberal political economy
1:01:29 – Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
1:08:21 – Have we learned anything from Foucault and Hayek?

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Mark Pennington, thank you for talking to Reason.

Mark Pennington: Thank you. It's great to be here Nick.

So let's start, you know, before we get into a discussion of your book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy—the new book, which is absolutely fascinating, and I think anybody interested in libertarian politics or in Foucault—and I think there's you, me, and about five other people that are in that intersection, but everybody should be.

But I want to read your Twitter bio and have you explain it a little bit to me. You are a "Professor of Political Economy at King's College London." OK, I understand. Everybody gets that. And then you say: "Post-modern Austrian political economist, Foucault Fan, Hayek Fan, classical liberal individualist."

And, you know, as somebody who's—I've been working at Reason since 1993. I went to grad school for literary and cultural studies from 1988 to 1993. And when I see "Post-modern Austrian political economist, Foucault Fan, Hayek Fan, classical liberal individualist," I just see all of the people that I went to school with—my professors and students and colleagues, classmates—their heads kind of exploding. This is an interesting mix.

Let's start first with the idea of: What does it mean to be a postmodern Austrian political economist?

Well, I think it refers to the idea that people who call themselves postmodernists are skeptical of universal truth claims. They're very skeptical about the access claims, as they would say, of scientific reason.

And as Lyotard, Jean Lyotard, says, "To be postmodern is to be incredulous toward metanarratives."

Absolutely, absolutely. And I see an important thread in— not in all of Austrian economics—but especially the thread that's been influenced by Hayek, but you can also see it in people like Ludwig Lachmann, George Shackle, and Don Lavoie, as being very compatible with this kind of a view.

There's a kind of radical skepticism of scientific claims. That doesn't mean that you throw out all claims to scientific reason, but it means you have a very particular understanding of what scientific rationality might imply.

And so, I mean, in a way—or the way that I think about this, because I see myself in that postmodern Austrian school of economics—it's really kind of emphasizing the limits of our knowledge rather than the extent, especially as that applies to public policy and the way that people are overtly or covertly governed.

I think that's right. And I think what underlies that, but which often doesn't come out—even as much as I would like it to—in some of the writers that I just mentioned, is that human beings are fundamentally, if you like—if we can use the word fundamental in this context—they're creative agents.

And it's that creativity that generates instabilities in the world. And it's the fact that there are these instabilities that means that our potential to discern lawlike relationships in human societies is very limited. So I see that as ultimately being about human creativity.

And this is an area where I think there should be—although there isn't—there should be much more overlap between Austrian economic analysis and a lot of the kind of work that takes place in the arts and humanities.

So the critique of scientism.

Yeah. And this term, "scientism"—when I think of how I started to develop an interest in libertarian thought, and I'm a mere journalist and an English major, so I don't think about it as rigorously as political economists and philosophers—but I had stumbled across Hayek's 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, where he talks a lot about scientism.

Which he sees as the kind of mechanical application of laws and axioms in one field to others. But that whole book is a critique of Enlightenment modernity that thinks, "Well, we've kind of figured out biology and chemistry and physics, and now we can just port all of that knowledge"—where the rules are clear and we can understand action and reaction—"and just port that over to human society."

And he goes through a bunch of particularly French and other continental thinkers who literally say things like, "Now that we know how physics works, we can direct human social advancement and speed it up or slow it down."

And for him, that's the beginning—it's the French Revolution and rationalizing society—that leads to the gulag. You know, both of the kind of Nazi version, but also of the Soviet—and this mania for planning.

Where does that kind of arrogance—or where does that—maybe that's too strong a term, because most of the people involved in this are not bad people. Francis Bacon didn't want to control the world when he was articulating an Enlightenment view that we're going to map every part of the known universe and understand it, and then we can control it, right? Knowledge is power and we'll get to that in terms of Foucault.

Where does that hubris come from?

That's a difficult question. I think there'd be different elements to my answer. One part would be, actually there are bad actors who can be empowered by scientism. So people whose actual real motive is to gain power over other people will use scientific reasoning as a kind of ruse for doing that.

But I think there is also a more unintended consequence from certain forms of scientific rationality. So the way I think about it is, if you have a narrative which sets up some kind of notion of expertise, you create a set of actors who have an interest in sustaining those claims to expertise. So people's income, their status, can be dependent on that expertise.

And that can mean that you have—unintentionally, perhaps, it's not something that was intended by the people who created these narratives—but you can create a kind of logic which counts against pluralism of thought. Because if you're an expert, the last thing you want is there to be too many other sources of expertise.

Because the more sources of expertise there are, the less likely it is that people will take note or feel that they should be governed by any one expert or set of experts. So the tendency is in many scientific fields—this is true certainly in social science, but also even in natural science—is once a certain view of what the expertise says gets established, there tend to be disciplinary dynamics that start moving out other ...

The Libertarian Case for Postmodernism