New Books Network Mark Pennington, "Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Mar 30, 2026
Mark Pennington, professor of political economy at King’s College London, explores Foucault through a liberal political economy lens. He probes decentralized surveillance, cultural forms of power, skepticism of technocratic expert rule, tensions between self-creation and rights-based freedom, and the risks of crisis-driven controls in public health, environment, and crime governance.
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Hidden Over-Government Via Decentralized Networks
- Over-government today operates through decentralized networks linking state, private sector, and civil society rather than only direct state commands.
- Mark Pennington shows these networks use worthy narratives (public health, sustainability, social justice) to create invisible surveillance and narrow freedom.
Self-Creation Preserves Agency Within Culture
- Agency is culturally situated but not eliminated; Foucault's self-creation lets individuals refashion the culture that produced them.
- Pennington argues freedom should be preserving space for such creative resistance, not seeking an essential authentic self.
Avoid Positivist Policy That Treats People As Atoms
- Avoid treating social problems as naturally solvable by applying natural-science methods to humans.
- Pennington warns that positivist stimulus–response models generate controls and surveillance despite human unpredictability.
