Power, freedom, and justice: rethinking Foucault

Contributor(s): Professor Mark Pennington | What are the implications of Michel Foucault’s critical social theories for how we think about freedom, power, and justice? Political economist Mark Pennington will address this question exploring themes from his forthcoming book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom. Pennington provides a unique engagement between Foucault’s account of power and knowledge and the most prominent theories of social justice in the liberal and social democratic traditions. He will suggest that the "positive" freedoms and rights favoured by contemporary liberal egalitarians, social democrats and standpoint theorists threaten to encase people in a web of bio-political surveillance "technologies" that narrow their scope to act as self-creating individuals. Building on this Foucauldian critique he will suggest that if we are to avoid the dangers of this species of "over-government" we may be best placed to re-explore the value of the "negative" freedoms and rights emphasised by the classical liberal tradition.