There Is No Off Switch with Government Power

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 the economist 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 surprising 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 is going to blow your mind in the best way possible.

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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 – 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?