Power, freedom, and justice: rethinking Foucault
01:26:22 Share

Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Wow, really good turnout. And apparently I hear that we've got another 200 or so online, I guess.

So a really good turnout for tonight. I am Cheryl Schoenhart Bailey and I am in the government department here at the LSC and I am welcoming you all. This is an excellent turnout. Really great to see you all.

A few administrative matters just to begin with. Could everyone just check their phones? Make sure they're on silent. And I'm going to do that when I go back up there too, because it would be very embarrassing for my phone to go off. So I will do that as well. Check your phones, either silent, vibrate, whatever. There is a hashtag for those of you who are really into hashtags. LSE events, that's the hashtag. Avail yourself of that as you like.

So it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker for tonight. Oh, one other thing, one other administrative thing. This is going to be recorded, video, put on a podcast.

or something. So we will be wanting to hear the questions. So when we get to that point, which is maybe 50, 55 minutes into the talk, we will then have Q&A. Please make sure if you do ask a question to wait until you receive the mic. Speak into the mic so that all can hear for posterity. Right.

Right. So my pleasure to introduce Mark Pennington, who I had not realized until about 15 minutes ago, and he reminded me, although I still don't remember him, that I actually taught him oh so long ago. That makes me feel very, very old.

Probably I'm not that old, but maybe I am. I don't know. You're just really young or something. So yes, this is great that I taught him all so long ago. And he's back to give a talk tonight. He is now professor of political economy and public policy at King's College London. He was, for his sins, previously head of department at political economy, but thankfully not during COVID, which was the experience I had as head of department, which is

and experience. He's also director of the Center for the Study of Governance and Society, and his research looks at or focuses on the intersection, the PPE intersection, politics, philosophy, and economics, focusing particularly on the area of limited knowledge and bounded rationality, and then seeks to theorize beyond this into the fields of economics and political theory.

So aside from loads and loads of articles in academic journals, a variety of different academic journals, he's also published a book in 2011 called Robust Political Economy. And his presentation this evening will be on his newest book with Oxford University Press. And he will be focusing on liberal political economy. So over to you. Thank you.

I apologize. I will get in trouble with the sponsors if I don't mention this. Okay, so this is hosted by the HIAC program in economics and liberal political economy. Okay, thank you very much, Cheryl, for the introduction. I should say to you all that I'm feeling really quite nervous this evening.

There's two reasons for that. One is because I did my PhD at the LSE and whenever you come back to the place that you did your studies, you just feel really quite nervous. But the second reason is that this is the first time in a 25-year academic career that I've given a PowerPoint presentation. There are some students in the audience I know, they know that I don't use PowerPoint, I just tend to speak.

But the rules of this particular evening are that we have a PowerPoint and as the protagonist who will be featuring in my talk this evening might have said, I'm going to submit to the disciplinary requirement to have a PowerPoint presentation. So I hope you just bear with me a little bit if my choreography is slightly out of sync because I'm not used to using slides. So please bear with me in that sense. So what is my topic this evening?

The topic is the relationship between Michel Foucault's postmodern social theory and liberal political economy. What are the implications of Michel Foucault's postmodern social and political theory for liberal political economy? By postmodern, I mean a philosophy sceptical of universal truth claims

and one equally skeptical of the notion of the autonomous individual. By liberal political economy, I mean a social theory emphasizing the role of individual agency in shaping personal and social outcomes, and a political project that seeks to protect that agency.

In my forthcoming book, which is entitled Foucault and Liberal Political Economy, Power, Knowledge and Freedom, I argue that there is a stream of liberal thought, what I call a post-modern liberalism, that is compatible with and indeed complementary to some of Foucault's core ideas. Now, there has been a good deal of controversy over liberalism

Foucault's own political views in recent times. On the one hand, in 2020, she was going to become our shortest serving prime minister, Elizabeth Truss, gave a speech which blamed Foucault for the excesses of what she described as an extreme left identitarian politics, which is antithetical to the civilizational values of liberal society.

Now in academia, you may not be surprised to know that the debate has been rather different. The issue there has been the question about whether Foucault towards the end of his life started to turn towards a political position that was sympathetic to aspects of liberalism. And there are a number of works which have made these sorts of claims. So Daniel Zamora Mitchell Dean and also Michael Berent

have made the argument that, though in the early to middle part of his career, Foucault saw himself as a critic of liberalism, by the end of his career he was moving towards a position that was at least tentatively embracing some aspects of the liberal political project. This is an image of Dean and Zamora's book, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution, which makes some of these claims. Now these kind of claims are inspired

by a series of lectures that Foucault gave in the late 1970s, which were published in the early 2000s as a collection, The Birth of Biopolitics. And those lectures present what many people consider to be a surprisingly sympathetic account of, broadly speaking, what you might describe as market liberal ideas.

perhaps partly because of that, but also because of some of his later writings on the care of the self. Lois McNay, as early as 1994, argued that the late Foucault, in his emphasis on a renewed form of subjective agency, was moving towards a position which tilted in the direction of, and this is how she described it, an unregulated libertarianism. Now, I want to be clear here,

that in my presentation and in my book, I'm not seeking to participate in this debate about what Foucault's own political views actually were. This is very dangerous territory. Foucault was quite a slippery character in some ways. He reveled in different sorts of interpretations of his own work, and he seemed to change his ideas on a very frequent basis.

To give you an idea of this kind of mischievous attitude, I want to show you a quote which is from not that long before he died. So I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another, and sometimes simultaneously.

as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal. An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited to the USA and I was denounced by the press in Eastern Europe for being an accomplice of the dissidents.

None of these descriptions is important by itself. Taken together, on the other hand, they mean something and I rather like what they mean. My project is a different one. I'm not trying to say that Foucault had one view or another. What I want to argue is that some of Foucault's core ideas are consistent with a strain of thought that I refer to as a postmodern liberalism. Now, my view

Foucault should perhaps have endorsed this form of liberalism. And by the same token, political and economic liberals, I believe, should embrace Foucault. There are three elements to the arguments in my book. I'm going to skip over all three of them very briefly, but it's the third that I'm going to be focusing on predominantly in my presentation to you this evening. The first element that I want to look at is liberalism.

Foucault's understanding of what he calls the subject, what other people might refer to as the individual. Now Foucault is famously associated with pronouncing the death of the subject. By that he means that our conceptions of who and what we are do not reflect some underlying essence or truth but are the result of historical cultural processes

that produce or condition our sense of self-understanding. This is what he refers to as discourse power. Though people are constituted by this discourse power, they are not determined by it. They have the capacity to engage in acts of creative agency or resistance that can reconfigure elements of their environment and their place within it.

I argue in the book that this particular view of subjectivity is highly compatible with the conception of the individual or the subject put forward by liberal thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. For these liberals, people are always the product of traditions and cultural norms, not of their own making. But as for Foucault, while they are never fully autonomous,

They can engage through creative acts in examples of ethical entrepreneurship that reconfigure aspects of the world around them and their place within it. Both Foucault and these postmodern liberals, I argue, share a belief in the capacity of individuals to be entrepreneurs of the self.

and they are concerned with the institutional settings that facilitate this kind of agency, and with those that close it down. The second theme that I explore in the book addresses Foucault's concerns with the effect that the institutionalization of discourses that claim the mantle of science may have on our self-understanding

and on the relationship between science and systems of social control. Foucault suggests that especially in the social and human sciences, what are presented as objective or impartial concepts of scientific reason are often a form of what he calls power knowledge, where some seek to exercise power and positionality over others by imposing a particular interpretation or social construction upon them.

For Foucault, alignments between such scientific power knowledge and the authority of the state can threaten creative freedom by silently locking people into fixed roles, positions or conceptions of themselves and by blocking their exposure to other forms of knowledge and ways of being. Now I argue in the book that this account has many commonalities

with the critique of scientism and socio-economic planning offered by political economic liberals such as Friedrich Hayek and other members of the Austrian School of Economics. Now, including that, thinkers such as Ludwig Lachmann, George Shackle, and Don Lavoie.

For these liberals, it's precisely the decentralized, subjective and partial character of socio-economic knowledge that warrants a profound skepticism of scientific planning and regulation and control. In contrast to a planned economy, which imposes a unitary classificatory grid devised by statisticians,

and other experts on which classifies those whose behaviors do not conform with the plan as social deviance. A broadly liberal market economy limits what Foucault would understand as the power effects of any one set of social constructions by subjecting them to competition from rival centers of authority. Moreover,

what Schumpeter calls the gales of creative destruction generated within such an economy continually destabilize, if not shatter, pre-existing cultural routines, hierarchies and positionalities and ways of doing things, and thus open up new spaces for people to reinvent or recreate themselves. Now Foucault's

great inspiration, one of his great inspirations was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche makes a distinction which comes from Greek antiquity between Apollonian characters, characters which are concerned with observing rules, regulations, working within a fixed tradition, and Dionysian characters who exercise creative agency to disrupt existing ways of doing things. I argue in the book

that excessively regulated models of economic systems suppress Dionysian forces in favor of a kind of Apollonian focus on fixed routines and practices. The third theme I explore in the book is Foucault's concern with how seemingly neutral concepts of human rights and justice, which claim to guarantee freedom,

may tether people to constructions of themselves and their possible relationships with others in ways that limit their scope to be self-governing or self-constituting agents. This is the aspect of Foucault's thought and its potential relationship to the liberal tradition that I want to focus on today. The liberal tradition is divided between two broad camps.

The dominant egalitarian liberal or social democratic camp sees freedom as dependent on individuals having access to resources and cultural status with the state acting as a guarantor of various positive rights.

Positive freedom on this view refers to the capacity to do things with one's freedom rather than simply being left alone and also to exercise some form of both individual and collective self-rule. The second camp in the liberal tradition

understands freedom as non-interference by the state or by private parties with the person or property of individuals. This negative rights camp is associated with the classical liberal or libertarian tradition. I'm going to argue in my presentation this evening that while Foucault's understanding of human agency and what threatens it is compatible with some limited positive rights claims,

On balance, it implies an emphasis on largely negative or classical liberal rights. I'll begin by setting out Foucault's distinctive account of freedom and its relationship to power.

I'll then move on to explore the ways in which various positive rights discourses may generate logics of power which close down the spaces within which people might constitute themselves as self-governing agents. And finally, I will sketch a broadly Foucauldian case for a focus on predominantly negative rights. So that's the structure of the presentation. So let me start by talking about

Foucault's account of freedom and its relationship to power. In Foucault's view, there can be no freedom outside of power. No freedom outside of power. Apart from some very thin parameters, in Foucault's view there is no true or authentic self or rationality waiting to be liberated from the effects of power.

By power, he refers to two interacting forms of government. The first of those is sovereign power, which is represented in the power of the state to issue orders or commands to other actors. And it can also refer to cases where one individual or another exercises violence against other individuals. The second type of power that Foucault refers to is a decentred form of power.

which operates through a series of web-like interactions within the context of the discourses that circulate in civil society. Discourses are narrative frames or interpretive grids through which people come to understand and to experience themselves and the world around them, and they affect what are considered acceptable statements and conducts.

Discourses tend also to be associated with what Foucault calls specific technologies of government, through which people attempt to conduct the conduct of other individuals. These forms of government are not confined to the auspices of the state, but are also to be found in multiple decentralised sites.

in the home, in the workplace, at school, in universities, prisons, hospitals, all kinds of different locations. Discourses and their associated technologies have power effects. They create positionalities, interests, relations of authority between people and actors who have an interest in supporting them. Though they are not necessarily created for this purpose,

Once established, they generate incentives or strategic logics that may work to preserve the positionalities they create. Foucault identifies two distinctive forms of discourse and technologies of government in contemporary societies. The first discourse he focuses on is disciplinary power and its associated discourses. This kind of discourse and the technologies associated with it

targets individuals. And these discourses are associated with the identification and correction of those who deviate from certain sorts of norms. Historically, these have included the effeminate homosexual, the criminal type, the hysterical woman. Disciplinary power involves a decentered network of surveillance, punishments, and rewards

for those who depart from or adhere to a specific set of norms. And it's exercised in multiple locations and sites. It exercises power over individuals deemed as troublesome or deviant and it attempts to bring them into line with a certain set of behavioural norms, much in the way that a gardener might tether a plant to a stake.

In extremists, this type of power creates docile bodies, ripe for manipulation by an external will. And Foucault's view, there are a number of practitioners of this type of power knowledge. They include the medical profession. They include psychiatrists in this kind of disciplinary regime. The next set of discourses that Foucault identifies are what he calls biopolitical discourses.

Instead of targeting individuals, these discourses target entire populations. They are accompanied by the production of statistics and reports that claim to know societal phenomena and to identify various pattern anomalies. These anomalies are described as imbalances or disequilibria, which require some form of correction. The aim is to bring the relevant pattern anomalies within some kind of acceptable range

and in doing so to maximize the well-being of the population or subgroups within the population. Practitioners of this kind of power knowledge include demographers, various public and environmental health experts, economists and multiple other social scientists. Now these biopolitical discourses

combine disciplinary mechanisms with what Foucault terms security mechanisms. These particular technologies of government work through target setting, auditing, the offer of various inducements and rewards, they include taxes and subsidies, various contracting arrangements and various performance management indicators. Though facilitated by legislation,

These discourses do not govern through legislation. They govern at a distance through multiple inducements to public, private and civil agents to monitor and to police their own conduct and that of other actors. Now the key issue here is that these technologies of government, as Foucault understands them, are not necessarily a threat to freedom. It's important to recognize this.

Freedom for Foucault should be understood as a form of critical practice where people engage creatively with their culture, drawing on various techniques or strategies they find within it to explore what he calls limit experiences, which challenge the disciplinary boundaries in which they're actually situated. The free subject for Foucault is one who is able to adopt

disciplines and techniques to remould itself by engaging acts of resistance or self-creation, rather than being entirely the product of an external hand. It is the freedom to recombine practices and disciplinary techniques in ways that will create something new and different from what currently exists. While we can never escape from the technologies of the self that govern us,

Freedom is the capacity to consciously adopt certain techniques in a process of resistance, re-subjectification or self-creation. What Foucault calls the care of the self. These techniques could inform new forms of employment. They could include taking up a religious discipline or set of practices. They could involve a sporting discipline or some kind of new sexual technique or practice. Crucially,

These kind of processes should not be confused with the discovery of an underlying truth about oneself, but instead they should be seen as part of an open-ended art of living. It's precisely those discourses that see us as having an underlying truth that risk constraining us in contingently structured categories. As Foucault puts it, the task nowadays is not to accept who we are, but to refuse who we are.

Neither, in Foucault's view, should freedom be equated with equality. Unequal power relations are not themselves, for Foucault, a threat to freedom. And they should not be confused with states of slavery or domination. For Foucault, it's precisely by devising resistant strategies that challenge various asymmetries that freedom is exercised.

If we think of an economic analogue in this particular case, think of new entrant firms who are trying to figure out a way of breaking into a new industry. They face inequalities, but it's precisely in challenging those inequalities that their freedom is exercised.

Inevitably, if this process unfolds, new inequalities will be created and they too will attract agents who attempt to attack them or to undermine them in a constant process of tussle between equilibrating and disequilibrating forces. Domination or unfreedom, by contrast for Foucault, arises when any one discourse or set of discourses

aligns with sovereign state power. And when governmental technologies at multiple levels unite or crystallize to mold people in accordance with a particular goal or telos through a kind of cultural monopoly that tethers people to fix conceptions of themselves and that blocks the emergence of alternatives. These are what Foucault refers to as strategic codifications or disposities.

Examples include theocratic regimes, Leninist vanguard parties and states that institutionalize claims to represent the true voice of the proletariat, as well as state-enforced networks of appointed experts and organized science. What these codifications share is that they close the space for people to adopt their own techniques of self-government or self-constitution.

Now because there is no authentic self, and because we can never escape from the attempt by others to shape and to manipulate us, in Foucault's view, attention should focus not on eradicating power, but to arrangements and practices that keep open the space for actors to constitute themselves in the face of power. My slides are stuck, so I have a problem. Can somebody help me with that? Excellent. Okay, so this is Foucault's view of

on the inevitability of power. I don't believe there can be a society without relations of power. If you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct the determined behaviour of others, the problem is not trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give oneself the rules of law, the techniques of management and also the ethics that will allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination.

What Foucault seems to favor is a sort of radical pluralism and a set of rules and ethics for governing ourselves that are commensurate with this. Yet he's notoriously noncommittal as to what those rules and ethics might consist of. And it's here that I think an engagement with the liberal tradition is warranted. Liberalism sees itself as favoring pluralism.

But is there a liberalism compatible with the pluralism that Foucault seeks? And what kind of ethic might ground this liberalism? In what follows, I want to suggest that Foucauldian freedom implies rules and ethics oriented towards the protection of largely negative rights to non-interference with person and property, as emphasized by classical liberals and libertarians, rather than

the positive rights to resources or a particular level of cultural status favored by egalitarian liberals and social democrats. The reason for this is that positive rights discourses generate various power effects that close down the space for actors to constitute themselves as self-governing agents under a number of ways in which these power effects operate that I'm going to focus on.

The first is that they try to universalize the subject to create a unitary notion of the self and they justify various disciplinary techniques to produce this universalized subject. Second, they deploy discourses that in effect erase the capacity for actors to engage in a form of creative agency. And third, because they are focused on pattern anomalies,

they generate a whole series of surveillance techniques which constantly attempt to monitor what people are doing with whatever resources they may happen to have been given. So let me take the first of these, universalizing the subject. The problem that a Foucauldian, I think, would have with many positive rights discourses

is that the attempt to specify an idealized human nature and then to discipline actors according to this particular notion of an ideal human nature. Let me start off actually flipping those around with Gerry Cohen. Gerry Cohen is a radical egalitarian thinker and Cohen argues in his various works that people can only realize the fullest potential of their natures in conditions of material equality.

and that it is in those conditions of material equality that people can have the worth of their freedom properly respected. By this, Cohen means that people can't be truly free unless they are materially equal, and that if they realize their true natures, they will sustain the conditions that manifest this material equality.

Now he illustrates this with his famous camping trip thought experiment in 'Why Not Socialism?' which he believes embodies the principles of socialist equality of opportunity and socialist community. In the idealized camping trip, all campers work hard for the good of the group and there are no contribution-based differences in access to food, equipment or social positions.

In Cohen's view, the impartiality of these principles is reflected in the fact that even members of capitalist societies can see that if people participating in the camping trip started behaving in a competitive spirit, for example, by charging other campers for the use of some of their equipment, the entire experience of being involved in the camping trip would be ruined.

Now in a Foucauldian view, there's nothing wrong with Cohen's conception of the subject per se. And indeed you could say that participating in various examples of camping trip socialism could represent a Foucauldian practice of freedom which seeks to resist the power effects of commercial capitalism on subjects' identities. What's dangerous from a Foucauldian perspective

is Cohen's determination to universalize this particular construction of the subject. On a Foucauldian view, there is no more reason to universalize camping trip ethics than there is to universalize the practices found in, say, a community of boxers or martial artists. The values exhibited there might be ones of resilience in the face of adversity,

where risk-taking with personal injury is part of the thrill of the fight. Such a community will be ruined if its members started behaving like Cohen's campers, only throwing soft punches and refusing to capitalize when their opponent is pinned on the ropes, removing the possibility for people as individuals to feel loss or even humiliation.

and if coming back after a defeat in this way would destroy the entire experience and the possibility for this particular type of self-creation or subjectification. Next, consider John Rawls. The subject Rawls seeks to universalize when thinking about justice and freedom is the type of person who

when not knowing the kind of social position they will assume when a hypothetical veil of ignorance is removed, opts to maximize their position if they find themselves in the worst-off social class. This particular construction privileges highly risk-averse attitudes and in effect stigmatizes more entrepreneurial or risk-taking conceptions of the subject.

by subjecting wealth creation that doesn't contribute to the maximum advantage of the worst-off to a kind of syntax. Now, in its more puritanical form, we see this attitude evident today in the proponents of what is now described as 'limitarianism'. This is a recent example of this particular philosophical approach. Limitarians, such as Ingrid Robbins,

proposed putting a maximum cap on the amount of wealth that people can actually acquire. Now, in a Foucauldian view, there's nothing wrong with such, with putting, in a voluntary sense, limits on the amount of wealth that people might acquire. We could see that as a kind of disciplinary practice of freedom. The danger with this view is that if this type of practice becomes compulsory,

if you like, a kind of compulsory methodism, institutionalized and crystallized in what Rawls calls the basic structure of society, it would represent a censorious attempt to limit people's scope, to explore what kind of self they might be through the pursuit of wealth.

So long as wealth is acquired through exchange and consent, then one would be hard-pressed to find an ethic more antithetical to the pursuit of Foucauldian limit experiences than Robin's Limitarianism. Now, others in the tradition of political or public reason liberalism, such as the later rules, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, are much less censorious.

What these liberals universalize is a democratic conception of the subject, the sort of person who always acts in ways that preserve what Rawls calls a stable and well-ordered society and that favors a form of democratic rule. The assumption here is that by participating in democratic processes, even people who disagree on many ethical questions can come to some kind of a consensus around values of democratic welfarism.

Now again, on a Foucauldian view, there's nothing wrong with this particular conception of the subject as such. The problem is the attempt to universalize it. What this particular focus on a stable and well-oiled society does is to rule out, if you like,

or to marginalize subjects who are disputatious, who don't want to go along with the status quo, who want to be disputatious, who want to engage in, if you like, a form of ethical creative destruction, rather than participating in a routinized, stabilized and well-ordered society. Likewise,

The democratic conception of the subject privileges those practices of freedom which are associated with participation in democratic or public forum. It marginalizes those subjects who prefer to craft their selfhood and develop a sense of self-creation or self-government by leading largely private lives by withdrawing from the public or democratic gaze as far as may be possible.

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event. Let me move on to the second podcast.

set of problems with positive rights liberalism. These follow from the social construction of economic and cultural resources that many positive rights liberals work with. Many egalitarians, following Jerry Cohen, view wealth as a ticket which gives those who possess more tickets the ability to do things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to. On this view, the freedom of those with fewer tickets requires that they are given more tickets

Similarly, in the case of cultural resources, theories such as Sen and Nussbaum see the capacities that people have as largely dependent on the actions of external givers. The freedom of women, for example, in non-Western societies is seen to be compromised by traditional values that maintain that it is natural for women to be confined to domestic roles. With their capacities for freedom in challenging these constructions,

dependent on their being given the necessary capacities through international aid programs and various state-sponsored education programs. Elsewhere, the concern of relation egalitarians, standpoint and intersectionality theorists to ensure that those have been historically marginalized and oppressed by various discourses are provided with an environment that gives them a sense of self-respect and self-confidence

coincides with the belief that this environment must be secured for the actors concerned by external agents who control what can be said and done in various public forum. Now in a Foucauldian view, the danger with all such constructions is that if they become institutionalized in a society, they may produce the objects of which they speak. If people are discursively positioned in ways

which portray their freedom in some sense as worth less than that of others because they lack certain resources or opportunities, they may internalize these labels in their identity and cease to exercise their freedom. Instead of seeing themselves as potential creators of wealth and opportunity, they may become habituated into seeing themselves as passive subjects of managerial decisions made elsewhere.

Similarly, if people are oppressed by certain practices and they are told that they require protection from various forms of speech, protection that they can't negotiate for themselves, they may internalize this in their identity, heightening their sense of vulnerability and encasing themselves and those around them in what the feminist Foucauldian Wendy Brown describes as a plastic cage of discursive control.

Instead of encouraging boundary crossing, challenges that attack the classifications that people are positioned within, the danger with all these kind of categorizations is that they fix people into a certain set of subject positions. Foucauldian freedom requires that subjects create themselves in part by refusing categorizations such as the advantaged and the disadvantaged.

the compensators and the compensated, the oppressors and the oppressed. Now let me be clear, this view should not be confused with any suggestion that people deserve their own fate and that they do not face genuine disadvantages. Neither does it maintain that we shouldn't give things to other people. What it does maintain is that if people's creative powers are to be activated,

That requires an institutional environment that does not institutionalize a discourse that claims that people have no agency, that makes people, in a sense, reliant on external actors. Let me give you an example to illustrate this. In 1968, Gunnar Myrdal, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 with Friedrich Hayek, in his book Asian Drama, which was written in 1968, claimed that

Southeast Asian countries could not hope to catch up to the West materially unless they were the recipients of massive developmental aid programs. Now just imagine what would have happened in those societies if they'd enforced on themselves a medallion discourse. I would put it to you that many of the things that we've seen, the incredible transformations that have happened in that part of the world, simply wouldn't have been possible if those countries that imposed that discourse upon themselves

The third set of reasons for Foucauldian scepticism about positive rights liberalism follows from its tendency to equate freedom with specific patterns of economic or cultural distribution. What Foucault would term the biopolitical focus on pattern anomalies and pattern control has two potential Foucauldian power effects. First, wherever these discourses become institutionalised,

The actual experience of specific individuals may be erased from view in favour of an emphasis on abstract group-based classifications, targets and goals, where the freedom of individuals must be overridden in the name of their freedom. What matters in such a dispositif or strategic codification

is not how individual people who happen to be rich, poor, black, female or LGBT experience their freedom, but how they can be fitted into classificatory schemes and subject to various forms of managerial action in the name of their freedom. These kind of schemes also grant power and position to those who claim to speak for designated categories.

erasing differences within designating groups and leading to a process of what I refer to in the book as cultural cartelization, equivalent in many respects to economic forms of corporatism. Now let me be clear here again, I'm not saying in making this point that there's no value at all in group-based forms of classification. It seems to me very clear that, for example,

LGBT people, who historically have been subject to various forms of violence, do have a collective interest in making sure that their basic rights are protected. What I am questioning though, are discourses that treat LGBT people and other such groups as amorphous collectives, as if they have a unitary perspective.

It's the diversity within these kind of categories that is effectively erased by conceptions of justice which want to tether people to these specific kinds of identification. The second and related power effect associated with the focus of positive rights discourses on pattern anomalies is that they tend to stimulate the demand for a biopolitical surveillance apparatus

to influence what people do with the resources once they have them or have been given them. These discourses tend not to stop at the taxes necessary to fund welfare programmes and to the public finance necessary to support educational opportunities for the disadvantaged.

Rather, they stimulate the production of a class of experts who claim to know how to mold people's behaviors in ways that will sustain specific distributed patterns. They also require a vast apparatus of target setting, auditing and reporting to demonstrate progress in achieving the relevant targets and goals. Now crucially,

Since this level of control cannot be achieved directly by legislation, these discourses tend to govern at a distance, recruiting multiple public, private and civil agencies and stimulating them to police their own conducts and to exercise power and position over others in ways that penetrate deep into the private and civil spheres.

The term that Foucault uses to describe this process is the governmentalization of the private and civil sectors. I think education provides a very interesting example of this kind of a process. Whether it speaks through Michael Gove or through Bridget Philipson, positive rights discourses stimulate the demand for surveillance and control of the curriculum in schools to standardize opportunities.

Even outside of school, they proliferate what are referred to by some egalitarians as pre- and post-distributive interventions. The former, the pre-distributive interventions, include interventions in the family and the home to exercise a form of surveillance over those deemed to be problem families that need to be given the parenting skills that are deemed to be necessary

if the opportunities that the families are given are to be used in the appropriate way. Think of the current government's proposals to have breakfast clubs in schools as an illustration of this type of process. In the case of post-distributive interventions, Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift seriously contemplate whether it's morally acceptable for educated parents to read bedtime stories to their children

less this gives them unfair advantages over those in less well-educated homes. Now, mercifully, they reject this suggestion on the grounds of protecting at least a degree of parental intimacy. But they are adamant that parents should not be able to spend their post-tax income in ways that advantage their children in any way. Now, unless people simply

acquiesce with these kinds of moral strictures. They imply the need for a network of surveillance and monitoring from neighbors, teachers, local officials to make sure that deviant parents don't smuggle computers or private tutors into their homes or that they don't buy books deemed appropriate for bedtime reading. Even if this surveillance isn't directly present,

The intent is to exercise control through mechanisms of internalized guilt and shame, through a form of disciplinary power. In all these cases, the scope for people to constitute themselves by choosing their own disciplines and rules of governance is closed down by logics of power that encase them in a thicket of normative pressure, much like that exercised over individuals by the medieval church.

Now Foucault uses quite strong language to describe this type of power. He sees it as a form of pastoral power, which is potentially demonic. He argues that it works through, and I quote, "an economy of merits and faults where subjects must recognize not only that they are sinners, but to do exercise any will of their own is evidence of their inherent badness."

I want to move on in my concluding section to think about what a Foucauldian case might be for what I would call a negative rights liberalism. So I've given you several reasons why I think from a Foucauldian perspective, which is focused on freedom of self-creation, we might be wary of positive rights liberalism. So why might institutions, rules and ethics which emphasize non-interference with person and property be more amenable to this Foucauldian freedom?

I want to be clear, the case for such institutions is not that they will protect people from all forms of power or interference, or any suggestion that they are in some sense neutral or power-free institutions.

In a society that protects negative rights, there will be numerous inequalities and decentralized forms of pressure in the economy and in civil society to mold people in this direction or that. What matters is that these pressures are pluralistic, that they cut across people in different ways, leaving people with greater room

either on their own or working in concert with others to exploit the gaps and to remould or refashion themselves in creative ways. What counts is that people have the space to develop their own resistance strategies against various asymmetries and that this may be less dangerous to freedom than a totalizing regime of cultural and economic safetyism or equalization.

which purports to offer protection from those asymmetries. By contrast, positive rights regimes proliferate the spread of surveillance mechanisms across the state, the private sector and civil society. And by trying to align these decentralized mechanisms with state power to mold people to maintain a favored pattern, they close down the space for self-government. The attempt to equalize people

also leads to their being permanently governed by a class of experts that refuses to let go until those it supervises can be trusted to use their freedom in what is deemed to be the right or appropriate way, and that also produces subjects who demand to be supervised. There are many parallels here between this type of view and the sort of power that was exercised historically by colonial regimes over the people they

colonized, where the colonizers would not let go of, if you like, the missionary power they were exercising over the colonized until the colonizers decided that those people had been given the capacities to enable them to be free. Now, I want to emphasize that I think a Foucauldian account can be made in favor of some limited positive rights claims.

I think one can make a Fucodian argument for something like a basic income guarantee, for example, as part of a framework that gives people to defend their personal property from the violence that might be exercised against them by others. People must have the means to defend their private spaces if they are to use those spaces as a springboard from which to resist some of the pressures in the world arising from those around them.

I think this is particularly important for groups that have historically been subject to various forms of violent oppression. I think there's also a case for some kind of minimum income guarantee to protect the poorest in society from demeaning forms of surveillance that are often carried out through various forms of means testing of benefits, for example. What I think such a regime would refuse, however,

is the constant attempt by the state and its satellites to grade and to rank different people and different states of the world so as to perform a process of equalization. I think we could characterize the type of regime I'm describing here as a loose morals regime. By that I mean a regime that allows more space for those it governs to develop their own ethics.

Now Foucault hints at something like this when he looks to the ancient Greeks for inspiration. Not because he wishes to go back to their specific practices, but as an inspiration for an alternative type of morality. This is a quote from one of his final works: "The few great common laws of the city, religion, nature remain present, but it was as if they traced a very wide circle in the distance,

inside of which practical thought had to define what could rightfully be done. Therefore, in this form of morality, the individual did not make himself into an ethical subject by universalizing the principle that informed his action. On the contrary, he did so by means of an attitude and a quest that individualized his action, modulated it, and perhaps even gave him a special brilliance. By virtue of the rational and deliberate structure, his actions manifested.

Now I believe this type of a conception of a regime of, if you like, loose morals is very similar to the kind of moral framework put forward by two of these postmodern liberal thinkers that I identify in my book, Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott.

Hayek talks about a free society being essentially a purposeless catalaxy. It has no overarching moral purpose other than to maintain the rights, the basic negative rights, which allow a kind of kaleidoscope of different possibilities to unfold, or in Foucauldian terms, the new subjectivities to be constantly created and recreated through a kind of process of ethical creative destruction.

Michael Oakeshott, I think, has another very similar kind of conception which is compatible with this loose morals through Kodyan regime. This is Oakeshott from On Human Conduct. Civil freedom is not choice to be and remain associated in terms of a common purpose. It is neither more nor less in the absence of such a purpose or choice.

I think there are also many similarities between the Foucauldian loose morals regime and the type of framework set out in the final part of Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State and Utopia. In that part of Nozick's book, he sets out the vision of a meta-utopia, which closely mirrors what I think Foucault would call a pluralism of rationalities.

It doesn't seek to favour any one particular moral framework, but to talk about a set of rights which allow for the coexistence of multiple moral frameworks. A society where there is a wide and diverse range of communities, which people can enter if they are admitted, leave if they wish, to shape according to their wishes.

A society in which utopian experimentation can be tried, different styles of life can be lived, and alternative conceptions of the good can be individually or jointly pursued. If we put this in Foucauldian terms, this is a society where no single discourse rules, where there is competition between discourses and technologies of government, which crisscross people in different directions.

a competition which both produces a kaleidoscope of subjectivities and one which exposes those subjectivities to alternative possibilities through which they might mold or recreate themselves. Personally, I find this an inspiring vision. If anything like it is to be realized in a way that is faithful to Foucault's spirit, then this vision will never come about through the attempt to impose it from on high. Rather,

It will come about from the actions of multiple entrepreneurs and civil associations who are able to run faster than those that seek to pursue and to discipline them. I don't know whether Foucault would have endorsed this vision, but I hope this evening to have given you some reasons to understand why it may be consistent with his philosophical and political concerns. Thank you very much.

So that was absolutely brilliant. No wonder you don't really need slides when you talk. You're a real gifted orator. All right, just to bring your attention to, we have to end right at 8 o'clock on the dot. So we're just going to go straight into questions. I suspect there will be plenty from the audience, and we'll also take some from the online audience.

as well. Brian will kind of let me know. You've got one already. So if we don't have an immediate-- OK, we'll start with some from the audience here, and then we'll move on to the online audience.

Yes, if you could actually introduce yourself. If you represent any kind of institution or entity, say that, or a general public, kind of just where you're coming from, that'd be great. Thank you. Hello, my name's Owen. I'm a PhD student from KCL, so just across the road. I suppose my question for you is, could you clarify a bit more about what you mean by kind of post-modern liberalism, right? Because you cited Hayek a lot, but I would, from what I've read, I would classify him as a neoliberal, right?

I mean, how does that perform this conception of postmodern neoliberalism? Postmodern liberalism, sorry. Okay, well, in some ways it doesn't. I'm not advocating something called neoliberals. I think that's a very unhelpful term. The reason I'm describing Hayek as a postmodern liberal is that if you look at his basic epistemological framework, it is deeply anti-rationalistic and anti-scientistic in precisely the ways that much of Foucault's thought is.

Okay, so I think there are strong complementarities between those two traditions. That doesn't mean that you support all of the policies that are associated with so-called neoliberalism. What I've tried to offer is a kind of creative synthesis between these thinkers so that something new or different actually comes from that interchange. Any other from the audience? If not, I'll take one online. Brian, do you want to...

Alright, we have an online question from Daniel Guizzo from University of Bristol. Thank you Mark for the fantastic talk. My question is about normalising and surveilling forms of self-governance and power that emerge outside the state. For instance, in social media that normalises aesthetics, behaviours, preferences and economic aspirations. How would you see those? Would an active rights approach still be applicable?

Thank you very much, Danielle. That is a very difficult question. My gut instinct is to say that a negative rights regime offers the best hope for limiting those kinds of disciplinary power, but it's quite a weak claim I would want to make because there's no doubt that the kind of systems of surveillance that can operate through social media platforms are for a kind that in many ways we haven't seen before.

Now, there are some of those forms of surveillance which I'm not worried about. So when Amazon tracks the purchases that you make, what it's trying to do basically is make it easier for you to fulfill your own preferences. It's not trying to reshape you in a different kind of direction to discipline you in that sense. I think when we turn to social media platforms and crucially their alliance with governments, then we have very serious concerns about the exercise of a kind of surveillance society and disciplinary power.

And I don't have any clear-cut answers to that. In this field, there is no doubt that social media is subject to what economists would consider to be network effects that may limit the amount of competition that you can get between different sorts of platforms. But on balance, my view would be that the biggest threat would arise in situations where, and we've seen it in the last few years, where the social media platforms are aligned with those who claim to be regulating them.

where effectively you have a kind of state-managed social media space, because in those situations the state can be the actor that decides to limit the speech of those who oppose it. This happened at various points during the COVID pandemic and in other sorts of situations.

There's very clear evidence of alliances between social media and government. That was true during the Biden administration. It's going to be true now in a different direction with the Trump administration and Elon Musk. So these are very serious problems, and I don't have any answer to them. I think I would say that a negative rights regime offers...

the least bad solution but but it's not a a great or perfect solution by any stretch of the imagination because this new technology is throwing up situations that i think very few of us would have conceived of um with a hat yes purple hat just wait for the mic if you would and remember to introduce yourself please

So my name's Alex. I'm just a geography teacher, but I was at Uni of Birmingham. I just wanted to ask, in a society where people are increasingly socially anxious and the sort of effects of power are felt on them more and more, is that social anxiety a reaction to biopower or a sort of further reproduction of it? Yes.

So thank you very much for the question. So my view is in many ways it is a re it's reproducing something that people are being encouraged to feel anxious about multiple things. And it's that very sense of anxiety that then empowers certain actors to police their conduct, to supervise them in various ways. I thought it was remarkable during the pandemic.

the way in which people just submitted to the rules in most cases. Now, I personally don't have a strong view on whether the lockdowns or those kind of policies were the right ones. I don't think it's possible to have, given the limited information, a clear-cut view. But what was extraordinary to me was that in supposedly individualist liberal societies,

People just gave up in the face of these strictures to stay at home and to pursue all of these kind of rituals. Why was that? I would say that it's because in multiple other spheres of life, people have already got used to being regulated in this way. Where you're allowed to smoke, where you're allowed to do X, Y or Z, whether you're allowed to vape, whether you're allowed to do other sorts of things, all of these behaviors are being regulated in a way that...

lead people to think that they cannot make decisions without being told or supervised by some kind of elite group of experts. And I think this is being reproduced in multiple different spheres. Yes, in the front here. I'm Phoebe. I'm actually just moved out of university now.

Masters in politics. I was wondering, do you think it's possible to actually press against limitations without ending up in a different sort of category? For example, you were just talking about pushing against, if you were going to move against a rights movement, you'd end up in a different, opposing rights movement. There'd be no way of truly getting there.

I think on Foucault's view the key thing is to be able to continue to recombine these practices. So if you think of what, this is why I think there are close analogies between his understanding of what he calls resistance and self-creation and what economic entrepreneurs do. So economic entrepreneurs are people who recombine resources continually and something new emerges from it. But it's a constant open-ended process, it doesn't stop.

And this is true with their identities as well, if you take a Foucauldian view. You can recombine different disciplines or practices or techniques and something new can come from it. Now, there's nothing in Foucault's perspective that says you should stay in your new category. He wouldn't want to stop you, I don't think, from staying there if you wanted to. But he would be wanting to emphasize a process that enables people to continually keep challenging themselves.

to step out of the category again, to move into something else. This is why he refers to freedom as this kind of art of living, rather than some notion that you're moving towards a fixed position, which is actually limiting of your freedom.

Do you still have the mic? Actually, just to economize the movement of the mic. Yeah, go ahead. Hi, Mark Richard, general public. Question, I'm interested in the softer control. And I think I hear you say that the positive rights regime is the one that introduces and reinforces the Overton window.

And I think you're saying the negative rights would take that to some degree away. That implies that there isn't just something very natural about the Overton window that just is part of who people are. Can we really get rid of that? I think the difference between the negative and the positive rights regime is the negative rights regime, people will be subject to what Foucault calls technologies which attempt to conduct their conduct. So there will be power relations.

The difference is that that regime does not try to align any one set of these dissented power relations with state power. Positive rights regimes are explicit about the requirement and effect

to align what the state does, what the sovereign does, with these decented kinds of arrangements. And that's precisely the risk when we're talking about social media. You know, that the state would be supervising the platforms to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable speech and all of the other paraphernalia that go with it. So the concern is with the alignment between the pressures that will exist in any society in this decentralized form with the more centralized controls that the state might exercise.

Can I just interject something here? Just push you a little bit on the role of social media. And you've posited that state control of the social media. The problem, as we are seeing, is the state and those who are making policy do not always understand how the algorithms work. Right?

So if they're seeking to exert control, how do they exert control when they simply do not understand how the algorithms may or may not be functioning as a coercive mechanism? Well, if they don't understand how the algorithms work, I think we should be thankful for small mercies. I mean, if they did know how the algorithms work, then they really would be in a position to be exercising if they can align.

governmental authority with these kind of more decentralized mechanisms, a kind of control that I think would be quite frightening. So if they don't understand the algorithms or if you have people who are constantly coming up with new algorithms which kind of disrupt the existing practice, I think that's something that might actually ameliorate some of the kind of worries that I have. Yes, in the black shirt, yes. Hello, I'm VC and I'm an LSE alumni.

My question is kind of on AI as becoming a more dominant power in society, and it's definitely representing us with what the future might entail, and whether there's potential to kind of go beyond one's cognitive abilities. Do you think this is an extension or a limitation of one's positive and/or negative freedom, and what Foucault might think of this development?

Great question. So I think you could read that in two different ways. So you could see some of these new technologies as potentially something that can help people if they get access to the technology to resist some of the attempts by others to control them.

The flip side is obviously what we've just been talking about, whether some of these systems can be controlled by particular actors, they can be monopolized in particular ways through alliances, say, between corporations and states in ways that will close down that space. So I think it's an open book. And a lot of the decisions around regulation in this space, I think, are really, really challenging. So on one side of this, you could think of, and this is the way

Ideally, I would like to think of AI. It's a disruptive new technology which challenges the categories that are within. So Foucault has a famous essay called What is an Author? Well, a lot of academics are thinking about that now in the face of some of these AI techniques. So old hierarchies, conceptions of what an author is even, are being destabilized by this technological creative destruction.

So you could see that as quite liberating in some ways, you know, it's unstable, destabilizing the hierarchies. But on the other hand, the danger is if this very technology can be used to control by alliances between states and corporations, it could obviously close down or reinforce certain kinds of hierarchies. And that's something I think that we are just having to grapple with anew at the moment. Yes, in the brown.

I'm Jacob. I'm from KCL across the road. I was just wondering, how do you think this would sort of play with nudges? I'm not sort of talking about sort of government mandated nudges, but nudges that individual companies are doing to change things. Do you think that that's inhibiting of individuals' negative freedoms? And if so, is there a role for the state there? Or would the state intervening there...

with other people's negative freedoms? Like, what would you say there? Okay, I think that's a good question. My view would be that there's nothing wrong with nudging. In fact, nudging is inevitable. It's part of the way we attempt to conduct the conduct of other people, to use Foucault's language. It's a technology of government. As long as you've got pluralistic nudging,

people nudging you in different directions, then you've got space to move within the cracks, to reconfigure yourself, to navigate. The problem is when the nudges align in the way we're speaking. So the thing to really fear would be something like a social credit regime, where you have the state aligning itself with surveillance mechanisms to nudge people in a very particular direction.

It's not a problem though in a society, I think, where some people are nudging you to be slim, to go to the gym every five minutes, and other people are nudging you to eat chocolate or do X, Y, or Z. There you've got the discourses or the nudges cutting across you in different ways. But if they aligned, then that's something that we really need to be worried about. So, the gentleman in the back and then in the grey shirt. Yeah, those two.

Hi, I'm studying economics and a master's degree. My question is, don't you see that there's a danger that there is a company that's very powerful, that even if it's not aligned with the state, it's so powerful that it has some control over the people?

I didn't quite hear the first part of that. Could you say that again? If there is something that's... If there's a company, like a big tech company, for example, that has control or power over people, even if it's not aligned with the government or a state, would you see that there's a danger? I think there is a danger if there are very, very strong network effects that would lead to a kind of natural monopoly across all social media platforms, for example. That would be a very serious concern.

I don't believe actually that the network effects in social media are that strong. You can have rival platforms. Okay, so a lot of people don't like X, but there is Blue Sky Social or whatever it's called and various other competitive platforms. So there is a concern there. I would be concerned about it. I don't happen to believe that social media has that strong network effects, but I could be persuaded otherwise. In the gray shirt? No, don't worry.

Hi, I'm Zoe. I'm a master's student in philosophy here. And I have a question about the decentralized areas of power and how they by themselves can pose a serious issue for the entrepreneurship of the cells. So I think this kind of joins the previous question. That is also, for instance, like there's this feminist idea of the personless political, which often leads to...

to try and resolve these issues by actually advocating for state intervention like childcare. So I was wondering with this emphasis on decentralized area of power, how by itself without the alignment of the state can actually already pose serious issues for agency and how if you completely exclude the possibility of state intervention that may pose different issues for different people.

Well, remember, I'm not completely excluding the possibility of state intervention. So I think there are basic rights that people should have protected. And there's no doubt that in the kind of regime I'm talking about, people will be subject to social pressure. And some people may feel oppressed by that. The question is, do you erase their agency?

in terms of being able to figure out their own strategies to resist those problems. So let me give you an example to illustrate this. I think there are cases across the world today where even in very extreme situations where you'd think the capacity for agency is being closed down, people do show they can exercise agency. Think about the women in Iran who've been campaigning against that regime.

That would be a kind of, it's a theocratic structure very close to what Foucault might consider to be a strategic codification. But women in Iran have been protesting against the oppression that they experience without the need for some external actor telling them that they need to liberate themselves. They've gone out and done it or tried to. Now, of course, they've not been successful at the moment because they've been subject to violent action.

But the decentralized action, the decentered power that they face is something they've been able to resist or to try to without external actors coming and telling them what they need to do. What you don't want to do is to institutionalize a kind of discourse which says that these people have no agency, that they have no scope to engage in resistance strategies themselves. I think we've got time for one or two more questions. Yes?

Thank you. So I'm a business person. I used to work at Google, so I'm very familiar with the AI piece. I want to unpack something that's sort of related, the idea of entrepreneurship. So you have that last quote there, freedom emerges from entrepreneurs who can outrun what would be disciplinarians.

I just wanted to unpack this potential paradox or illusion of equality in some of what you shared with us. So the notion that there can even be an entrepreneur who is not, in essence, informed by power, or one has the ability to be an entrepreneur as a result of power. And if we apply this notion of maybe critical race theory or someone referred to feminism earlier,

it's kind of contradictory or paradoxical because the idea of who has the power to even rise up to be an entrepreneur, to be creative is limited. And if we look at that even in this presentation and the concepts of the goal, a lot of them are coming from established affluent white men. That's what we saw on the slides. So I'm putting that paradox out there to question how do you unpack the notion of entrepreneurship as a base concept when the power to be an entrepreneur is limited?

Okay, that's a really good question. So in my view, Foucault's concept of resistance, which is a basic notion of agency that he thinks people are capable of exercising, is a kind of entrepreneurial notion. So in a sense, even though he's a theorist of being anti-universal, he is saying that there is a capacity for people to have their own will to power, to resist various constructions that are put on people.

Now, I wouldn't deny for a moment that in today's world there are many people who could be entrepreneurs, they could have an entrepreneurial subjectivity, have that crushed through some of the very processes that, for example, critical race theorists talk about. So there are certain situations where forms of entrepreneurship, for example in the United States, by African Americans, are closed down.

by certain kinds of regulatory discourses around the trade in drugs, for example. Now that's a controversial aspect, perhaps, but it's an illustration of how certain people's entrepreneurial actions are marginalized by what are basically biopolitical regimes. So I'm not suggesting that we live in a world of unconstrained entrepreneurship.

I am saying that if we take Foucault's notion of agency and resistance, then we should be thinking about what are the things that block that entrepreneurship, including forms of blockage that could be on racial lines, gendered lines, and other kinds of lines. I think we have time for one more question. I think the person in pink.

Hi, Marina. Hi. Farmer, semiotician. I have a remark and a question. One is that I find that your reading of Foucault is quite original and out of the mainstream, so it has been very refreshing. Thank you. The thing that you say about Foucault aligning with supporting more negative rights, liberalism, though it seems to me to...

kind of say that the Foucault theory is more kind of normative rather than descriptive, while I've always read it as more something that provides a framework to read the power system rather than saying, oh, this is how we should be doing things. And in this context,

I was kind of thinking that how do you see then the difference between a Foucault view of negative rights as the basis for liberalism and Carl Schmitt's views on freedom, which is also kind of towards negative rights?

Gosh, I haven't thought a lot about Kauffman, I must say, so I don't think I'm going to be able to answer that question. But the first part of what you were saying, there are some people who do think that Foucault is predominantly a kind of descriptive theorist in the sense that he's explaining how power regimes operate, how they're enforced, how they're policed, rather than being a conventional normative theorist. Now, he's not a normative theorist in the tradition of analytic political philosophy, no doubt about that.

But he is clearly concerned with normative questions. When I put up that quote about how he says we can never escape from power, but we should be thinking about the rules, the techniques of management, the ethics that enable people to operate in a world of minimum domination, that's a normative statement.

Now, what he doesn't do very much, and I'm obviously filling in the pieces in a very particular way, is tell us what those techniques or rules institutions should actually be. And, you know, one of the things I've tried to do in my work or what I'm trying to do is give a liberal interpretation, a particular type of liberal interpretation of how we could address some of the kind of issues that he's concerned with.

Okay, I think we've reached the end of our session. If you would join me in thanking Mark Penitentiary very much. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.