Episode: 56. Foucault was ALWAYS a Libertarian - Mark Pennington
Pub date: 2025-09-18
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What if the most subversive libertarian of the twentieth century wasn’t Hayek or Nozick, but Michel Foucault? In this episode, Rasheed and Mark Pennington dismantle the worn-out cliché of Foucault as the Left’s philosopher of suspicion and instead expose how his late work aligns disturbingly well with the libertarian project. Forget the caricature of Foucault as the theorist of discipline and surveillance. In this episode he appears as the radical voice warning that freedom erodes not just under authoritarian violence but under the bureaucrat’s file, the planner’s map, and the expert’s soothing discourse of “safety.”
By pairing Hayek’s critique of the “pretense of knowledge” with Foucault’s genealogy of “regimes of truth,” the conversation makes an explosive claim: both thinkers diagnose social engineering as a theological fantasy, a bid for God-like authority over human complexity. And if Hayek valorizes entrepreneurial discovery, Foucault demands a relentless critique of the categories that normalize us into docile bodies. The convergence? Freedom is not a polite legal boundary but a restless act of self-creation: always experimental, always at risk, and always opposed to those who claim to know better.
This episode pushes further: into Milei’s Argentina, where Foucault is suddenly a touchstone for right-wing politicians; into the culture wars, where “identity” becomes just another disciplinary cage; into Judith Butler, recast as an unwitting libertarian entrepreneur of the self. The provocation is clear: maybe libertarians abandoned Foucault too quickly, and maybe Foucauldians ignored how close their master was to undermining their own collectivist pieties. What if the true scandal is that Foucault, at his most dangerous, was never the enemy of liberalism — but its most radical ally?
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Rasheed Griffith
Mark Pennington | Mark Pennington @ King’s College
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