Mark Pennington, "Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2025)

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Dr. Mark Pennington has been Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King's College University of London since 2012, and is currently the Director of the Center for the Study of Governance and Society. Mark, welcome to new books Network. Thank you very much. It's very good to be here. Before we start talking about the book, can you just briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your field of expertise, and more importantly, how did the idea of this book come to you? Why did you decide to write a book about Foucault? Gosh, well, as you said in the introduction, I've been a professor of political economy at King's College London for about 30 years now. Before that, I used to work at Queen Mary, which is another part of the University of London. In my career, I've actually done a variety of things. I started off working on the politics and economics of land use planning or what in some countries is called zoning laws. It's got some connections actually to sort of Foucault and ideas around the importance of surveillance and control mechanisms. I worked in that space for a few years, and that was very empirically oriented. Then I started to work more in areas around environmental ethics, which has always been a sort of, was always a side interest of mine, and I sort of worked in that more extensively on an academic basis. I wrote a book in 2011, which is called Robust Politically Economy, which is a kind of general political economy book, which interrogates different aspects of the liberal tradition from various perspectives. And then most recently, as he said, I've written this book on Foucault, and the reason I wrote this book was because I got interested in his ideas when I was a PhD student. So this is back in the 1990s, but I always perceived him, or at least the people who were interested in him as being kind of opposed to a lot of the ideas that I personally have. I personally identify as a political and economic liberal, and many people who were Foucaultians, certainly at the time, were very critical of that tradition. Now, as I read more of Foucault's ideas, I felt actually there was a lot more commonality between some of the themes he looks at and some thinkers in the liberal tradition. Around about, I guess, 10 years ago, there started to be a number of books coming out that were focused on Foucault's biopolitics lectures, which was suggesting that he himself towards the end of his career was moving towards a position that was kind of endorsing a sort of liberalism, even neo-liberalism as some people might call it. And this provoked quite a lot of debate. So it made me sort of start to revisit some of his ideas and to try to think through some of those connections. And what I wanted to do in this book is not actually say whether or not Foucault himself did actually come to endorse some form of political economic liberalism. What I wanted to do was to look through the basic concepts that he uses, the sort of call theoretical philosophical ideas, and to see whether you could connect them to different elements in the liberal tradition. So that's what I do in this book. So the book is trying to make the argument for what I call a postmodern liberalism. Foucault is why they consider to be one of a leading postmodernist or poststructuralist thinkers. And I've tried to sort of create almost like a new model of liberalism, which uses some of his ideas. And the aim is for really for Foucault's ideas to inform that liberalism, but also for that liberalism or some of the core ideas in it to inform Foucaultian thought. So that's basically the real idea behind the book. That was quite an interesting introduction. I'm not familiar with Foucault as deeply as you are, of course, but I'm quite familiar with a lot of my friends who are more on the left to hate to go. Not so much because I identify politics and things like that, but because they go along and say, well, he was a new liberal as well. He supported the whole new liberal projects. So I'm glad that you've mentioned that in this book we get to talk about some of those ideas. So let's talk about your first chapter. The first chapter is over government power and the correctional state. That's the title of the chapter. So it is in this chapter that you introduce the idea that contemporary societies have this problem of over government where state power, you know, is sort of is fused with more other informal power networks or decentralized power network. Can you tell us what you mean by over government here and then tell us how do you see this, this alignment, reshaping every day, free them to them. Why is it important that we rethink liberals and through Foucault and also post modern political economy? Yeah, I mean, so I think when people think about over government or when a lot of people think about over government and this would certainly be people who would call themselves say liberals, they think about that in terms of there being lots of direct commands or orders coming from government agencies. So if you think of, you know, sort of liberal critique of a kind of Soviet type model of the economy would be an example of what those thinkers would see as over government. Now I'm not in this book. I'm not denying that that kind of power or that kind of over government exists. And suggesting is that in today societies in even supposedly liberal societies, there is another type of over government that is operating and that isn't through direct commands or orders or such. It's through a whole network where people are nudged in particular sorts of directions by multiple agencies that are pursuing various targets or goals. So those targets or goals can be related to many very sort of worthwhile, sending objectives so it could be around public health. It could be around sustainable development. It could be around social justice. These are all very worthy. They're not only sending objectives, but the way in which these concepts are interpreted leads to the creation of why disciders decentralized surveillance networks that monitor people in multiple aspects of their lives. That could be at work. It could be in the businesses that they're running. It could even be in some cases in the home. All of these mechanisms are sort of been juicing people or trying to induce them to behave in particular sorts of ways. They don't operate through direct commands or orders, but they work in such a way that they narrow the space within which people are sort of free to experiment with different ways of being different ways of approaching certain kinds of problems. So what I suggest is that this kind of net of relationships is gradually closing in that these different areas kind of intersect if you like in ways that are closing down the space for people to be free agents. One of the interesting things about this is that a lot of this power and this is a classic kind of Foucault type argument, I think, is that a lot of this, a lot of what underlies these kind of power relations or power structures is almost invisible. So it lies in many ways in a lot of of the concepts and ideas that are in general circulation in the society. So the way in which public health, sustainable development and social justice are understood in the narratives or discourses that we have in contemporary society is such that they give rise to these kind of networks in a kind of unquestioned way. So I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with public health, sustainable development or social justice, but what I am suggesting is that the way these concepts are understood has all these other consequences of creating these kind of surveillance networks that are narrowing the space within which people can be free. And sorry, this idea of over government, it's just for my own curiosity, is it similar to that I get new liberal idea of big government that you're critical of? Yes and no, so it is in the sense that it is wary of an excessively large presence of the state in people's lives. But it's much more than that. It's actually about the connections between state power and also various forms of power that are operating in the private sector and in civil society. So it's not just saying this is a problem of an over-winning state. That is part of the problem in some ways, but it's about the connections between the state, civil society and private actors which are responsible for these sort of surveillance networks. And I don't think you can explain the power that operates simply by saying this is the state projecting itself everywhere. It's much more to do with the ideas that are in circulation. There are certain narratives of what Foucault called discourses that give rise to these connections between the state, the private, certain civil society that have these kinds of effects of creating these surveillance networks. Yeah, I can see how Foucault is kind of written all over the whole idea of power, biopolitics. And I guess that also highlights the question of agency which is again what you allocate the whole chapter to. In your book, you describe agency as something that is culturally situated. It is shaped by power systems, but at the same time, it's not that classical idea of power that is exerted from one specific source or a headquarter. You call it the power that operates without headquarter. And that's again, I'm guessing it's also very to Foucault and ideas as well. So if we come to think of agency, if we want to come to think of agencies as such, how does it come into conflict or how does it challenge that traditional liberal idea that you're an individual, you're an autonomous individual and with agency. And thinking of agencies, you describe it as something culturally situation and shape by all these power systems and networks. Is it some people might argue that it's sort of a very narrow, or the fittest idea. It doesn't really leave any potentials or possibilities for challenging the system or for new understandings of how people might act within that complex power structure. Can we talk about that a bit? Yeah, so what I want to get away from is the idea that liberalism depends on the idea of an autonomous subject. So the idea of autonomy is the notion that the way you see yourself in the world comes from you that you have some kind of underlying truth, some underlying nature or some underlying being. And that's what gives you your sort of sense of motivation or movement in the world. So it's the idea of the sovereign individual. You make your own choices on the basis of your own understandings of the world. And that is what is usually meant by autonomy. Now, food codians have always been critical of that idea on the grounds that actually what people think they are, what people think is rational, what people think are, if you like, free choices, are actually culturally creative. So they're created in large part by the narratives that we inhabit. And no one is actually directly in control of those narratives. They kind of emerge from interactions of people trying to influence one another in various ways. But once those narratives get established, they kind of limit our field of vision in a sense. They operate almost like a kind of tunnel vision, which keeps people on particular sorts of paths. Now, what I want to say is that a kind of liberal position, at least the kind of liberalism that I would defend, accepts that. It accepts that we are all to a large extent, cultural or social products. But you can accept that and still recognize that people do have agency. So agency means not that you are fully autonomous, not that you sort of create all of the world around you, but that you do have some scope to challenge those kind of cultural norms and value systems. So certainly towards the end of his life, in his work on the care of the self, Foucault himself talks about the idea of resistance as being a form of self creation, where you are a culturally situated aptanth. He's being sort of shaped by all of these forces around you. But you still have some scope to kind of refashion yourself into something different. And that's the idea of self creation. So the self creating agent, as Foucault understands it, is not someone who's a purely authentic actor. It's someone who just sort of refashion the culture that is produced into something new or different. So self creation is not the same as authenticity. The idea that there's a kind of true you that you've just, that is separate from the cultural environment. It's rather more a kind of creative move within that environment. And a Foucaultian notion of freedom as I understand it is about keeping open the space within which people can keep challenging the established norms and practices that have actually created them. And I think what he's concerned about is the kind of social processes that close that space down. And the kind of analysis that I offer in this book is an attempt to understand in today's society what those processes might be that are closing down the space for people to be these self creating agents. It kind of reminds me of that famous debate within Foucault and Chomsky. Listen to a line time ago. Let me ask another question about this is something that I'm really, really interested in. I'm not a, I don't consider myself to be a postmanus of Foucaultian, but I've always defended against these vulgar accusations that they are anti-Western or anti-science. And I myself also work in, when I work in the education sector here, and I work with a lot of government agencies and they always ask our organization for policy advice, but they always say evidence-based policy or evidence-based advice and evidence they're always saying this, they're more or less means that of fact, let's say, evidence. And you talk about how Foucault and also postmodern liberal thinkers were skeptical of this whole rise of positivism and expert rule, let's say. And you will yourself have a lot of background in policy as well. And how should we understand these political stakes of relying too much on scientific rationalism? And I've seen, I think we have seen a consequence that when it comes to economics, it has completely forgot. I think it's rule-bound mathematical models, which is completely forgotten, the real lived experience of the people, anyhow. What are, how should we understand the political stakes of, let's say, relying too much on that kind of scientific rationalism? And what does your analysis help show about the limits of that kind of technocratic policy making? Well, let's say how those Foucault and Post-Doug, how do Post-Doug want to think as help us look at this aspect differently? Well, I mean, there's a lot in that question. So the first thing, the first thing I think is about saying what I understand by positivism. So essentially, I'm reading that as being the use of a methodology, which actually is appropriate in certain natural science contexts and applying it in the human or social sciences, and economics will be a classic example of that. So positivism in the natural sciences is going to be about using, for one of a better a phrase, a kind of laboratory-type method, where you're treating atoms and you're subjecting them on the sort of control conditions to a sort of stimulus response. So you've got atoms, whatever it may be, you apply a stimulus and then you observe in a statistic. what the response of those atoms is to asthm yours. Now, people who are critical of positivism, when it is applied outside of a natural science context, will say that is ignoring the creative aspect of human behavior. So, human beings are not like atoms in a laboratory but respond predictably to a kind of stimulus response. They're creative actors and that means that the human world is much more unpredictable than the kind of relationships that a natural scientist would be looking at. However, many disciplines, such as economics, but also to a large degree today, political science, actually approach questions of human behavior as if they can be analyzed through a kind of natural science or positivist lens where you are looking at people as though they will respond predictably to certain stimuli. And what's significant about this is that these kind of ideas lead to the view that human societies are, if you like scientifically knowable, a manageable object. Because if you can study human beings through this kind of stimulus response lens, whether a predictable response is too certain stimuli, that implies that people can be controlled, that you can control outcomes. Now, what I'm arguing in this book, and I think what is a, you know, many postmodernist, I think would agree with this, the idea that, actually, this level of control cannot exist over human beings, precisely because they are these creative or unpredictable actors. Nonetheless, if people believe in this kind of scientific model of social control, that will have what, or what FUCO would call multiple power effects. It will create various relationships between people, where they become enmeshed in surveillance systems that are supposed to be monitoring them, that are supposed to be subjecting them to a kind of predictable set of relationships. And this means that the space for people to do different things, to experiment in different ways, is progressively closed down. They get enmeshed in various controls, regulations, performance indicators, targets, this sort of thing, which arise from this positivist sort of view of the world. So even though these techniques don't actually work in the sense of delivering the outcomes that they want to, they have the effect of subjecting people to all of these controls and surveillance mechanisms. And we see that this in the economics, they are very, very significantly. So if you watch any muse program or current affairs program, which is talking about what people might consider to be macroeconomic phenomena, they're always talking about, does the economy need a stimulus? Or does it need this, or does it need that? And does it need more taxes? Does it need more regulation? Does it need more spending? Or even does it need tax cuts? And all of these ideas are based on the idea that are predictable responses to the stimuli. And it means that all of public debate, or a lot of public debate about the economy, debts, stuck in this kind of narrative, where it's assumed that stimuli have to be applied to people. And the people can't, in a sense, be left to make more of their own decisions without this kind of apparatus monitoring everything that they do. We talked about the idea of agency and power. And I'm also keen to know more about the idea of freedom from a fulculean perspective, and also a more or less liberal perspective. So, a fulculean's understanding of freedom is sort of an open-ended process of self-creation in the face of power. And then you have another conception of freedom and rights that is more or less offered by a egalitarian tradition of liberal political philosophy, and also postmodern liberals and on that. So, is there a tension between them, between these fulculean ideas, freedom of self-creation and the liberal debates of freedom as, you know, freedom of rights as welfare rights and negative rights? And there is, of course, a tension. But I'm keen for you to kind of elaborate on that. And also, how do you think this tension will reshape? How we tend to think of freedom today, especially that I think we know we do need some sort of protection from the government or from well-intention, you know, those power networks. But at the same time, we don't want those networks to become new sites of power, surveillance and control, which they are becoming, I guess, in some societies, unfortunately. So, can you talk about this, please? Yeah, so, traditionally, debates about freedom, certainly in the liberal tradition, especially outside of it, to a significant degree of being focused on the difference between what's called negative freedom and positive freedom. So, negative freedom is the idea of freedom as a non-interference. So, you are a free agent if somebody else isn't telling you what to do, or using violence against you, hitting you without your permission, that kind of idea of non-interference. Now, other people emphasize the idea of freedom as a positive thing. So, that's the idea that, well, maybe you're not free unless you've got the resources that you might need to perform certain actions that you want to perform. Or maybe you're not free if you're not able to set your own rules. So, there are different conceptions of freedom. One is this idea of freedom of non-interference. The other is this idea of positive freedom, which requires that you have access to certain resources or certain capacities. Now, many people in the, if you code in tradition, traditionally are seen as being very skeptical of the idea that negative freedom is even possible. In the sense that they see people as constantly, if you like, interfered with by the cultural environment. Okay, by the fact that all around us were subsumed in these narratives or discourses that can have certain effects on us. And we see this in terms of, say, cultural ideas about what's the appropriate role of women. What are the attitudes towards things like homosexuality? These are things that sort of circulate in narratives. And they imprint themselves on people's identities in sense of what they can do. So, because of that, a lot of people in the Foucault tradition are very skeptical of the idea that people ever can be free from interference in that sense. Now, many people would then argue that if that is the case, what people need is a more sort of positive understanding of freedom, which is seen freedom in the sense of people being able to break out from and challenge some of these kind of cultural norms or practices. So, many of the movements that, you know, been very prominent in the last 50 years are so social movements about gay liberation or female liberation of being precisely about challenging some of these kind of background social norms to create the space within which people can see themselves in a different way, be seen by others in a different way. Now, I've got a great deal of sympathy with many of those arguments and many of those movements. But I'm also suggesting in the book that there's a danger associated with some of these kind of arguments. And that danger is that even though they are suggesting that they want people to be able to explore different notions of identity, not just to accept the status quo, that in a strange way they can end up actually reinforcing certain stereotypes about people. So, to take an example of this, a lot of social justice narratives, which in many ways I've got sympathy with, speak about groups such as gays and lesbians or women or people in various ethnic minorities, as though they are homogenous categories, as though there is such a thing as a gay interest or a female interest or a black interest. And what this leads to is a kind of policing of people's identities, that people feel that they have to behave in a certain way because they are fitted into this sort of category. So, ideas that start off as being associated with notions of liberation, of freeing up the space for people to be different and to explore different conceptions of themselves. end up actually policing identity in ways that are actually quite threatening to freedom. They can be threatening a threatening to the freedom of people within those groups, which are supposed to be protected by various social justice measures, as they are potentially threatening to people who perhaps might be using forms of speech that some of the people in those groups might find to be offensive or to be upsetting in various ways. So what I'm suggesting is that actually positive notions of freedom, the idea that people need to be freed from various forms of cultural interference, are actually quite dangerous, and there are few codian reasons to believe that they're quite dangerous, that actually it might be better to rely more on a negative notion of freedom. Maybe caveated with some basic say anti-discrimination law or something of that kind, but not moving in the direction that we have been in recent years of quite a rigid identity politics, which kind of fixes people into certain categories. And I guess a lot of right-wing maybe I guess, or people who kind of affiliate Foucault with a rise of identity politics, but I don't agree with that myself. I don't think he's responsible for the rise of identity politics. Go back well to romanticism. But that's kind of one of those vulgar criticisms against him that comes up every now and then. I think Foucault would be a highly critical of identity politics, because what his overall philosophy about is freeing people from categories that are imposed on them by society. So he was a gay man, but in many ways he refused to be identified as that, because he didn't want to be sort of stereotyped. It doesn't mean that we have to ignore the fact that gays and lesbian or other groups do have some common interests when they face various oppressive forces. But what you've also got to be resisting is the idea that there's some unitary identity that comes from having these sorts of characteristics. And the danger of a lot of identity politics is they create what I call in the book, cultural cartilization, where people who happen to have a particular category are assumed to have the same interests. And there's a kind of perverse logic here where social movements that claim to be about diversity are actually homogenizing people within these categories. And I think Foucault would want people to break out of them, create new identities, new sort of combinations of identity that are not just stuck in these kind of rigid forms. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And when I was reading your book, that idea of cultural cartilization that you mentioned, there's a lot of genuine, let's say, criticism of identity politics, especially when it's kind of hailed by the ruling class, or it's used as a kind of a tokenism. I guess I read another book where it was called Elite Capture, where I think it was called Elite Capture from Namaste. And where the whole idea of identity politics is turning to all those different categories are turning to this homogenized monolithic units, as you mentioned. And you're more or less used as a tokenism. And I completely agree with you that I guess if Foucault was around, that it would be completely against that idea, that sort of categorization, because it runs counter to his idea of, you know, those possibilities for creating, for self-creation, or creating new forms of freedom, and resisting that power. There is another chapter in the book where you talk about public health. And I think it would be remiss of any Foucault, Foucault, expected enough to talk about Foucault and public it. But which you have included here, and that's where you discuss how, let's say, our public health management is sort of entangling in network of micro-regulatory controls. That sort of narrow the scope of subjects to constitute themselves, self-governing agents. What does your analysis suggest about the balance between public health goals, and at the same time the preservation of individual freedom, in an era where we are more and more, you know, let's just surrounded with those interventionist health policies? Well, I think this goes back to actually what we were talking about earlier with regard to positivism. So what I'm suggesting in the book is, it's not that there's anything wrong with the idea of public health as such. It's the kind of form of analysis that dominates. And this is the idea that we can understand what is good or bad for people's health through a fairly simplistic kind of stimulus response model. Now there are some areas of public health where actually that model is appropriate. So, you know, we know very well. I think we've got very good reason to believe that if you smoke heavily, you're going to have an increased risk of lung cancer. We know that people massively overeat that this isn't good for their health. So it's not that we can't know anything. But actually the problem is that in general most health issues that people face are much more complex than that. So the things that contribute to good health or ill health are not really fully known, nor really ever can they be known in a strictly scientific sense. There are too many variables that play in the environment in the person's life, the things that they do that actually affect health outcomes. And the problem is that the model that dominates in the public health space is one that believes that there are, if you like, simple solutions to what are complex health challenges. And because it works with that model, it then leads to this emphasis on very prescriptive micro controls over people about what they're supposed to eat, how many times they're supposed to exercise. All of these sorts of things that really limit people's scope to exercise. If you like a more entrepreneurial approach to the way in which they approach their health. So instead of living by rigid rules, people need to have more space to be more created and making judgments about what they do. But the current public health establishment for one of a better phrase doesn't see things in that way. It is propagating very simplistic models. And on the basis of that, exercising controls over people that are excessive. So in the UK, I'll just give examples of this. I don't know whether this is the same in Australia, but in the UK, if you want to buy cigarettes, those cigarettes are hidden behind cupboards in supermarket. So you're not allowed to see cigarettes in a store. But there are even suggestions now from some parts of the public health lobby that certain food types, you know, fatty foods or sugary drinks should also be hidden from public view. So this is a level of control that is treating people as actors who have no agency whatsoever. That they have to be governed to such an extent that they can't really be considered as remotely free actors. So it's the same here. What I've never thought about that aspect of it that you just discussed. For example, I think you mentioned at the beginning of the interview that you also were also interested in environmental discourse on ecology. And you discussed at the beginning of your book as well in chapter seven where you discussed ecological governance and the politics of catastrophe. So you examine environmental discourses there in that chapter and you and also the images of what you call sustainability, this, this positive. Can you tell us what you mean by that? And then I'll ask you have another question which I'll ask you. Yeah, so it's the thing in the second part of the book is that there are a series of in our in contemporary societies what Foucault called Disposities. So what he means by that is a set of ruling concepts or ideas. And the ruling ideas in public health sustainability and also in social justice that we see today are actually very similar. And they operate on the idea that the social world is in a sense a knowable object that it can be manipulated to produce desirable outcomes. This is informed by this kind of quite simplistic, I would say. positive as model, which views people as subject to a kind of stimulus response, sort of idea. And what I'm suggesting is that in many areas, whether it's social justice or in this case, sustainability, the problems are actually much more complex than that. So as I've just been saying with regard to public health, what actually contributes to good environmental outcomes? In many circumstances, it's very vague. It's not very clear. It's not very legible. So that implies that we need people to be, yes, conscious of the fact that they have an impact on the environment, but that we shouldn't be trying to subject them to overly rigid rules about the kinds of behaviors that they should be engaged in. But what we see increasingly in the environmental domain is this sort of rigidification that happen. People aren't just being encouraged to be sort of humble if you like in their attitude to the natural world. They're being told that they must live by very prescriptive sort of standards. I think this is just not going to work because environmental problems are just more complicated than that. But it's also dangerous for for human freedom because people are going to be enmeshed in more and more of these micro controls of the kind I was speaking about with regards to public health so that every time you go into the supermarket and you buy a product you are being told how many food miles are involved or the alleged impact that that product has. It's almost about trying to make people feel guilty about every choice that they make. What we need is an approach that recognizes that we've got to be careful about what we do that may impact the environment but that gives people a lot more leeway about how they respond to these challenges. So in the case of climate change which I think is a good example of this, I am very sympathetic to the argument in favour of what economists would call a carbon tax. The idea behind that is we need to signal to people that climate change is a problem and that we might need different kind of energy systems. But you send out a signal to producers and consumers to be the tax that they need to change their behaviour but you don't tell them in which ways they should change their behaviour. You leave it to them to figure out how they should respond to that tax. Now that is not the approach increasingly that we see in many countries. What we have are very prescriptive rules saying which technologies people should use, which travel modes they should use, which foods they should eat, whether they should consider going vegetarian or whatever it may be. These are very prescriptive narratives that are coming to the forewifter, restricting people's freedom and which because they are rigid are actually unlikely to succeed in addressing the actual genuine problem of something like climate change. What do you think maybe a less disciplined environmental politics might help us? I think it would. I think we need, as I say, this is not about denying environmental problems but it's about recognizing that they're complex and if something is complex, if it's very multifaceted, you don't want a rigid one-size-fits-all approach that tries to micromanage every aspect of what people do. So I think we do need a more pluralistic approach to address these challenges without denying them. But that kind of pluralism I find is something that is actually resisted by many people within what, at least we could call the green movement. That many people there tend to have a very moralistic view that they do want to prescribe to people. What things they should buy, what things they should eat, how they should travel rather than giving people the space to adapt in multifaceted ways to these complex challenges. You also discuss crime, counterterrorism and also the expansion of the securities that are in your book. What do you think are the hidden costs and expansion of this kind of system for democratic life? I did that in Australia and I said, "How do you know my name?" We said, "Well, five years ago, about something in our story in New Zealand. It was a franchise." It just freaked me out for a moment to know how my mastercard is. They know all my ideas, my address, my bank account and the whole story have access to it. Then what are the hidden costs of this system of surveillance to control crime for democratic life? How do you think societies can resist this slide of all-were criminalization, without sacrificing the security aspect of it, without compromising the or downplaying the security threats? Well, again, you've got to locate an understanding of what is causing the spread of a surveillance view of how you address crime. That goes back to the model of society that people actually have. The dominant models in crime control are based on what I've been describing as a positivist of youth science, applied to human beings. This is the idea that you can predict what kinds of people or what kind of situations will generate criminal activity. If you know certain background characteristics about those people, that means, therefore, you have to survey these background characteristics in order to be able to predict where the crimes are likely to happen and who is likely to be committing them. I actually think this model is just wrong. That crime is much less predictable than that. But the belief that it is predictable has this consequence of generating a surveillance network. There are now movements, say, in the UK and Canada, they've not actually gone through formal legislation yet, but there's certainly attempts to move in this direction, where people are talking about what they call preemptive measures, which are regulations designed to control and limit people's freedom in case they commit a crime. So you even see this in the area of freedom and speech-type questions. So if people have said something in the past, but might be perhaps an offensive comment to people from a particular sexual identity or racial group or something of that kind, that is then used as a predictor that they might be predisposed to violence at a subsequent point in time. And therefore, that they potentially might need to be restrained or even imprisoned. We see this in other areas where if people consume drugs, soft drugs, the assumption is that they might then go on to commit some other kind of crime or offense. So what this whole model of trying to predict crime leads to is this surveillance network. And I think it's very damaging. I think it doesn't work. I don't think it actually succeeds in reducing crime. But what it does is subject people to all of these sorts of controls, whether on speech or whether on other aspects of their behavior. So what I think you need is a different model. One that instead of giving power and authority to the criminal justice system to be constantly monitoring people and powers people more themselves to make their own pragmatic judgments about crime and how you should respond to it. So we do need to have crime prevention measures. But we need the measures to be much more pluralistic, much more diverse, much more situated in terms of local contexts, rather than these very prescriptive models which are currently dominant. Just I just have a couple of more questions. One of them comes from the final chapter of the book, The Conclusion, where you argue that the critical political economy, but it means schools must be wary must be called cautious of the dangers from imposing, let's say, its own gaze. Yeah. You mean I've, I've actually put it. So you acknowledge that even critical political economists avoid imposing its own totalizing gaze, let's say. Yeah. How do you think schools or policymakers should, or even ordinary citizens should practice critique responsibly and also be alert to the dangers without becoming trapped into dominating and sweeping theories? Well, you've got to, you've got to exercise an attitude of humility towards the people that you are claiming to understand or claiming to study. And so I would include myself in that. So you know, I've been putting forward an analysis in this podcast and in this book, which makes specific sorts of claims. I think there's good reason to think that the analysis is accurate, otherwise I wouldn't have made it. But I don't want, and I don't mean I should, or anybody else should, impose my conclusions on other people because they could be wrong. You know, I could be misunderstanding some of the reasons why people do the things that they do. So that means that you, you've got to be very wary of adopting a kind of blueprint, whether they're based on whether that blueprint is based on my ideas or anybody else's ideas for that matter. So I think you must preserve space for people to be able to resist if you like any kind of attempt to offer an all encompassing explanation of the world. And I would include, you know, my own ideas in that. So I'm suggesting that in today's society, there are many areas where people's freedom is being unjewly constrained. But I think if I'm true to my own analysis and being, you know, sort of skeptical of the, if you like, the truth claims that anyone should make. Ultimately, you have to leave it up to the individuals themselves who are in those situations to address the problem. You shouldn't try to address it for them. You know, you can give advice. You can circulate your ideas. But you shouldn't sort of aspire to, you know, seize control of government to implement your vision. You need to leave people the space to figure out themselves, how they extricate themselves from some of these processes, rather than thinking that you as the analyst, as the academic, as the intellectual or whoever, has all the solutions because we don't. And one final question. And I'm trying to kind of relate the content of your work in the framework you discussed to today's geopolitical problems that we have. So much of your book here explores how states and decentralized power systems align to shape behavior, the truth, whether it's true expertise, which we discuss of valence, crisis narrative, like climate, for example. And again, looking at today's geopolitical landscape, we have conflicts, we have climate emergencies, migration, rise of authoritarianism, and right-wing populism around the world. How do you think your framework can help us better understand these new forms of power and governance that are emerging in the world? How should we understand them? And what possibilities remain for us? There is very little to be optimistic to these days, but what possibilities remains for genuine freedom from all these dominating sort of global developments? Well, I mean, that's gosh, that's a very difficult question. I mean, I think what I would say is you have to challenge the underlying narratives that underpin the type of situation that you've just described. So we are told constantly that we're living in times of emergency or crisis. And I think what you need to do, if we're going to preserve people's faith for freedom, is to challenge those ideas. So we do face problems in society. But one of the things in my book is that there are grave dangers from seeing problems as emergencies or crises. Because whenever you construct a problem as being an emergency crisis or almost like a war-type situation, you create an internal dynamic that leads to the proliferation of controls. So whenever people are at war, it justifies quite understandably various controls on what people do. They're freedom of movement. They're freedom of speech. Freedom of multiple dimensions can always be considered. People's freedom we can think of justifications for limiting it when we're in those situations. So the thing what you need to do is to undermine the suggestion that all problems are emergencies, that all problems are crises. That doesn't mean that we never face crises or genuine emergencies. But we need to understand that there are actually many acts in the world who profit in many ways from circulating the idea that everything is an emergency. Because if something is an emergency, it justifies exercising controls over other people. And some people like exercising power and control over other people. And that's something that we need to be permanently aware of. So what I'm arguing for is the case for people being aware of the fact that ideas about emergency and crisis can be used to control them. And if they're aware of that, then we may have got a little bit more hope that we can preserve that space for people to be free agents. And before we end this interview, I'm just keen to know another of your recent published book. keen to know if you are working on any other new projects. Anything that might be published sometime soon. So I am started a new project recently, which is called Market Economies and Green Ideals. So that's very much focused on the sustainable development theme. And I want to look at ways in which you can have more pluralistic conversations about addressing environmental challenges. In ways that address those challenges, but without leading to the creation of this kind of surveillance approach to environmental management that I think is becoming very dominant in the contemporary world. Well, hopefully we should be able to speak to you soon about your project, article book, whatever shape a performer comes out soon. Thank you to do what I'd like to thank you again for your time to speak with us on new books network. The book we just discussed was called a Proquel and Liberal Political Economy Power Knowledge and Freedom Published by Oxford University Press Professor Mark Pennington. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much indeed. [Music]