This highly original and innovative book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault from within the tradition of liberal political economy. Divided into two parts the book commences by demonstrating important commonalities between Foucault's ideas and those of a neglected 'post-modern' stream in liberal political and economic thought. These ideas draw on a social theory emphasising a culturally situated individualism; a philosophy of science highly critical of socio-economic 'scientism' and 'expert rule'; and an understanding of freedom as an open-ended process of 'self-creation' in the face of cultural power relations--a freedom threatened by alignments between state power and more decentred manifestations of power. Part two combines the tools of Foucault's critical social theory with those of a post-modern liberalism to problematise four separate though overlapping 'bio-political' or 'pastoral' dispositifs in
