Mark Pennington has been Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy since January 2012 and was Head of Department between 2016 and 2020. Prior to joining King’s he taught for 12 years in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Mark is currently director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society

Research

Mark’s work takes place at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics with a focus on problems of limited knowledge and bounded rationality. This approach is exemplified in his new book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2025) which is the first attempt to integrate Michel Foucault’s ‘post-modern’ social and political theory with the perspective of liberal political economy. In doing so Mark develops the case for a distinctively ‘post-modern’ liberalism focused on threats to freedom in contemporary societies arising from multiple ‘power/knowledge’ complexes that seek to correct ‘pattern anomalies’ in the name of social justice, public health, sustainability, and law and order. Mark’s earlier work includes analyses of the classical liberal tradition, environmental governance, social capital, and the relationship between markets and democratic citizenship – brought together in the book Robust Political Economy: classical liberalism and the future of public policy (Edward Elgar, 2011). He is also the author of Planning and the Political Market (Continuum, 2001) a political economy analysis of the UK town and country planning system. From September 2025 Mark will be working with Roberto Fumagalli on a new 33-month project supported by the John Templeton Foundation on ‘Market Economies and Green Ideals’.

Teaching

Undergraduate: Ethics, Economics and Environmental Protection

Post-graduate: Key Concepts in Contemporary Political Economy