Bernard E. Harcourt | University of Chicago Law School. Website: Professor Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science at The University of Chicago. Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, and penal law and procedure. He is the author of the book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011) and the co-editor with Fabienne Brion of Michel Foucault's Mal faire, dire vrai (in French 2012 here at PUL and in English forthcoming at the University of Chicago Press). He is also the author of Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001).
Education: AB ,1984, Princeton University; JD, 1989, and PhD, 2000, Harvard University. The Illusion of Free Markets - Bernard E. Harcourt. It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm.
The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Welcome, Nato, to Chicago's police state | Bernard Harcourt. With Nato delegates arriving Saturday night, the City of Chicago has been turned into a police state. Courtesy of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who several months ago began implementing new draconian anti-protest measures, Chicago has gone on security lockdown.
Starting early Friday night, 18 May 2012, the Chicago Police Department began shutting down – prohibiting cars, bikes, and pedestrians – miles and miles of highways and roads in the heart of Chicago to create a security perimeter around downtown and McCormick Place (where the Nato summit is being held). Eight-foot tall, anti-scale security fencing went up all over that perimeter and downtown, including Grant Park; and the Chicago police – as well as myriad other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the US secret service – were out in force on riot-geared horses, bikes, and patrols – batons at the ready.
So, welcome, Nato, to the Chicago police state 2012. A few further points are worth mentioning. Bernard Harcourt.