Law Commons^™

“Let Those Who Have An Experience Of Prison Speak”: The Critique & Praxis Of The Prisons Information Group (1970-1980), Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

As the May ’68 revolution reached a boiling point, a remarkable assemblage of philosophers, writers, and incarcerated persons, doctors, nurses, social workers, and sociologists, activists and organizers, and militants in France turned their attention to the problem of the prison. At a time when prisons were mostly hidden from view, practically impenetrable in France to outsiders, at a time long before we recognized mass incarceration in countries like the United States, the Prisons Information Group (the Groupe d’information sur les prisons or the “GIP”) coalesced to spotlight the travesty of justice that is the prison – one that continues unabated …

The Critique And Praxis Of Rights, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The critique of rights has played a crowning role in critical philosophy. From Hegel to Marx, to Foucault and beyond – Duncan Kennedy, Christoph Menke, the contributors to this Symposium – the critique of rights has always represented an essential and inescapable step in the critique of modern Western society. The reason is plain: conceptions of natural rights, human rights, and civil rights have been central to the founding of modern political thought (from Hobbes, Locke, and Wollstonecraft forward), to the birth and flourishing of legal and political liberalism (in Rawls and Habermas), to the establishment of regimes of civil …

Critique & Praxis: A Pure Theory Of Illusions, Values, And Tactics, And An Answer To The Question: "What Is To Be Done?", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

We are going through an unprecedented period of political instability. With the rise of the alt-right and of xenophobic sentiment, and the fallout of neoliberal government policies, our political future is at stake. These times call for the type of critical theory and praxis that gave rise to the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and to the critical ferment of the 1970s. Yet, in the face of our crises today, contemporary critical theory seems disarmed.

Critical theory is in disarray because of a wave of anti-foundational challenges in the 1960s that shattered the epistemological foundations of the Frankfurt School. The …

Radical Thought From Marx, Nietzsche, And Freud, Through Foucault, To The Present: Comments On Steven Lukes’S In Defense Of "False Consciousness", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Steven Lukes offers a precise, succinct, and forceful defense of the idea of "false consciousness" in his provocative essay by that name, In Defense of "False Consciousness" People can be systematically mistaken about their own best interest, Lukes contends – or, in his words, "they can have systematically distorted beliefs about the social order and their own place in it that work systematically against their interests." It is not just that sometimes people knowingly but regretfully make compromises, nor simply that they face no alternative choices; people are at times factually mistaken about what will promote their best interest. "There …

Post-Modern Meditations On Punishment: On The Limits Of Reason And The Virtues Of Randomization, Bernard E. Harcourt, Alon Harel, Ken Levy, Michael M. O'Hear, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

In this Criminal Law Conversation (Robinson, Ferzan & Garvey, eds., Oxford 2009), the authors debate whether there is a role for randomization in the penal sphere - in the criminal law, in policing, and in punishment theory. In his Tanner lectures back in 1987, Jon Elster had argued that there was no role for chance in the criminal law: “I do not think there are any arguments for incorporating lotteries in present-day criminal law,” Elster declared. Bernard Harcourt takes a very different position and embraces chance in the penal sphere, arguing that randomization is often the only way to avoid …

An Answer To The Question: "What Is Poststructuralism?", Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

What is poststructuralism? It has always struck me as odd that so many critical theorists are reluctant to offer an answer to this question. In this essay, I unpack the term and provide a synoptic answer. Poststructuralism, I suggest, is a style of critical reasoning that focuses on the moment of ambiguity in our systems of meaning, as a way to identify the ethical choices that we make when we overcome the ambiguity and move from indeterminacy to certainty of belief in our efforts to understand, interpret, and shape our environment. Post-structuralism concentrates on the moment when we impose meaning …