Law Commons^™

The ’73 Graft: Punishment, Political Economy, And The Genealogy Of Morals, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I explore the place of a genealogy of morals within the context of a history of political economy. More specifically, I investigate the types of moralization – of criminals and delinquents, of the disorderly, but also of political economic systems, of workers and managers, of rules and rule-breaking – that are necessary and integral to making a population accept new styles of political and economic governance, especially the punitive institutions that accompany modern political economies in the contemporary period.

The marriage of political economy and a genealogy of morals: this essay explores how the moralization of certain …

Fantasies And Illusions: On Liberty, Order, And Free Market, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Critical thinkers have used various terms to describe the collective imaginary that has real effects on individuals, society, and politics. Freud used the term “einer Illusion” to characterize religious belief in his work, The Future of an Illusion, though many others in the psychoanalytic tradition would turn to the notion of fantasy. Marx sometimes used the term illusion and he notoriously deployed the optical illusion and the phantasmagoria in his famous discussion of commodity fetishism. (And Marx, of course, is the father of Ideologiekritic). Foucault at times used the language of fantasy and phantasms, in an early period deployed the …