Bernard Harcourt: Order

“The idea of natural order, in effect, masks the state’s role. … Robert Hale … demonstrated the extent to which the distribution of income and wealth is the product of legal rules we choose to impose. Hale trained our attention on the foundational rules of property and contract law, showing how free, voluntary, compensated exchange is in fact a product of the legal coercion that the government establishes through its role in defining property rights.”

Bernard Harcourt

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 32

Law , Idea , Nature , Training

“Faith in natural order and market efficiency forecloses a full normative assessment of market outcomes. … It effectively depoliticizes the market itself and its outcomes. It is only when the illusion of natural order is lifted that a real problem arises: that of the justice of the organizational rules and their distributional consequences.”

Bernard Harcourt

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 32

Faith , Justice , Nature , Problem

“The different strands of radical thought seek to lift a veil from our eyes in order to emancipate us from domination, cowardice, or repression. They unmask in order to liberate.”

Bernard Harcourt

“Radical Thought from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, through Foucault, to the Present: Comments on Steven Lukes's ‘In Defense of False Consciousness,’” The University Of Chicago Legal Forum, 2011, p. 34

“At what price have so many of us come to believe that the economy is the realm of natural order and that the legitimate and competent sphere of policing—of administration and government—lies elsewhere? What flows from that sharp dichotomy between orderliness in the market and ordering in the penal sphere? At what price do we embrace these categories? And here, the answer is equally clear: at the price, first, of naturalizing the market and thereby effectively shielding from normative assessment the regulatory mechanisms in our contemporary markets and the wealth distributions that occur daily; and at the price, second, of easing, facilitating, and enabling the massive expansion of our penal sphere, or, to be more provocative, of making possible mass incarceration today.”

Bernard Harcourt

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), pp. 31-32

Nature , Wealth

“The doctrine of laissez-faire in the mid-nineteenth century essentially allowed three functions for the government: first, maintaining the external defense of the country; second, providing for the internal order and security of persons; and third, possibly, providing for minimal public amenities. … Criminalization and punishment became, undisputedly, the most legitimate and competent task of the government. There, for sure, government intervention was proper, necessary, legitimate, and competent. There, natural orderliness had to be replaced by governmental ordering.”

Bernard Harcourt

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 37

Nature , Personality , Country