Trust in Freedom or in Equality? A Comment on Bernard E. Harcourt's The Illusion of Free Markets

“At the end of the day, the notion of a 'free market’ is a fiction. There is simply no such thing as a non-regulated market—a market that operates without legal, social and professional regulation. Those forms of regulation, including the criminal sanction, are precisely what distributes wealth and resources, what makes it possible for the Chicago Board of Trade to exclude non-members from the trading floor, for the Big Four accounting firms to effectively control accounting standards and for large commercial banks to essentially coordinate lending practices” (p. 242).This erudite and forcefully written book’s chief endeavour is to propose a genealogy of the reason why, in the United States and, by extension, in most western neoliberal societies, proclaimed state abstention in the economic sphere combined with actual state intervention in the criminal sphere have come to be perceived as perfectly “natural” and fail to trigger much social contestation, despite the devastating social consequences that this seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of practices has had over time.