IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/b/hup/pbooks/9780674066168.html
   My bibliography  Save this book

The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order

Author

Listed:
  • Harcourt, Bernard E.

    (University of Chicago)

Abstract

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. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

Suggested Citation

  • Harcourt, Bernard E., 2011. "The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order," Economics Books, Harvard University Press, number 9780674066168.
    • Handle: RePEc:hup:pbooks:9780674066168
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peter Mascini, 2013. "Why was the enforcement pyramid so influential? And what price was paid?," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 7(1), pages 48-60, March.
    2. Andrew Lynn, 2022. "Ethics, Economics, and the Specter of Naturalism: The Enduring Relevance of the Harmony Doctrine School of Economics," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 178(3), pages 661-673, July.
    3. Hogarth, Stuart & Löblová, Olga, 2022. "Regulatory niches: Diagnostic reform as a process of fragmented expansion. Evidence from the UK 1990–2018," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 304(C).
    4. Annalisa Rosselli, 2022. "Good Theories and Bad Practices. Speculation and the Economists of the 19th Century," Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics, History and Political Science, Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Torino (Italy), vol. 56(2), pages 147-162, December.
    5. Innset, Ola, 2023. "Dual Argument, Double Truth: On the continued importance of the state in neoliberal thought," SocArXiv kyvdm, Center for Open Science.
    6. Mazhar Ali Jarwar & Stefano Dumontet & Vincenzo Pasquale, 2024. "The Natural World in Western Thought," Challenges, MDPI, vol. 15(1), pages 1-16, March.
    7. John D. Bessler, 2018. "The economist and the enlightenment: how Cesare Beccaria changed Western civilization," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 46(3), pages 275-302, December.
    8. Chris Muellerleile, 2015. "Speculative boundaries: Chicago and the regulatory history of US financial derivative markets," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 47(9), pages 1805-1823, September.
    9. Di Liberto, Yuri, 2022. "Hype: The Capitalist Degree of Induced Participation," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 2(2), pages 1-16.
    10. Damien Cahill, 2020. "Market analysis beyond market fetishism," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(1), pages 27-45, February.
    11. Boldizzoni, Francesco, 2013. "On history and policy: Time in the age of neoliberalism," MPIfG Discussion Paper 13/6, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    12. Mark B. Salter, 2013. "To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility and the Assemblage of Circulation," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(1), pages 7-19, February.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • P1 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies
    • B2 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hup:pbooks:9780674066168. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Aili Contini-Field (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.