Humanities Institute Event: Bernard Harcourt Seminar and Lecture

The Precarity and Social Contract Working Group of the Humanities Institute and the Department of Comparative Studies present a Bernard Harcourt lecture, "Bars and Digits: Liberal Democracy in the Digital Age of Security."

 

This lecture will explore one of the most fundamental paradoxes of Western liberal democracy in the twenty-first century: How is it that those liberal democracies that pride themselves on individual liberty and economic liberalism are the very same ones that hold the world record for persons detained behind bars and engage in forms of digital surveillance that would typically be associated with authoritarian regimes?

 

Bernard Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Chicago and, during 2013-2014, the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia University. Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, political economy, and penal law and procedure. He is the author of the book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011) and the editor of Michel Foucault's 1973 courses at the Collège de France, La Société punitive (Gallimard, forthcoming).

 

In addition to the lecture, there will be a seminar with Bernard Harcourt for faculty and graduate students Sept 20, 2013 from 10:00 am until 12 noon at the Humanities Institute, George Wells Knight House, 104 E.15th Ave.