Becker and Foucault on Crime and Punishment

Becker and Foucault on Crime and Punishment with Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard E. Harcourt

Wednesday, May 15, 2013, University of Chicago

Transcript of the Second Session can be freely downloaded here: ssrn.com/abstract=2321912
[Note: There is a 40 second time delay (while the audio is running properly) before the video kicks in! Please be patient!]

In 1968, Gary Becker published a seminal article titled “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” in the Journal of Political Economy, in which he set forth the contours of an economic perspective on the field of criminal law and punishment. Only a few years later, in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics at the Collège de France on March 21, 1979, Michel Foucault analyzed Gary Becker’s article in relationship to his own writings.

This seminar, featuring Gary Becker, François Ewald and Bernard E. Harcourt, seeks to engage the discursive repercussions of this textual exchange and the impact Becker's work made on Foucault's work, including his well-known work Discipline and Punish, published in 1975.

The relevant texts can be accessed here:
Becker's 1968 paper: http://bit.ly/17W2Yvo
Foucault's lecture: http://bit.ly/11MB4dB

This is the second conversation between Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt. The transcript is forthcoming and will be available soon. You can view the video of the first conversation on American Neoliberalism here: vimeo.com/43984248. You can read the transcript of the first conversation here: thecarceral.org/cn7_Becker_Ewald_Conversation.pdf

Gary Becker is a Nobel Laureate in economics and currently holds the position of University Professor in Economics, Booth School of Business, and Sociology at the University of Chicago and is the Chair of the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.

François Ewald is titular professor of the chair of insurance studies at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and director of the Ecole nationale d'assurances. Professor Ewald was Michel Foucault’s primary assistant and interlocutor at the the Collège de France from 1976 to 1984, and is the founder of the Michel Foucault Centre. He is in charge of publication of Foucault's teaching works at the Collège de France.

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard 2011).

Sponsored by the Department of Political Science, the France Chicago Center, the Computation Institute, and 3CT at The University of Chicago.

Видео Becker and Foucault on Crime and Punishment канала Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought