About

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Corliss Lamont Professor of Law and Civil Liberties at Columbia Law School. He is also a faculty affiliate in the departments of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. A distinguished critical theorist and legal advocate, Harcourt's scholarship focuses on political, social, and legal theory, political economy, punishment practices, and critical philosophy. He has authored and edited over a dozen books, with recent works including 'Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory' (2023), which offers a blueprint for a society based on cooperation, and 'Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action' (2020), which charts a vision for political action and social transformation. His previous publications examine issues such as government counterinsurgency tactics, digital age disobedience, free markets and punishment myths, and profiling and policing in an actuarial age. Harcourt began his legal career representing individuals on Alabama’s death row, working with Bryan Stevenson at the Equal Justice Initiative, and continues to represent persons sentenced to death, life imprisonment without parole, and detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He has been recognized with awards such as the Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award for his work on death row cases. Harcourt has also served on human rights missions and challenged policies like the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban. Before joining Columbia Law, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he was the chairman of the Political Science Department and the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science, and has held visiting positions at Harvard University, NYU, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He served as a law clerk for Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Gender studies
• History
• Genealogy
• Law

Selected publications

• The Pressing Task of Critique

  Foucault Studies · 2025-10-15

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• Sobre a genealogia crítica

  Veritas (Porto Alegre) · 2025-05-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Hoje, a maioria dos teóricos críticos que empregam a história usa um método genealógico forjado por Nietzsche e Foucault. Essa abordagem genealógica atualmente domina a crítica com inflexão histórica. Mas nem todos os escritos genealógicos atuais, nem todos os debates filosóficos em torno da genealogia promovem os objetivos de uma filosofia crítica. É crucial neste momento que avaliemos o valor das críticas genealógicas. A métrica adequada para esse trabalho é avaliar se ele contribui para a transformação de nós mesmos, dos outros e da sociedade de uma forma valiosa. Neste artigo, proponho que usemos o termo “genealogia crítica” para identificarmos as práticas genealógicas que nutrem positivamente nossa atividade e, com isso, promovem a ambição da filosofia crítica.

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• The Will to Chaos and Disorder: The Behemoth as a Model of Political Economy

  The Business History Review · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

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  Abstract The history of political economy is tormented by beasts. The most famous is the Leviathan, the giant serpentine monster that figures in Hobbes’s masterpiece of modern political theory. Robert Fredona and Sophus Reinert spotlight another sea monster, the Kraken, that giant octopus or squid with a particular morphology (i.e., its tentacles) that so fittingly describes the grip of multinational corporations, stateless financial capital, social media, and tech giants today. But there are still other monsters in the bestiary of political economy. In this essay, I highlight the Behemoth, a land monster that captures another critical dimension of political economy: the willful and intentional deployment of chaos and disorder as a way of governing. Franz Neumann, political and legal theorist and lawyer, Columbia University professor, and member of the Frankfurt School in exile, placed the Behemoth at the heart—and in the title—of his analysis of Germany’s political economy under the Nazi regime. Alongside the Leviathan surveillance state and the many tentacular grips of multinational, social media, and tech Krakens, the Behemoth remains a key model to better understand current forms of capitalism.

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• On critical genealogy

  Contemporary Political Theory · 2024-08-31 · 7 citations

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  Today most critical theorists who deploy history use a genealogical method forged by Nietzsche and Foucault. This genealogical approach now dominates historically inflected critique. But not all genealogical writings today, nor all philosophical debates surrounding genealogy, advance the goals of critical philosophy. It is crucial now that we assess the value of genealogical critiques. The proper metric against which to evaluate such work is whether it contributes to transforming ourselves, others, and society in a valuable way. In this article, I propose that we use the term “critical genealogy” to identify those genealogical practices that positively nourish our activity and, thereby, advance the ambition of critical philosophy.

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• The Future of Critical Theory: From the Academy to the Public Sphere. [A Contribution to the 2023 Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung Workshop].

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cooperation

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• 5. “To Burst Open the Possibilities of the Present”: Seyla Benhabib and Utopia

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Nommer, « utopier »(Naming. Utopizing)

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

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  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking the Carceral through an Institutional Lens: On prisons and asylums in the United States

  Champ pénal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Introduction The classic texts of social theory tell a consistent story not only about the rise and (in some cases) fall of discrete carceral institutions, but also of the remarkable continuity of confinement and social exclusion. This pattern is reflected in the writings of Erving Goffman on Asylums (1961), Gerald Grob on The State and the Mentally Ill (1966), David Rothman on The Discovery of the Asylum (1971), and Michel Foucault (1961). In Madness and Civilization, Foucault traces the co...

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• A GENEALOGY OF ARCHAEOLOGY

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2022-11-11

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  T he mark of true genius is to elaborate an approach to human inquiry that enters the public imagination and becomes so widespread, it turns invisible.So natural and common, so pervasive, so extensive, people absorb it into their ordinary lives and no longer even recognize that they are using it.Foucault's early method, what he called "archaeology," is just that.An approach to studying how people come to know and understand reality, and live and function within it, Foucault's archaeological method rests on the idea that our experience of reality is embedded in a deep conceptual and epistemological coherence that itself becomes invisible.The method has become so pervasive today that contemporary thinkers deploy a word cloud of expressions with family resemblancesconditions of possibility, constitutive, organizing concepts, afterlives, styles of reasoning-to communicate in everyday parlance the idea that Foucault developed under the more technical title of épistémè.The method has become so extensive, it now encompasses practically all aspects of human life, from the social and political to the deeply subjective to the outer limits of sexuality.In the political realm, Foucault's method has evolved to reveal the way in which people are embedded within relations of power they

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Frequent coauthors

• François Ewald

  24 shared

• Tracey L. Meares

  Yale University

  23 shared

• Alessandro Fontana

  16 shared

• Fabienne Brion

  14 shared

• Jens Ludwig

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  11 shared

• Sacha Raoult

  University of California, Irvine

  6 shared

• M Lee Badgett

  6 shared

• Michele Goodwin

  Georgetown University

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Law and Political Science

  University of Chicago

• Other

  University of Chicago

• B.A.

  University of Chicago

Awards & honors

• New York City Bar Association Norman J. Redlich Capital Defe…