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ANNUAL LAW LECTURE WITH PROFESSOR BERNARD HARCOURT

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Clore Management Centre

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Inversions in Critical Times
Bernard E. Harcourt
 

In their darkest moments, in deepest crisis, many of the sharpest critical thinkers returned to G.W.F. Hegel to confront his dialectical thought and philosophy of history—inverting Hegel in various different ways and directions. Marx, of course, throughout his writings, but Lenin as well in 1914, de Beauvoir in 1940, CLR James, Sartre, Fanon, Marcuse, as well as Althusser, Foucault, and Butler. Drawing on this long history, Bernard E. Harcourt will explore in this lecture the myriad ways in which critical thinkers from the nineteenth century to the present have confronted Hegel’s thought and, in the process, invented new radical visions and programs of solidarity, cooperation, and emancipation. This is an urgent task today in the face of mounting, extreme Right-wing politics around the world: to forge new paths to counter the increasingly systematized theories of the far-Right and propose new horizons for the future. 

 

 

 

 

Professor Bernard Harcourt is the Corliss Lamont Professor of Law and Civil Liberties at Columbia Law School. He is a distinguished critical theorist and legal advocate, he has written and edited over a dozen books. His scholarship focuses on political, social, and legal theory, political economy, punishment practices, and critical philosophy.

He is the founding director of the Initiative for a Just Society at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, which brings contemporary critical theory and practice to bear on current social problems and seeks to address them through practical engagements, including litigation and public policy transformation.

His most recent book, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (2023), offers the blueprint for a society based on cooperation. His other recent book, Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (2020), charts a vision for political action and social transformation. In The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018), Harcourt examines how techniques of counterinsurgency warfare spread to U.S. domestic policy and policing. His previous books include Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015), The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (2007), Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (2001), and Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (2013), with W. J. T. Mitchell and Michael Taussig. In addition, Harcourt has edited or co-edited and annotated many volumes of the lectures of Michel Foucault in French and English, as well as the French edition of Discipline and Punish for the official Pléiade edition of the complete works at Gallimard.

He began his legal career representing individuals on Alabama’s death row, working with Bryan Stevenson at what is now the Equal Justice Initiative, in Montgomery, Alabama. He continues to represent pro bono persons sentenced to death and life imprisonment without parole, as well as those detained at Guantanamo Bay. In 2019, Harcourt was awarded the New York City Bar Association Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award, a lifetime achievement award for his work on behalf of individuals on death row.

He also served on human rights missions to South Africa and Guatemala, and has actively challenged the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban, representing pro bono a Syrian medical resident excluded under the executive order, as well as Moseb Zeiton, a Columbia SIPA student.

Contact name: Patrick Hanafin

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