Good Listening: Harcourt on the Market

Update: And see Mike's link to the paper from whence it came, in the comments (infra).

About the most interesting Podcast I've heard lately is a University of Chicago Law School presentation by Bernard Harcourt his work on the the history and theory of "the market." That's my title, not his: he calls it ""Neoliberal Penality: A Genealogy of Excess," but I'm presumptuous enough to think I understand his thrust better than he does. From scan of his web page I gather his agenda for years now has been populated by issues in criminal penalties. That might account for his supposed focus here, but in fact I think his current work addresses a somewhat different set of concerns. One is his inquiry into what you might call the archaeology of the market: his exploration of the highly non-obvious idea--no older than the 18th Century--that the government might just set some traffic cop rules and stay out of the way. For so long now we have taken Adam Smith as more or less an article of faith, so much so that we lose sight of how novel, even radical, were the set of ideas that he was showcasing (but did not invent) in his time. One virtue of reconstructing the history of this complex is that it helps to articulate a hobby horse of mine: no market is "natural; every market is a cultural artifact, bound up with a set of rules, conventions, whatever, that define and constrain it.

Given the limits of the genre, I thought he did a stellar job with his archaeology. In another part of the presentation, I thought he was less successful. He suggested (plausibly enough) that the next item would be to try to identify which (non-inevitable) rules of market governance are worth the trouble, which not. He's entirely right that this is a worthwhile task but his thinking, at least as here presented, doesn't seem to go much beyond the conventional: he rattles off the familiar mantra about allocational efficiency and distributional equity and more or less leaves it t that.

But it's early yet. He seems to have presented the talk way back last spring and there is only so much you can expect in 60-odd minutes. But it's a highly promising line of inqauiry; he's made a fast start and I look forward to a strong finish.