American Neoliberalism: Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics Lectures

American Neoliberalism: Michel Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics Lectures from UChicago Political Science.

Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt

“American Neoliberalism: Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics Lectures”

“Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker”

The discussion took place in Foster 505, the seminar room of the Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago at 12:00 noon on Wednesday May 9, 2012.

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 (Cnam) 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 of Law, and 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) and co-editor of Michel Foucault’s Louvain lectures, Mal-faire, dire-vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice [Wrong-doing, truth-telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (Presses Universitaires de Louvain and University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

Read the transcript here.