Bernard Harcourt

"The idea of natural order, in effect, masks the state’s role. ... Robert Hale ... demonstrated the extent to which the distribution of income and wealth is the product of legal rules we choose to impo…"

"Faith in natural order and market efficiency forecloses a full normative assessment of market outcomes. ... It effectively depoliticizes the market itself and its outcomes. It is only when the illusio…"

"The doctrine of laissez-faire in the mid-nineteenth century essentially allowed three functions for the government: first, maintaining the external defense of the country; second, providing for the in…"

"The different strands of radical thought seek to lift a veil from our eyes in order to emancipate us from domination, cowardice, or repression. They unmask in order to liberate."

"By an odd amalgam of liberal economic theory and Beccaria on punishment, nineteenth-century thinkers would replicate this exceptional relationship between markets and punishment: natural orderliness i…"

"At what price have so many of us come to believe that the economy is the realm of natural order and that the legitimate and competent sphere of policing—of administration and government—lies elsewhere…"

"The notion that human interaction could spontaneously and autonomously achieve a stable, orderly, self-sustaining form of equilibrium in the absence of government intervention—what François Quesnay an…"