Profile
Bernard E. Harcourt is the Corliss Lamont Professor of Law and Civil Liberties at Columbia University and an affiliated faculty member in the departments of Political Science, African American and African Diaspora Studies, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. At Columbia, Professor Harcourt is the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights and the founding director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. He is also a chaired professor (Directeur d'études) in philosophy and epistemology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris (EHESS).
A distinguished legal advocate and critical theorist, Harcourt is the author or editor of more than a dozen books. His forthcoming book, In the Name of Justice, recounts the thirty-year struggle of his client, Doyle Lee Hamm, to seek justice on Alabama’s death row. His most recent published book Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (2023) charts a vision for a new economic system of coöperism and solidarity. In Critique & Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (2020), Harcourt attempts to reconstruct critical theory as a transformative praxis. In The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018), he 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.
Harcourt has edited or co-edited and annotated several volumes of the lectures of the French philosopher Michel Foucault in French and English. He edited the French edition of Foucault’s 1972-73 lectures at the Collège de France, La Société punitive (Gallimard 2013) and the 1971-1972 lectures, Theories et institutions pénales (Gallimard 2015). He edited Foucault’s lectures on Nietzsche for the new series of lecture publications by Gallimard/Le Seuil (2024). He is also the editor of the new Pléiade edition of Surveiller et punir in the collected works of Foucault at Gallimard (2016). He is the English language editor of the ongoing series of Foucault’s Early Lectures and Manuscripts. He is co-editor with Fabienne Brion of the lectures Foucault delivered at Louvain in 1981, in French and English, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (Chicago 2014).
Harcourt began his 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, and represented a man 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. Harcourt 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.
Before joining Columbia University in 2014, Harcourt 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. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University, New York University, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.