Foucault News

Gary S. Becker, François Ewald & Bernard E. Harcourt, Becker and Foucault on Crime and Punishment’: A Conversation with Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt: The Second Session (Coase- Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Working Paper No.654, 2013

[Editor: Update 15 March 2026. I have updated the links below to the archived pages held on The Wayback Machine as well as a page still available online]

This is an edited transcript of a conversation held at The University of Chicago on May 15, 2013, in Foster Hall 505, the seminar room of the Committee on Social Thought. The video recording of the open seminar can be viewed on-line at [this link]. It represents a continuation of a conversation begun the year before, titled “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker”: American Neoliberalism & Michel Foucault’s 1979 Birth of Biopolitics Lectures. That first session can be viewed on-line as well at [this link], and the transcript of that first session can be read here. Professors Gary Becker and François Ewald have individually reviewed their portions of the conversation; Professor Bernard Harcourt has edited and annotated the text. We are extremely grateful to Eléonore Rimbault for transcribing the conversation.

In 1968, Gary Becker published a seminal article titled “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” in the Journal of Political Economy, in which he set forth the contours of an economic perspective on the field of criminal law and punishment. Only a few years later, in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics at the Collège de France on March 21, 1979, Michel Foucault analyzed Gary Becker’s article in relationship to his own writings.

This seminar, featuring Gary Becker, François Ewald and Bernard Harcourt, seeks to engage the discursive repercussions of this textual exchange and the impact Becker’s work made on Foucault’s work, including his well-known work Discipline and Punish, published in 1975.

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 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 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).

Sponsored by the Department of Political Science, the France Chicago Center, the Computation Institute, and 3CT at The University of Chicago.

With thanks to Daniele Lorenzini for this information