Bernard E. Harcourt | University of Chicago Law School Website: Professor Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science at The University of Chicago. Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, and penal law and procedure. He is the author of the book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011) and the co-editor with Fabienne Brion of Michel Foucault's Mal faire, dire vrai (in French 2012 here at PUL and in English forthcoming at the University of Chicago Press). He is also the author of Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). Education: AB ,1984, Princeton University; JD, 1989, and PhD, 2000, Harvard University
In and out of Kingdoms [A guest post by Tipu Sultan] Once, I Was An Oil Drop I was taught that oil was the most glorious thing that had ever happened to humankind. My first memory of this education was at age six. I was inducted into the girl-scouts, along with some of the other girls in the corporate-garrison town-city of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where I grew up. We were made to dress up as oil drops for the annual Saudi ARAMCO Day Parade. Who dresses six-year-old girls in large black plastic garbage bags to be paraded around for two hours, in over a hundred degrees of heat? Saudi Arabia was a land, we were constantly told, that time forgot—until the Americans and the oil. In the 6th grade, I went on a school trip to the first museum I remember: the Saudi ARAMCO Exhibit. I have a vivid memory of the larger-than life size photographs of the first American geologists in Arabia in the 1940s, smiling confidently through their sunglasses as they sat in rugged clothes, in front of tents and oil wells.
Taxation and Democracy - Steinmo, Sven Sven Steinmo Winner of the Gabriel Almond Award given by the American Political Science Association for the Best Book in Political Economy Taxation and Democracy is the first book to examine the structure, politics, and historic development of taxation policies in several countries. Comparing three quite different political democracies—Sweden, Britain, and the United States—the book provides a powerful account of the ways these democracies have managed to finance their welfare programs despite widespread public resistance to taxes. According to Steinmo, all democracies face a basic dilemma—how government can be both autonomous and responsive to public wishes. Sven Steinmo is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
America's Kingdom - review by S hertog Business History Review The Business History Review is a scholarly journal that seeks to publish articles with rigorous primary research that address major topics of debate, offer comparative perspectives, and contribute to the broadening of the subject. The journal is primarily concerned with the history of entrepreneurs, firms, and business systems, and with the subjects of innovation, globalization, and regulation. Harvard Studies in Business History Harvard Studies in Business History is a series of scholarly books published by Harvard University Press. Course Development The business historians at the School engage in extensive course development for the three major MBA electives.
Democracy, Agency, and the State: Guillermo O'Donnell Democracy, Agency, and the State aims to contribute to a comparatively informed theory of democracy. Professor O'Donnell begins by arguing that conceptions of 'the state' and 'democracy', and their respective defining features, significantly influence each other. Using an approach that is both historical and analytical, he traces this relationship through the idea of legally sanctioned and backed agency which grounds democratic citizenship. Drawing on the examples of democratic and non-democratic regime, he discusses the dialogical spaces congenial to democracy, as well as examining the options that may or may not enable agency, and the complex comparative and ethical issues raised by the intersection of agency with globalization and legal pluralism.Throughout these discussions several comparative vistas are opened, especially but not exclusively toward Latin America.
The Nature of Oil: Reconsidering American Power in the Middle East Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. New York: Verso, 2011. Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Robert Vitalis, American Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006. For most of those who consider themselves politically liberal, oil—along with environmental degradation and foreign occupation—form a kind of political axis of evil on the American political landscape. In the past few years, three new books in Middle Eastern studies have complicated this picture considerably. Robert Vitalis’ American Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier effectively destroys the notion that ARAMCO represented a benevolent corporation committed to the “social uplift” of its employees. Of the three books, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil makes the most far-reaching claims for the importance of oil.
The Decline and Fall of the American Republic - Bruce Ackerman Bruce Ackerman shows how the institutional dynamics of the last half-century have transformed the American presidency into a potential platform for political extremism and lawlessness. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the War on Terror are only symptoms of deeper pathologies. Ackerman points to a series of developments that have previously been treated independently of one another—from the rise of presidential primaries, to the role of pollsters and media gurus, to the centralization of power in White House czars, to the politicization of the military, to the manipulation of constitutional doctrine to justify presidential power-grabs. He shows how these different transformations can interact to generate profound constitutional crises in the twenty-first century—and then proposes a series of reforms that will minimize, if not eliminate, the risks going forward. The book aims to begin a new constitutional debate.
Global production networks and the extractive sector: governing resource-based development This article explores the opportunities a GPN approach provides for understanding the network configurations and regional development impacts associated with extractive industries. The article elaborates two core claims: (i) that the application of the GPN analytical framework provides a way to make progress in a stalled policy debate regarding the linkages between resource extraction and socio-economic development (popularly known as the ‘resource curse thesis’); and (ii) that the encounter between GPN and a natural resource-based sector introduces distinctive issues—associated with the materiality and territoriality of extractive commodities—that, to date, GPN has not considered fully. The article examines the global production network for oil as an empirical case of how extractive industries can provide (limited) opportunities for socio-economic development. JEL classifications © The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
The Illusion of Free Markets - Bernard E. Harcourt It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion.
Middle East Policy Council | America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier Reviewed by G.J.H. Dowling, Author and journalist; ARAMCO government affairs (ret.) Verso, 2009. 354 pages. $19.95. This book by American historian Robert Vitalis was reissued in 2009 in a paperback edition, a testament in part, no doubt, to the unrelenting interest in U.S.-Saudi Arabian relations occasioned by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. However, the principal ground for its appeal must surely be located in the nature of the work itself. Despite the scholarship and the invigorating quality of its expression, however, this is a flawed work. It is universally recognized that the oil concession catalyzed the American "penetration of Arabia" with Aramco at the vanguard of what would ultimately be a broad, substantial and sometimes contentious U.S. involvement with the kingdom. To be sure, Aramco has been discussed in a great many publications elucidating its significance in the reshaping of diplomatic, strategic and economic relationships. But for Dr. Dr.
Quiet Politics and Business Power Corporate Control in Europe and Japan Pepper D. Culpepper, European University Institute, Florence Publication date:January 2011 248pages 17 b/w illus. 19 tables Dimensions: 234 x 156 mm Weight: 0.48kg In stock Robert Vitalis | The Middle East Center at Penn Robert Vitalis joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in July 1999 as associate professor of political science and director of the Middle East Center. He stepped down as Center director in July 2006. Penn promoted him to full professor in July 2008. Vitalis received his Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1989. His graduate work included a three-year residence in Cairo where he studied Arabic and researched the political strategies of Egyptian business firms. He has continued to develop and expand the scope of his interests in historical comparative analysis in his second book, America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, which was published in October 2006 by Stanford University Press, and named a book of the year in the London Guardian. Education: Massachussettes Institute of Technology, S.M. 1984; Ph.D. 1989State University of New York - Stony Brook, B.A. 1978 Research Interests: Overseas Research Experience: Egypt, Israel, Gulf States Recent Publications: