"The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences"
At this year's conference, leading social scientists and legal scholars will present and discuss their research regarding the historical origins, psychological antecedents, and policy consequences of the free market ideology that has dominated legal discourse and lawmaking the last few decades. More specifics regarding participants, registration, readings and the conference agenda will be announced soon.
2009 Conference Materials
Below you can find downloadable papers and articles related to 2009 PLMS Conference. We will be supplementing these items several times before March 7.
Bernard E. Harcourt, Neoliberal Penality: The Birth of Natural Order, the Illusion of Free Markets, U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 238 (2008)
This Article represents the culmination of over two-years of historical research, but it arrives at an odd moment, right in the middle of one of the largest financial crises in Western capitalism. In one sense, it is bad timing because the central premise of the Article is that most people today believe that the market is the most efficient mechanism to allocate resources. The federal bailouts of 2008 challenge this central premise and are forcing the American people to reexamine the need for the regulation of the free market. In another sense, the timing is, sadly, perfect. Perfect because the purpose of this Article is to question the meaning of the phrase the need for the regulation of the free market and to suggest that it is precisely the belief in the duality of those two terms - regulation and free market - that is one of the greatest problems we face today. The terms, as well as their companion expressions, market efficiency, natural order, self-adjusting markets, etc., are misleading categories that fail to capture the individual distinctiveness of different forms of market organization. These categories are responsible, first, for facilitating our growing penal sphere, and, second, for naturalizing and thereby masking the redistributive consequences associated with different methods of organizing markets. This Article asks the question, what work do these categories of natural order and market efficiency do for us? The story begins very far in time and place, in the Parisian markets of the eighteenth century, with the establishment of the lieutenant generale de police du Chatelet de Paris and the police of bakers, grain merchants, and markets.
Bernard E. Harcourt, Post-Modern Meditations on Punishment: On the Limits of Reason and the Virtues of Randomization (A Polemic and Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century), 74 Social Res. 307 (2007)
Since the modern era, the discourse of punishment has cycled through three sets of questions. The first, born of the Enlightenment itself, asked: On what ground does the sovereign have the right to punish? Nietzsche most forcefully, but others as well, argued that the question itself begged its own answer. The right to punish, they suggested, is what defines sovereignty, and as such, can never serve to limit sovereign power. With the birth of the social sciences, this skepticism gave rise to a second set of questions: What then is the true function of punishment? What is it that we do when we punish? From Durkheim to the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault, twentieth century moderns explored social organization, economic production, political legitimacy, and the construction of the self—turning punishment practices upside down, dissecting not only their repressive functions but more importantly their role in constructing society and the contemporary subject. A series of further critiques—of meta-narratives, of functionalism, of scientific objectivity—softened this second line of inquiry and helped shape a third set of questions: What does punishment tell us about ourselves and our culture? What is the cultural meaning of our punishment practices? These three sets of questions set the contours of our modern discourse on crime and punishment. * * * What happens now—now that we have seen what lies around the cultural bend and realize that the same critiques apply with equal force to any interpretation of social meaning that we could possibly read into our contemporary punishment practices? This essay suggests that the form of the questions never really mattered. In all the modern texts, there always came this moment when the empirical facts ran out or the deductions of principle reached their limit—or both—and yet the reasoning continued. There was always this moment, ironically, when the moderns took a leap of faith—an ethical choice about how to resolve a gap, an ambiguity, an indeterminacy in an argument of principle or fact. This essay argues that it is time to abandon the misguided project of modernity—time to recognize the critical limits of reason, and whenever we reach them, to rely instead on randomization. Where our facts run out, where our principles no longer guide us, we should leave the decision-making to the coin toss, the roll of the dice, the lottery draw—in sum, to chance. This essay begins to explore what that would mean in the field of crime and punishment.
Barry Schwartz, The Creation and Destruction of Value, 45 American Psychologist 7 (1990)
Barry Schwartz, Psychology, Idea Technology, and Ideology, 2 Psychological Science 21 (1997)
Scienafic development leads to a technology of ideas—idea technology—no less than it leads to a technology of objects. But idea technology can have insidious effects that the technology of objects does not. First, ideas can suffuse through a culture before people notice they are there. And second, ideas can have profound effects even when they are false—when they are nothing more than ideology. These effects can arise because sometimes when people act on the basis of ideology, they inadvertently arrange the very conditions that bring reality into correspondence with the ideology This potential effect of ideology is discussed in connection with the behavioral psychology of Skinner and the claim by Hermstein and Murray that intelligence is, for all practical purposes, unmodifiable. I suggest that, in general, psychologists must be on the lookout for positive feedback loops between theory and practice that contribute to theory confirmation and thus mislead psychologists into interpreting historically and culturally contingent truths as universal ones.
Barry Schwartz, Why Altruism Is Impossible...And Ubiquitous, 67 Social Service Review 314 (1993)
Deeply held commitments to individualism, atomism, and egoism have moved psychology to underestimate the frequency and significance of altruism, and to seek explanations of examples of altruism that are based in the self-interested motives of the altruists. This article reviews evidence that altruism is pervasive, and discusses the conditions that promote its development in children and its display in adults. However, the article suggests that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the pervasiveness of altruism—that large-scale cultural influences that regulate social relations and contribute to establishing the boundaries between self and other can have profound effects on altruism. The contemporary United States, with its emphasis on market relations between free and autonomous individuals, exemplifies the cultural conditions least condusive to altruism.
Barry Schwartz, There Must Be an Alternative, 18 Psychological Inquiry 48 (2007)
Tom Tyler, Psychological Perspctives on Legitimacy and Legitimation (2006)
This review focuses on legitimacy: the belief that authorities, institutions, and social arrangements are appropriate, proper, and just. Because of legitimacy, people feel that they ought to defer to decisions and rules, following them voluntarily out of obligation rather than out of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward. Being legitimate is important to the success of authorities, institutions, and institutional arrangements, since it is difficult to exert influence over others based solely upon the possession and use of power. This article explains that being able to gain voluntary acquiescence from most people most of the time, due to their sense of obligation, increases effectiveness during periods of scarcity, crisis, and conflict. (Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 1-26.)
