The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order

(Harvard University Press) The author traces the birth of the idea of natural orderliness to 18th-century economic thought and its gradual evolution into today’s myth of the free market, and explores how it has produced the largest government-run penal sphere on the globe. Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Paw in print

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An inside look up the inside of a building, with four floors and a dinosaur skeleton visible.
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April 2026

Inside the new ES and SEAS complex; kudos for austerity; jazz at Princeton.