Lawprof James Q. Whitman is one of my favorite legal writers. Writing style is a matter of taste, but I find his style wonderfully engaging. Whitman’s new book review of former VC guest-blogger Bernard Harcourt’s latest book is a good example. I can’t comment on whether Whitman’s characterizations of Harcourt’s book are accurate. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know. But I find Whitman’s writing delightful. Here’s a taste:
Harcourt[‘s] book is an exercise in discourse analysis of the kind associated with Michel Foucault.
Now here I should rush to reassure those who might be unduly put off by the phrase “discourse analysis.” Too many of us have learned to associate “discourse analysis” with the portentous and jargon-ridden writings of second-rate literature scholars and specialists in cultural analysis — with the writings of what a recent critic sneeringly calls “Foucaultphiles.” I do not by any means think that Harcourt has avoided all of the pitfalls in doing Foucauldian discourse analysis, but it should be said immediately that he has not written that sort of Foucaultphile book. The Illusion of Free Markets is a serious, able, and mostly jargon-free piece of scholarship.
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Of course, there are some obvious intellectual risks in analyzing the world in this Foucauldian way. It is no easy trick to write like Foucault without slipping into the language of a kind of New Left libertarianism — of Tea Party–like cries of alarm at the creeping progress of government-as-bodysnatcher. So once again, it should be said immediately that Harcourt’s book is much better than that. In mounting his version of a “discipline” argument, Harcourt displays an exceptional range of scholarly abilities. He chews carefully over methodological issues. He takes a nuanced and skeptical view of many of Foucault’s claims. He makes important and interesting discoveries in intellectual history and even ventures into the eighteenth-century Paris archives, something few scholars without professional historical training dare to do. It goes without saying that he gives able accounts of contemporary American legal argument. He also makes pointed and sardonic observations about the regulation of the Chicago Board of Trade. There are not many scholars of any school who can range so widely.
. . .
All of this adds up to a study with many fine and perceptive observations — a book that is a pleasure to read. Nevertheless, I fear that more about this enjoyable book is wrong than is right. The shortcomings of the book have partly to do with its claims about the birth of the discourse of liberty, which are argued in ways that seem uncomfortably sloppy by the standards of professional intellectual history; but they also have to do, more deeply, with fundamental weaknesses in Foucauldian historiography and Foucauldian social science.This is, to say it once more, not the sort of academic book that gives Foucaultphilia its bad name, but it remains the case that there is simply too much Foucault in this book, and too little effort to justify all the Foucault.
UPDATE: Professor Harcourt replies to Professor Whitman’s response here. A taste:
Whitman had already revealed an aversion to Foucault’s work on the third page of his last book, back in 2003, where he wrote that Foucault’s approach “must be rejected out of hand.” In his book review of The Illusion of Free Markets, Whitman goes further, mocking “Foucaultphilia” and “Foucaultphiles,” deriding “the portentous and jargon-ridden writings of second-rate literature scholars and specialists in cultural analysis,” and poking fun at “the writings of what a recent critic sneeringly calls ‘Foucaultphiles.’” Whitman writes derisively of the “fundamental weaknesses in Foucauldian historiography and Foucauldian social science” and ridicules that “sort of Foucaultphile book.” Though he absolves me of those sins, in his apparent anger, Whitman misdirects his fire at me, seeing the specter of Foucault lurking in every shadow. But we should not let that distract us. The Illusion of Free Markets specifically seeks to go beyond the categories of both the free market and regulation— of both natural order and discipline.