Transcript of the Second Session can be freely downloaded here: ssrn.com/abstract=2321912
[Note: There is a 40 second time delay (while the audio is running properly) before the video kicks in! Please be patient!]

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.

The relevant texts can…