2025.04.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Bernard Harcourt, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory, Columbia University Press, 2024, 312pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780231209540.
Reviewed by Albert W. Dzur, Bowling Green State University
Cooperation is a big-hearted, finely researched work of criticism and reconstruction. Bernard Harcourt’s critical diagnosis of contemporary politics is dire: the increasingly polarized stalemate between right and left, the heavy influence of the donor class on public policy, all prop up corporate profit maximization. Far from a free market, what is evident is a kind of dirigisme in which the state incentivizes capital investment by the tax code and protects financial risk-taking through bailouts. Quasi-autocratic populist politicians mobilize and harness citizen frustrations with the status quo, but they only entrench the power of wealthy backers, prompt democratic backsliding, and increase economic precarity. Social order is maintained through regimes of punishment borne predominantly by the economically and racially marginalized who fill the prisons. All the while,…
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