Bernard Harcourt - "The Counterrevolution" - Tom Durkin and John J. Mearsheimer

"What does Pokémon Go have in common with CIA waterboarding, police abuses in Ferguson, Mo., NSA surveillance or President Trump’s proposed border wall? If you’re tempted to say, “Nothing,” consider reading Bernard Harcourt’s new book, “The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens.”––Rosa Brooks, professor at Georgetown University Law Center and the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

Bernard Harcourt will discuss The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens. He will be joined in conversation by John J. Mearsheimer and Tom Durkin. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

 At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About the book: Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States–one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans. Harcourt shows how counterinsurgency’s principles–bulk intelligence collection, ruthless targeting of minorities, pacifying propaganda–have taken hold domestically despite the absence of any radical uprising. This counterrevolution against phantom enemies, he argues, is the tyranny of our age. Seeing it clearly is the first step to resisting it effectively.

About the author: Bernard E. Harcourt is a contemporary critical theorist and social justice advocate. Intersecting contemporary critical, social, and political theory, Harcourt’s writings examine modes of governing in our punitive and surveillance society especially in the post 9/11 period and the digital age. He traces the birth of what he calls our “expository society” and recent turn to the paradigm of “counterinsurgency warfare” as a mode of governing. He is the author, recently, of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order, and Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience with Michael Taussig and W.J.T. Mitchell. Earlier books include Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy, and Illusion of Order: The False Promise Of Broken Windows Policing. Harcourt is also an editor of the works of Michel Foucault. He is currently the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.

About the interlocutors: John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Tom Durkin is a nationally known trial lawyer specializing in the defense of complex federal criminal matters, with a special emphasis on the defense of prosecutions involving national security and domestic terrorism related matters.