Prof. Bernard Harcourt has been elected to a chair at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and will become a permanent visitor at the research institution. Harcourt, who is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science, will keep his primary appointment at UChicago and visit EHESS annually as a “directeur d’études.” The name of his chair is “Political Theory of Juridical Practices,” or, in French, "Théorie Politique des Pratiques Juridiques."
EHESS is the leading social science institution in Europe, and claims a long history of prominent scholars, among them Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Aron, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Harcourt won’t be the only jurist at EHESS; in Europe, law is often woven into the social sciences and it forms part of the EHESS.
With Harcourt’s appointment, the Law School joins other University divisions with a relationship to EHESS. The late François Furet, historian of the French revolution, was an EHESS professor who held the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in Social Thought at the University of Chicago. French philosopher Vincent Descombes is a professor at EHESS and a visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at UChicago.
Emailing from Paris last week, Harcourt said he was thrilled about the opportunity.
“I am truly delighted and honored by this, and feel that it will complement well and contribute greatly to the range of intellectual projects and research that I am pursuing.”
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
