Power and Freedom

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Biography

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, where he is faculty director of the Program on Law and Political Economy and a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Since the 1990s, he has written about the political economy of digital technologies, focusing on how struggles over commodification or decommodification of access to the basic resources necessary for information, knowledge, and cultural production are a central determinant of freedom in twenty-first century society. His current work focuses on the institutional political economy of capitalism, combining historical and theoretical work to explain the dynamics that drive waves of innovation and productivity growth, social struggle, dislocation, and crisis in market societies. His books include The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press 2006), which won academic awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the McGannon award for social and ethical relevance in communications; Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford University Press 2018), which in 2026 was recognized by the American Political Science Association as the best book on political communication in the last ten years, and a co-edited volume, A Political Economy of Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2022 (with D. Allen, R. Henderson, L. Downey, and J. Simons)). His forthcoming book is entitled The Global Origins of Capitalism: Power, Productivity, and the Evolution of Modern Market Societies (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2027)