What Happened to Occupy?

The Financial Times has a well-done roundup review of several books about the Occupy Wall Street movement, mostly by people involved in it. The short version: "A sympathetic reader of these books will end up with the slightly exasperated feeling that Occupy wasted its chance as a political movement." A couple of observations:

1) Past Prawfs guest Bernard Harcourt of Chicago appears in the review, with a quote from his essay in one of these collections. This is just a guess, but when the dean at the University of Chicago Law School sent a memo to the faculty urging them to assist the efforts of its students and recent graduates to occupy Wall Street, I doubt this is what he had in mind.

2) I love this quote from Michael Taussig, a Columbia anthropology prof who also wrote an essay for a collection. As the review puts it, "Taussig hails the coming together [in Zucotti Park] of a 'community defining itself through a new language and sense of collective': this, he reflects, is a problem for politicians and experts who 'want to channel the messianic and transgressive  impulse into their own need for pathological fame and power'." The use of "pathologicial" is especially nice here; why let people think for themsevles when you can just insert a pseudo-diagnostic adjective? But I would have thought that politicians and experts who wanted to pursue fame and power would have been delighted by the Occupy movement.

3) There are probably lessons in here for the popular front of the law school reform movement.