Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
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- Philosophy and Ideas x
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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Following on from The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand and A Realist Philosophy of Economics, this new book drawn from Karl Mittermaier’s writings examines the intricate relationship between economic theory and real-world economic experiences.
Despite the centrality of subjectivism in both philosophy and economics, these fields have often overlooked each other’s insights. Mittermaier challenges this disconnect, advocating for a shift from deterministic models to a more reflective approach in economics. He examines the historical, methodological and philosophical dimensions of economic theory, highlighting its struggle to connect economic theory to empirical data and individuals’ lived experiences.
Originally penned between 1979 and 1982 and now published posthumously, this work remains a crucial contribution to contemporary economic discussions.
Vulnerability theory offers an alternative to social-contract and rights-based paradigms. Beginning with the corporeal body, the theory argues we are inevitably and constantly dependent on social institutions that are generated (and ideally monitored) through law. Accordingly, vulnerability theory argues for a state attentive to the needs of the universally ‘vulnerable subject’.
Based on lectures at Trinity College Dublin that focused on four foundational concepts, this book highlights how vulnerability theory differs from individualistic liberal frameworks.
Calling for a reorientation of law toward a collective responsibility-based approach, it is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory, social justice, and sociolegal scholarship.
Following the highly respected first volume, this book continues to provide a holistic view of Julio Boltvinik’s vast and important work on poverty conceptualisation and measurement. While the previous book introduced the author’s widely adopted Integrated Poverty Measurement Method (IPMM), this new volume outlines his Marxian approach to poverty and human flourishing, focusing on what he conceptualises as human poverty.
Bringing together 20 years of research, this interdisciplinary book provides an alternative to Sen’s Capability approach and details its internal consistency, solid foundations and promising perspectives for applicability.
This book traces the origins of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the broader context of universalism since the beginning of the 20th century.
UHC aims to improve access to essential health services, provide financial protection and overcome health care inequities.
Drawing on rich first-hand data, including expert interviews and archival research, this book adopts a historical-sociological methodology to analyse some of UHC’s key political dynamics: consensus, conflicts, negotiations and struggles. It reveals that UHC is the result of a unique conjoining of movements in health, debates on human rights and concerns with development in a particular world context across the global North and global South.
How can we have meaningful public conversations in the algorithmic age?
This book explores how digital technologies shape our opinions and interactions, often in ways that limit our exposure to diverse perspectives and fuel polarization. Drawing on the ancient art of arguing all sides of a case, the book offers a way to revive public debate as a source of trust and legitimacy in democratic societies.
This is a timely and urgent book for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in the digital era.
Love is fundamental to the flourishing of society and nature. However, the competition of the market economy has resulted in a fractured and traumatised modern world.
Revisiting philosophical developments and countercultures since the Enlightenment, this book offers a ‘loving critique’. It shows how learning to love better is the key to releasing ourselves from the alienating grip of the market.
The utopian template presented draws on archaeology, the witch trials, hippies, Hinduism, Buddhism, quantum mechanics, and psychedelics to describe how we can build a more loving society that can survive and flourish through the ecological, ethical, economic, and existential crises that we all now face.
The COVID-19 pandemic thrust fear into the heart of political debate and policy making. In the wake of the pandemic, it is critical to clarify the role of fear in these processes to avoid repeating past mistakes and to learn crucial lessons for future crises.
This book draws on case studies from across the world, including the UK, Turkey, Brazil and the US, to provide thought-provoking and practical insights into how fear and related emotions can shape politics under extraordinary and ordinary circumstances. Offering interdisciplinary perspectives from leading and emerging scholars in politics, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, the book enables a better understanding of post-pandemic politics for students, researchers and policy makers alike.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence
Transhumanism is a philosophy which advocates for the use of technology to radically enhance human capacities.
This book interrogates the promises of transhumanism, arguing that it is deeply entwined with capitalist ideology. In an era of escalating crisis and soaring inequality, it casts doubt on a utopian techno-capitalist narrative of unending progress. In critiquing the transhumanist project, the book offers an alternative ethical framework for the future of life on the planet.
As the debates around the advancement of AI and corporate-led digital technologies intensify, this is an important read for academics as well as policy makers.
A realistic economics may take as some of its empirical content the institutions of an economy. In neo-classical economics, in contradistinction, it is the choices of individuals that constitute the empirical content of theory. Institutions and choices, however, belong to two different orders of fact, according to the conceptual framework developed in this book. Choices belong to the ex post order of facts, and institutions belong to the ex ante order of facts. The former are mere records of past events, whereas the latter have to do with structure and causation. Economic theory presents preferences as if they were in the nature of ex ante facts, giving rise to choices, but in the absence of observing preferences, it infers them from the choices. Accordingly, the empirical content of economics are in the nature of ex post facts. Preferences are ex ante facts to the operating individual, but to the observing theorist, they are in the domain of ex post facts. This book shows how a confusion between ex post and ex ante facts has manifested itself in micro-economics.
Bringing together eminent International Relations (IR) scholars from China and the West, this book examines moral realism from a range of different perspectives. Through its analyses, it verifies the robustness of moral realism in IR theory.
The first section of the book is written by Chinese scholars and dedicated to debates about how moral realism relates to traditional schools of IR theory. The latter portion, provided by Western contributors, critically investigates both the universal and practical values of moral realism. Finally, Yan Xuetong concludes by responding constructively to all criticisms and further exploring the nature and characteristics of interstate leadership in moral realism.
