Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1,500 titles.
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
Love can not only be found to underlie commercial transactions but also be seen in other aspects of our culture that eschew the market. Pre-Enlightenment religious festivals such as Eid, Holi and Christmas, as well as more recent cultural festivals like Glastonbury and the free parties of the 1990s that were, respectively, colonized by the market and crushed by police violence, are based around both transcendental experience and gifts. Modern families, for all their corruption by the market, are also based on Love and care for one another. As was the cultural revolution of the 1960s, religious movements throughout the ages and the more recent political phenomena that are explored in this chapter. Humanity has always practised these alternative political arrangements through festivals and eccentric cultural activities. These have often formed the basis for a revolutionary reorganization of our politics. By shifting our focus from the market to other ways of relating to one another, we can see that we are surrounded by possibilities to Love.
Manifesting Love in a society set against Love is hard. Therefore, while we need to be able to do this work, we also need to rest. To this end, we glide up and away like the birds that we meet in this chapter, before returning for the next courageous act of Love. This starts by recognizing and loving ourselves, and this is a realization that involves falling in Love with the whole universe. When we achieve this most fundamental revolutionary act, we can all, the universe included, flourish.
The 1700s were a time of huge transition in British society, and many alternative ways of living had been crushed by the time that the market emerged as the driving force of society. First, Ben Wheatley’s film A Field in England is used an as entry into unfamiliar world views, magic and the English Civil War. What was lost has often been portrayed as a time of witches and magic – including by Adam Smith. By paying attention to the relics of this time in our language and myths, we can reconstruct part of what was lost. This reveals a pre-Enlightenment society organized around views and practices that are being rekindled today. While the proponents of these alternative ways of living were burned at the stake throughout Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, they had to be engaged with by Jesuit missionaries attempting to convert indigenous Americans in the 1700s. It is argued that it was this engagement that sparked the European Enlightenment, with Enlightenment ideas on liberty and equality having been stolen from these indigenous cultures so that Europeans could maintain a sense of superiority over the people they colonized and destroyed.
While history can give us a sense of the progression of time, theoretical physics tells us that time is not as linear as we perceive it to be. Rather, we might see time as an infinite number of ‘time cones’ that converge on different points of space-time in a dispersed and granular universe. This takes the cause of our alienation beyond the Enlightenment, the capitalist economy that it imposed on us and culture more generally and into the very fabric of the universe. However, Henri Bergson theorized that it is only through time and memory that we can be; Heidegger supported this with the idea that we are only able to be (Dasein) in the context of our own temporality and historicality. For Bergson, it is memory that places us in time and gives us both consciousness and free will. The consciousness and free will that emerged in the US and Western European counterculture of the 1960s are shown to have come from both psychedelics and from strong labour representation, which delivered the time and resources to be without the time-hungry angst that has become the hallmark of now.
The importance of Love is explored, alongside how difficult it is to define what we speak of when we speak of Love. How the Enlightenment interacts with our ability to Love is discussed to establish that the competing interests of Love and the market must be explored if we are to live flourishing lives in a flourishing universe.
References to ‘the market’ in Parliament throughout the 1700s show that the emergence of the market economy was accompanied by a huge expansion of the British military and other modes of oppression at home and abroad. This bears more than a passing resemblance to the expansion of the military and carceral state that has accompanied the spread of neoliberalism since the 1970s. This would suggest that the recent losses of working-class rights, money and bargaining power may not just stem from the neoliberalism of Hayek, Thatcher, Reagan and the political contestation of the 1970s, as is often claimed. Rather, neoliberalism represents a continuation of a project to consolidate power in a shrinking elite that stretches back at least three centuries. The emergence of a market economy that has come to dominate all spheres of life is shown to be distinctly dystopian in the context of Love. Austerity and the current trend in the media and by the political classes to support further losses of rights through their demonization or ‘monstering’ of the poor and disenfranchised are the current nadir of this dystopian trend.
Erich Fromm explores our misguided conception of Love as something that happens to us but, rather, argues that Love is something that we do. Like other arts, Love requires proper theory and ongoing practice, and must be our ultimate concern if we are to master it. This could not be more important than at a time when capitalism has reframed vices like greed and selfishness as virtues and imposed transactions on such areas as family and sex, where Love should be allowed to flourish. Alongside Fromm, other great thinkers like Bhaskar, Fisher and O’Neill suggest that Love is the antithesis of the market, and that it might form the basis of Watson’s ‘incendiary subcultural movement that rips up the political and cultural canons that led us to the impasse we’re at’.
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.
As the market has inveigled its way into all facets of modern life, Love has been corrupted to become largely transactional. In the context of recent interpretations of Vedic and Buddhist ways of thinking that have been embraced by some modern philosophers, this can be seen as a shift from Dharmic to Karmic Love. This transactional form of Love is based on attachment to earthly things and is associated with materiality and birth and death. The modern imposition of market economics onto all facets of life stems from a lack of recognition and Love for the world. We learn that without trauma, the hoarding and restriction of goods and services would be inconceivable. Without trauma, there could be no market economy. While Karma describes the world of duality that we inhabit day to day and Dharma describes the Love (noun) that is the foundation of everything, Janana describes the active process of bringing ourselves into alignment with the universe to become Love. We learn that through Janana we can heal ourselves and learn to overcome the global ecological, ethical, economic and existential crises that the world now faces.
Peaceful and egalitarian prehistoric societies have been overlooked in humanity’s grand narrative to the present. This has left us with a flawed and Darwinian picture of humanity as ‘red in tooth and claw’, which was promoted by Rousseau and Hobbes, was the foundation of Adam Smith’s self-satisfied nationalistic jingoism for the present, and continues to be expounded by Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Yuval Hariri, Jordon Peterson and Stephen Pinker. As such, the teleological argument that all history has led up to what is currently assumed to be the peak of civilization should be abandoned. Doing so enables us to question how we arrived at our current social and political structures and the climatic, environmental, nuclear and other existential crises that we now face and that are supported by an increasingly dystopian education system. Understanding how we got here enables us to ask how we might learn from the past to live better, loving and more sustainable lives.
