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 1400 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.
The ultimate victory of Emmanuel Macron in 2022 repeated the 2017 result, albeit with important differences. The first difference was a shift of Macron’s electorate to the right. Whereas Macron could still garner support from sections of the left in 2017, this support had virtually evaporated in 2022. It confirmed electorally what had already been true ideologically: Macron was now firmly the candidate of the right, crushing the old electoral right in 2022 as he had crushed the electoral left in 2017. The bourgeois bloc, now independent electorally, has largely rallied behind Macron and his values of security, merit and hope. The second difference was the antipathy of the left towards Macron. Even in the second round of the elections, more left-leaning voters shied away from giving Macron their support, recognizing that the next five years under Macron will be a continuation of the neoliberal reforms already enacted since 2017. Between the globalist neoliberal policies of Macron and the neoliberal nationalist policies of Le Pen, the choice for the left was unappealing, to say the least. A new left is possible, and a sketch of what it can do is provided here.
The dichotomy of political affects into hope and fear plays directly to the liberal dream put together by Macron. His is the party of hope, the party of an open society, pro-European, globalist, based on free markets and rewarding merit. It is portrayed as the answer to the fear-driven, nationalist, Eurosceptic ideology of the far right that is driven by cronyism, nepotism and corruption. This hope/fear dichotomy obfuscates the interplay between those two emotions, that there is no hope without fear or fear without hope, and that basing a political programme on hope has the potential for dramatic disillusionment in the case where those hopes are shattered by the unfolding of events. By introducing the concept of hope as an affect, as an emotion which drives action, and its relation to fear, the first part of this chapter will show that understanding Spinoza and Nietzsche on the concept will go a long way to highlight some of its pitfalls. We will then see how hope was deployed by Macron to achieve his political aims.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité is the motto of the French Republic. From revolutionary times to today, liberty, equality and fraternity have resonated as core values for all types of republicans, from left to right, and act as a profession of faith highlighting common values, aspirations and beliefs. The three values have survived changes in political régimes, the erosion of the centuries, wars, counter-revolutions and civil strife. Macron has continued the republican tradition and sought to live up to its ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Yet one cannot help but notice at the very least a slight rebranding, or, for Macron’s critics, a thorough overhaul of those republican ideals. Liberty has made way for a strengthening of the state in its sovereign functions: those of maintaining order and projecting power with a rise in the notion of security. Equality has been defended according to one particular definition, one that promotes merit above all other types of equality. Fraternity has given way to hope, with a vision for a future prosperous France built around the figure of the entrepreneur.
When Emmanuel Macron was elected President of the French Republic, it ended the long-standing political alternation between the mainstream right and left-wing parties. This book examines Macron’s political career from his rise as a public figure to his time as a president.
The book explores Macron’s political ideology and examines the enactment of the key notions of security, merit and hope during his time in office. By offering a close study of his actions and ideological commitment, this book argues that, despite claims of being ideologically neutral, Macron actually represents a new form of right-wing politics in France.
Macron is fond of equality. It is a feature of his programme, put together in his autobiographical work Révolution. It is the value that underpins his pragmatism and his desire for social justice. Yet it is a very specific type of equality that Macron defends, an equality in the face of luck, an equality against discrimination, and an equality of opportunity. This type of equality is better described as merit – the desert and worth of a particular individual independently of circumstances around them. I will show that Macron’s liberal-libertarian compromise is the blending of two types of liberalism found in Rawls and Nozick. I then move on to show that it is in the philosophy of Dworkin that this attitude towards equality comes together in a form of ‘luck egalitarianism’, which is the culmination of Macron’s thought on equality. This lays open the question of the vision of the individual developed by Macron, and its roots in a very specific, responsibility-driven conception of the person with specific theological roots found in Weber’s seminal work on the Protestant ethic and the concepts of grace and the calling.
The first task of the Macron régime was to institute a new diet for France. Grown too fat, it was time to start thinning the social body and get back in shape for the global economy. This will be the first focus of this chapter on the new régime: to look at the analogy of the diet to understand what Macron’s régime is about. The analogy will lead us to strengthen the claim that Macron’s revolution was not a centrist revolution, beyond left and right, but rather a continuation of right-wing policies under a new banner. The right has a long trajectory of catching up with its revolutionary adversary, and the three historical rights in France (the Restauration, July Monarchy, and Bonapartist rights) had revolutionary elements to them as well. Macron’s revolution differs from these three; it is a version of neoliberalism that emerges in Macron’s ideology that sets it apart. Although neoliberalism is not in itself new in France, it is a new, self-assertive and radical version of neoliberalism that is proposed by Macron. It aims at the restructuring of the state and differs from classical versions of the liberal project precisely because of this acceptance of state power.
The need for security is an essential component of Macron’s ideological thought, so much so that it has surpassed the need for freedom that liberalism is renowned for being founded on. In order to provide security, neoliberalism has fully embraced the power of the state to create markets and economic structures that liberalism once thought to be natural. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the rise of security as a core value of society. By analyzing the thought of Michel Foucault, who was writing on security in the late 1970s precisely as the neoliberal state was becoming a reality, we will see that this new value is articulated in the form of new technologies for the management of populations. By focusing on the town, economics, and health policy, we see three distinct areas where this state has established itself as the primary provider of techniques to deal with problems of the industrial and post-industrial eras. Instead of a continued focus on security, as articulated under Macron, I show that a focus on safety (sûreté), conceptualized as both safety and certainty, is possible and desirable.
This worldwide crisis initiated frantic comparison (and competition) between nations to search for a response to the coronavirus. Sweden has been more than ever in the spotlight, under media and popular scrutiny. The daily briefings of Anders Tegnell and his sidekicks were followed by journalists and experts around the world. Initially there were more favourable opinions about a strategy that avoided lockdown and mitigated the effects on the economy, but it became increasingly controversial as the mortality rate rose. This chapter reflects on the comparison of policies, statistics, infection rates, death counts and the moral and normative dimensions that surrounded the justification of each nation’s ‘strategy’, along with forms of ‘health care nationalism’ that emerged in many countries, and markedly in Sweden. Indeed, the high and stable legitimacy of the Public Health Agency, []FHM, and its main experts has been striking and in sharp contrast with the situation in other European countries w[h]ere experts and politicians alike have faced sharp criticism. I show that this is coherent with traditional forms of trust in science, expertise and public institutions in this society but that it also hides a tendency to avoid divisions and conflicts
This chapter reviews the initial phases of the Swedish response to the epidemic emergency. The ‘slow’ and ‘delayed’ response Sweden was criticized for is accounted for in all its complexity. It is important to try to explain why Sweden deviated so much from the rest of Europe, in comparison with its direct neighbours, but also by contrast to its own history of handling epidemic crises. This response met with a lot of astonishment, especially in light of the fact that Sweden has one of the lowest hospital bed capacity in the OECD and could have been expected to react very differently. While the role of FHM, the Public Health Agency, and of its chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, corresponded to a traditional form of administrative independence and heeding of expertise, it went much further than what is generally expected, and other factors must be taken into account to make sense of their unprecedented influence. The lack of certain legal instruments is also important in this regard. The most controversial debate around ‘herd immunity’ and whether Sweden strived to achieve and even more or less openly promoted are some of the issues discussed in this chapter.
