This book seeks to better understand the meaning and implications of the UKs calamitous encounter with the COVID-19 global pandemic for the future of British neoliberalism.

Construing COVID-19 as apolitical pandemic and mobilising a novelapplied political philosophy approach, the authors cultivate fresh intellectual resources, both analytical and normative, to better understand why the UK failed the COVID-19 test and how it might fail forward so as to strengthen its resilience.

COVID-19 they argue, has intercepted the UK governments decades-long experimentation with neoliberalism at what appears to be a threshold moment in this models life course. Neoliberalism has served as a key progenitor of the countrys vulnerability: the pandemic has cruelly unveiled the failings of neoliberal logics and legacies which have placed the country at elevated risk and hampered its response. The pandemic in turn has attenuated underlying systemic maladies inherent in British neoliberalism and served as a great disruptor and potential accelerant of history; a consequential episode in the tumultuous life of this politico-economic model. 

To meaningfully build back better, a true renaissance of social democracy is needed. Drawing upon the neorepublican tradition of political philosophy, the authors confront neoliberalisms hegemonic but parochial concept of human freedom as non-interference and place the neorepublican idea of freedom asnon-domination in the service of building a new UK social contract.

This book will be of interest to political philosophers, political geographers, medical sociologists, public-health scholars, and epidemiologists, to stakeholders engaged in the public inquiry processes now gathering momentum globally and to architects of build back better programmes, especially in western advanced capitalist economies.

Mark Boyle is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University in Ireland.

James Hicksonis Research Associate at the University of Liverpools Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place.

Katalin Ujhelyi Gomez is Research Associate at the Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast (ARC NWC) in the Department of Primary Care and Mental Health at the University of Liverpool.

Chapter 1: In what sense a political pandemic?.- Chapter 2: A brief introduction to the odyssey of (British) neoliberalism.- Chapter 3: Chastened: The UKs encounter with COVID-19 in global context.- Chapter 4: Neoliberalism, freedom and the UKs response to COVID-19.- Chapter 5: The reluctant neoliberal state: Reticent and hesitant?.- Chapter 6: Me, Myself and I? The neoliberal citizen.- Chapter 7: An unequal pandemic: neoliberalism and variegated vulnerability.- Chapter 8: Reclaiming freedom: placing republican thought in the service of build back better.