This book is about health, society and politics. Not so much how socioeconomic and political forces generate health – on which much is already written – but how health illuminates the political and policy choices we make, the values on which we make them, and the kinds of society we get as a result.

Health is arguably the preeminent human good – the condition to which above all others we aspire and on which all our other aspirations depend. In each society – and between countries globally – health reflects back at us in irrefutably objective detail the physical effects of our social and economic principles – the societies they shape embodied, quite literally, for good or ill. My aim, in writing this book, is to present health as a kind of yardstick against which to assess the credibility of the values of the liberal democratic project as they are offered to us today; not to offer glib solutions to wicked problems, but to ask better questions – to use the measure of human health to see where those values are working and, where not, how they might be reimagined.

We are living in turbulent times. A grand convergence of interlinking crises from climate change at the cliff-edge of catastrophic irreversibility and cumulating dysfunction in the global economic system, to tectonic changes in the distribution of geopolitical power and the unravelling of international norms and laws. From splintering party politics and deepening disaffection with democratic process to the performative theatrics of Trump and Brexit and a global landscape of disintegrating state legitimacy, the last decade has witnessed a spiralling failure of faith in the modern liberal institutions and values by which societies have sought to structure themselves over the last 70 years – values of growth and prosperity, of freedom and justice, of democracy and security, and truth.

It is a decade filled with the echoes of the great crash of 2008, reflected back at us through a disorienting mosaic of fractious, antagonistic and increasingly extreme politics (see, for example, Beckett, 2019). But the roots of the crisis go deeper – more than half a century in the making, in the ascendance of a hyper-individualist economic model and the social consequences of economic globalisation, the resurgent power of capital and the slow-motion collapse of societal mechanisms mediating between rich and poor, citizen and state.