Acclaimed social scientist Professor Peter Taylor-Gooby OBE has published his second novel, focussing on some of today’s most pressing social issues.
Entitled Ardent Justice, the novel highlights homelessness, social exclusion and tax fraud in a City of London setting, utilising some of the themes of his research at the University’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research.
In the novel, Professor Taylor-Gooby argues that it is emotions that are most important in determining how individuals behave.
He suggests that social scientists are good at analysing people ‘in the aggregate’, looking at classes, ethnic, social and political groups and so on and describing where they are now.
However, he contends that academic research has got major issues wrong – like the Brexit vote and the banking panic that sparked the 2007 recession – because it is ‘not so good at taking feelings into account’.
Professor Taylor-Gooby’s first novel, The Baby Auction, published in 2016, was the result, he says, of frustration that his academic output ‘has made no difference to anything’. A story on his reasons for writing the novel appeared in the Times Higher, the magazine for academics, resulting in it becoming the most-viewed item that week.
Ardent Justice is published by Troubador.