Why is Life Worth Saving? Neoliberalism, COVID-19, and Boris Johnson’s Public Statements

We apply Brown’s Foucauldian framework on neoliberalism to the COVID-19 crisis in the UK, and use qualitative content analysis to interpret the moral logics within 32 of Boris Johnson’s public statements on COVID-19. We present the content analysis in six parts. For the first four parts, we apply four elements of Brown’s framework: economization, governance, responsibilization, and sacrifice. Next, we explain two other moral logics—utilitarian and sympathetic. Johnson’s condensation of logics contains ideological connotations: neoliberal rationality serves the mass of people and the purpose of sympathy. Within Brown’s conceptual framework, the problem is not just the domination of the market, but the logic that grants the market legitimation as a human-centered logic. The adjustment we suggest is in recognizing the human-centered aspect as not a veneer for neoliberalism, but rather as a collection of disparate moral logics, combined with them smoothly on the surface, but messily underneath.