My Leverhulme-funded project develops a political, practice-first approach to human need. Where much philosophical work begins by defining a set of basic or fundamental needs, I treat needs instead as social and political claims. Reconstructing needs-claims as performative interventions rather than descriptive statements, the project thus moves the focus from what needs themselves are, to what different needs-claims do: the responses they prompt, the kinds of actions they authorise and deauthorise, the distributive decisions they justify, and the exclusions and harms they enact. Drawing on needs theory, the philosophy of language, and the lived experience of poverty, the project will thus explore who gets empowered to make the needs-claims that count, how they become so empowered, who – by contrast – gets disempowered and silenced, and how this shapes what ultimately comes to be regarded as ‘a need’. 

In this project – which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and culminated in my 2026 book – I challenged one of the most pervasive habits in contemporary political theory and practice: treating needs as moral facts that sit outside of our politics, and which can be used to judge it. Against that depoliticising impulse, the project developed a provocative re-reading of Marx’s writings on need, interpreting them not as didactic statements of an abstract philosophy but as subversive interventions and provocations inseparable from his radical political activism. On that basis, I presented a distinctive Marxian framework that recast needs as constitutively political, exposing the conflicts, stakes, and possibilities that shape how they are defined, contested, and met. The project thus aimed to reopen assumptions about need that have become ossified and closed down in contemporary political and social thought, thereby fashioning new opportunities for radical political agency and portending new social possibilities.

This project begins from a familiar feature of the discipline: the apparent distance between political philosophy and everyday politics. Reading that gap as both a problem and a provocation, the project aims to shift attention away from institutional or instrumental justifications of public political philosophy centred on impact and engagement, and towards an intrinsic one: because political life is saturated with disputes over values, justification, and critique, philosophical reasoning is, I argue, always already part of political practice. To explore the nature, aims, and methods of public political philosophising, the main project output – a guest-edited special issue for Public Humanities – critically surveys the diverse ways contemporary political philosophers are attempting to close the theory/practice gap: from policy advising and committee work, to participation in public debate, collaboration with citizens, and experimental forms of engagement that reshape philosophical methods themselves.