Ben Jackson
University of Oxford, History, Faculty Member
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Conservative Party, Political Theory, Labour Party (UK), Political Economy, Scottish History, Modern British History, and 25 moreHistory of Political Thought, History of Social Policy and the Welfare State, Labour history, Political History, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy, British Politics, Intellectual History, British History, Welfare State, Social Policy, History of Economic Thought, Scotland, Equality, Social Justice, Hayek, Thatcherism, Scottish Politics, Ideology, Distributive Justice, Socialisms, Politics of Devolution in the UK, Conservatism, Keynesian Economics, and History Of Political Thought (Political Science) edit
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My research focuses on the role of ideas in political and policy debates in the twentieth century, chiefly in the UK ... moreMy research focuses on the role of ideas in political and policy debates in the twentieth century, chiefly in the UK but I have also written about the United States and continental Europe. I have worked on three main projects. First, the political thought of socialism and liberalism in Britain across the twentieth century, especially my first book, Equality and the British Left (2007), which investigated the debates about economic inequality that lay behind the rise of the welfare state. Second, the political and economic ideas of the neo-liberal right from the mid-twentieth century onwards. I am interested in both the transnational networks that generated neo-liberal theory and the emergence of Thatcherism in the UK. With Robert Saunders, I co-edited Making Thatcher’s Britain (2012), which was an early attempt to historicise the Thatcher government. I have also co-edited (with Aled Davies and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite) The Neo-Liberal Age? Britain Since the 1970s, out later in 2021, which debates how useful the concept of ‘neo-liberalism’ is for understanding recent British history. Third, I have worked on Scottish history, focusing on the history and politics of Scottish nationalism. This led to my second book, The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Political Thought in Modern Scotland (2020), which traces the evolution of Scottish nationalist ideology from the interwar period to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence.
I am the Co-Editor of Political Quarterly. edit
Scottish nationalism is a powerful movement in contemporary politics, yet the goal of Scottish independence emerged surprisingly recently into public debate. The origins of Scottish nationalism lie not in the medieval battles for Scottish... more
Scottish nationalism is a powerful movement in contemporary politics, yet the goal of Scottish independence emerged surprisingly recently into public debate. The origins of Scottish nationalism lie not in the medieval battles for Scottish statehood, the Acts of Union, the Scottish Enlightenment, or any other traditional historical milestone. Instead, an influential separatist Scottish nationalism began to take shape only in the 1970s and achieved its present ideological maturity in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The nationalism that emerged from this testing period of Scottish history was unusual in that it demanded independence not to defend a threatened ancestral culture but as the most effective way to promote the agenda of the left. This accessible and engaging account of the political thought of Scottish nationalism explores how the arguments for Scottish independence were crafted over some fifty years by intellectuals, politicians and activists, and why these ideas had such a seismic impact on Scottish and British politics in the 2014 independence referendum.
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The demand for equality has been at the heart of the politics of the Left in the twentieth century, but what did theorists and politicians on the British Left mean when they said they were committed to ‘equality’? How did they argue for a... more
The demand for equality has been at the heart of the politics of the Left in the twentieth century, but what did theorists and politicians on the British Left mean when they said they were committed to ‘equality’? How did they argue for a more egalitarian society? Which policies did they think could best advance their egalitarian ideals? Equality and the British Left provides the first comprehensive answers to these questions. It charts debates about equality from the progressive liberalism and socialism of the early twentieth century to the arrival of the New Left and revisionist social democracy in the 1950s. Along the way, it examines and reassesses the egalitarian political thought of many significant figures in the history of the British Left, including L. T. Hobhouse, R. H. Tawney and Anthony Crosland.
Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her governments inspired hatred and veneration in equal measure and her legacy remains fiercely contested. Yet assessments of the Thatcher era are often divorced... more
Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her governments inspired hatred and veneration in equal measure and her legacy remains fiercely contested. Yet assessments of the Thatcher era are often divorced from any larger historical perspective. This book draws together leading historians to locate Thatcher and Thatcherism within the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain. It explores the social and economic crises of the 1970s; Britain's relationships with Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States; and the different experiences of Thatcherism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The book assesses the impact of the Thatcher era on class and gender and situates Thatcherism within the Cold War, the end of Empire and the rise of an Anglo-American 'New Right'. Drawing on the latest available sources, it opens a wide-ranging debate about the Thatcher era and its place in modern British history.
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Liberalism is the dominant ideology of our time, yet its character remains the subject of intense scholarly and political controversy. Debates about the liberal political tradition - about its history, its central philosophical... more
Liberalism is the dominant ideology of our time, yet its character remains the subject of intense scholarly and political controversy. Debates about the liberal political tradition - about its history, its central philosophical commitments, its implications for political practice - lie at the very heart of the discipline of political theory. Many outstanding political theorists have contributed to the growing sophistication of these debates in recent years, but the original voice of Michael Freeden deserves particular attention. In the course of a body of work that spans over thirty years, Freeden's iconoclastic contributions have posed important challenges to the dominant understandings of liberal ideology, history, and theory. Such work has sought to redefine the very essence of what it is to be a liberal. This book brings together an international group of historians, philosophers, and political scientists to evaluate the impact of Freeden's work and to reassess its central claims.
A short tribute to the late Jose Harris, focusing on her contribution to the field of intellectual history.
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Labour governments have often struggled to maintain popularity in challenging economic circumstances. Can Keir Starmer buck the trend by securing not just election but re-election in the face of a dysfunctional economy?
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A review essay on Colm Murphy, Futures of Socialism: 'Modernisation', the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-1997 (2023)
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While it is obvious that Scotland’s political trajectory has significantly departed from England’s, the explanation for this divergence is less straightforward. Social scientists have demonstrated that Scotland’s economy, social... more
While it is obvious that Scotland’s political trajectory has significantly departed from England’s, the explanation for this divergence is less straightforward. Social scientists have demonstrated that Scotland’s economy, social structure, and even underlying values are not in fact that different from England’s. To understand why Scottish electoral behaviour and public debate has followed a distinctive path, this article turns to the realms of politics and culture, where the same underlying socio-economic shifts that have transformed England’s political landscape over the last fifty years have been filtered in a different direction in Scotland. Available at https://discoversociety.org/2021/06/08/the-irresistible-rise-of-scottish-independence-a-brief-history-of-scotlands-constitutional-debate/.
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A review essay on recent books on the intellectual history of neoliberalism.
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Scottish Labour’s decline is not the result of an inexorable tide of history that swept the party away but of avoidable political mistakes. Online at https://www.holyrood.com/comment/view,comment-why-the-scottish-labour-party-is-in-a-mess.
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The British right cannot answer the case for Scottish nationalism because it does not understand it. Available at... more
The British right cannot answer the case for Scottish nationalism because it does not understand it. Available at https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/scottish-independence-denial-is-no-way-to-ward-off-divorce-union-snp-sturgeon-nationalism.
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A review essay on Alexander Zevin, ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist’. Available at https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/ben-jackson-whose-liberalism
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Although neo-liberalism is often seen as a set of ideas that prioritises the individual, in fact neo-liberals have always seen the traditional family as the critical social institution that is to be protected from the state and to be... more
Although neo-liberalism is often seen as a set of ideas that prioritises the individual, in fact neo-liberals have always seen the traditional family as the critical social institution that is to be protected from the state and to be granted new freedoms by greater access to market opportunities. A male bread-winner model of economic life was therefore as central to the worldview of neo-liberalism as it was to post-war social democracy. How did the advocates of market liberalism on the British right conceptualise the shifts in gender norms that took place during the 1980s and 1990s? How far did they try to adapt their free market objectives to this new social reality and how far did they try to resist it? How did they react to the growing salience of feminist arguments and policies on the left of British politics, and in particular Labour’s growing enthusiasm for a social democratic politics that integrated some feminist insights? This article investigates these questions through an examination of the political thought of Britain’s market liberals. The picture that emerges is two-fold: in the first instance, a concerted, although unsuccessful, effort by the free market right to resist some of this social change, but secondly greater ideological success for neo-liberals with respect to the role that could legitimately be played by the state rather than the market in addressing the social challenges posed by shifting gender roles.
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An influential strand of Jose Harris’s research has emphasised the importance of idealist political thought to the rise and fall of the British welfare state. Harris argues that the mid-twentieth century demise of political theory about... more
An influential strand of Jose Harris’s research has emphasised the importance of idealist political thought to the rise and fall of the British welfare state. Harris argues that the mid-twentieth century demise of political theory about social policy left the welfare state vulnerable because its defenders lacked a philosophical discourse with the depth of idealism. This chapter tests this argument by looking in more detail at a case study from the post-1945 discussion about the welfare state: the debate between the group of socialist social policy academics associated with Richard Titmuss and the neo-liberals at the Institute of Economic Affairs spear-headed by Arthur Seldon. The chapter demonstrates that while the defenders of the Beveridgean welfare state lacked theoretical firepower when confronted by a philosophical counterblast from the right, the major weakness of the left’s social policy analysis was in fact a failure to contest the neo-liberal appropriation of economic theory.
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A review essay on John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee
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The aim of this chapter is to consider how far it is possible to distinguish the progressive strand of Scottish nationalist thinking that coalesced in the 1980s and 1990s from the similar discourse of constitutional reform at the British... more
The aim of this chapter is to consider how far it is possible to distinguish the progressive strand of Scottish nationalist thinking that coalesced in the 1980s and 1990s from the similar discourse of constitutional reform at the British level associated with movements such as Charter 88 and their leading intellectual advocates such as David Marquand, Paul Hirst and Will Hutton. This latter body of opinion was in the 1980s and 1990s generally indifferent or hostile to Scottish nationalism, but it has become harder in recent years to formulate a hard and fast distinction between them. Should those committed to a more democratic and pluralist British constitutional settlement such as David Marquand in fact ‘logically’ favour Scottish independence as part of such wide-ranging reform?
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How social democratic is the policy record of the SNP in government? This is a harder question to answer than partisans on both sides of this argument will admit.
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This article investigates the emergence of neo-liberalism in Britain and its intellectual relationship with each of the three main British political ideologies. The article distinguishes between different currents of neo-liberalism that... more
This article investigates the emergence of neo-liberalism in Britain and its intellectual relationship with each of the three main British political ideologies. The article distinguishes between different currents of neo-liberalism that have been absorbed into British political thought, and shows that this process to some extent pre-dated the electoral success of Thatcherism in the 1980s. The article further suggests that labelling recent British political discourse as unvarnished ‘neo-liberalism’, while at times analytically useful, simplifies a more complicated picture, in which distinctively neo-liberal ideas have been blended in different ways into the ideologies of British Liberalism, Conservatism and even Labour socialism. The article therefore turns the spotlight on a more obscure aspect of the making of British neo-liberalism by exploring how politicians and intellectuals of varying partisan stripes generated policy discourses that presented neo-liberal ideas as an authentic expression of their own ideological traditions. Perhaps the most surprising finding of this article, then, is that neo-liberalism, although frequently characterised as rigid and dogmatic, has in fact proved itself to be a flexible and adaptable body of ideas, capable of colonising territory right across the political spectrum.
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An important consequence of the rise of neo-liberalism to political power in many nations has been a significant erosion of corporatist industrial relations arrangements and labour market regulation. How have neo-liberals made the case... more
An important consequence of the rise of neo-liberalism to political power in many nations has been a significant erosion of corporatist industrial relations arrangements and labour market regulation. How have neo-liberals made the case for such radical reforms? This chapter examines the analysis of labour and collective bargaining developed by neo-liberals during their long years in the political wilderness and which subsequently emerged as an influential policy discourse after the 1970s. It first seeks to pinpoint precisely what is distinctive about the neo-liberal understanding of labour and then traces in more detail the various dimensions of this radical ideological innovation, encompassing neo-liberals' understanding of the economic relationship between trade unions and employment, inequality and inflation; of the distinction between the state and civil society; and ultimately the neo-liberal attempt to dissolve the language of class altogether through the sponsorship of alternative discourses about 'human capital' and producer and consumer interests.
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There is something about the Labour Party that makes otherwise rigorous left-wing thinkers misplace their critical faculties.
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The aftershocks of the recent referendum on Scottish independence continue to be felt across the United Kingdom. The increased popular support for Scottish independence; the enhanced devolutionary powers granted to Scotland; and the... more
The aftershocks of the recent referendum on Scottish independence continue to be felt across the United Kingdom. The increased popular support for Scottish independence; the enhanced devolutionary powers granted to Scotland; and the greater political salience of the English question all now pose significant new challenges to the British state, constitution and economic model. Renewal gathers here four reflections on the meaning of the referendum and its implications for the future.
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A retrospective essay on Frank Knight, ‘Freedom as Fact and Criterion’, International Journal of Ethics, 39 (1929) for the 125th Anniversary of Ethics.
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This chapter introduces W. H. Hutt’s work on trade unionism, examines how F. A. Hayek built on the work of Hutt and others to develop his own analysis of trade unionism, and then investigates the connections that Hutt drew between trade... more
This chapter introduces W. H. Hutt’s work on trade unionism, examines how F. A. Hayek built on the work of Hutt and others to develop his own analysis of trade unionism, and then investigates the connections that Hutt drew between trade union power and the development of the South African apartheid regime. The chapter concludes by comparing Hutt’s writings on South Africa with the brief comments on the subject made by Hayek.
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A review article of Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion and Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe.
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The origins and implications of the left’s dalliance with Scottish independence.
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This article examines the political thought of contemporary Scottish nationalism. What are the key arguments and intellectual influences that have come together over recent decades to produce the case for Scottish independence? How do the... more
This article examines the political thought of contemporary Scottish nationalism. What are the key arguments and intellectual influences that have come together over recent decades to produce the case for Scottish independence? How do the major political ideas deployed in this nationalist discourse sit together? In particular, the article draws attention to three crucial, but discordant, ideological themes that have become recurrent features of the arguments for a ‘yes’ vote in the 2014 referendum: an analysis of the British state indebted to the New Left; a surprising enthusiasm for the politics of the British labour movement; and a belief that we are witnessing the end of the era of absolute state sovereignty.
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In reply to the comment by Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail on Ben Jackson's article ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism’, this communication briefly examines the development of the political thought of Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s. It... more
In reply to the comment by Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail on Ben Jackson's article ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism’, this communication briefly examines the development of the political thought of Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s. It argues that the chronology of Hayek's critical analysis of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ is more complex than Farrant and McPhail suggest. Farrant and McPhail underestimate the extent to which neo-liberalism in the 1940s was a body of ideas in flux, trying to come to terms with a changing political context, but not yet achieving a mature and stable ideological statement.
This chapter explores the relationship between neo-liberalism and Thatcherism by giving a historical account of the way in which neo-liberal ideas were disseminated into British politics. In particular, it cautions against too ready an... more
This chapter explores the relationship between neo-liberalism and Thatcherism by giving a historical account of the way in which neo-liberal ideas were disseminated into British politics. In particular, it cautions against too ready an acceptance of the self-image of the neo-liberal pioneers as a marginalised group of intellectuals who succeeded through the sheer force of their ideas. This image, I will argue, has obscured a more complex story about the sources of support for neo-liberalism and the political strategy of its advocates.
Having started with the firm intention of creating a clear political identity for the SNP on the left, Alex Salmond’s journey has followed in the footsteps of the other politicians of his generation.
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This article examines the intellectual relationship between Friedrich Hayek and Walter Lippmann in the 1930s and 1940s, and argues that Lippmann's writings on economic planning were a neglected influence on the development of Hayek's... more
This article examines the intellectual relationship between Friedrich Hayek and Walter Lippmann in the 1930s and 1940s, and argues that Lippmann's writings on economic planning were a neglected influence on the development of Hayek's political thought in this period. Lippmann's work provided a first approximation of arguments that Hayek would later make this own: that planning would destroy civil and political freedom; that a certain form of legal order was essential to the preservation of liberty; and that critics of planning should offer a positive liberal reform agenda that was compatible with this understanding of the law.
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The mid-twentieth century is often seen as the period in which the left learned to love the state, as earlier pluralist ideas – federalism, syndicalism, guild socialism – were relegated to the margins of socialist and liberal ideologies... more
The mid-twentieth century is often seen as the period in which the left learned to love the state, as earlier pluralist ideas – federalism, syndicalism, guild socialism – were relegated to the margins of socialist and liberal ideologies by new state-centred reform projects organized around the welfare state, nationalization, and economic planning. But this brief social democratic moment was itself delegitimized shortly thereafter and replaced by a neo-liberal discourse grounded on the sovereignty of the individual and an abiding hostility to the state. This chapter argues that this is in fact a misleading account of the fate of the socialist pluralist tradition, for two reasons. First, socialists and progressive liberals explicitly theorized the mid-century social settlement as a pluralist enterprise, albeit one that was much less ambitious than the equivalent projects envisaged by guild socialists and syndicalists earlier in the century. Second, the neo-liberal critique of social democracy was articulated as an attack on the existence of certain associations in civil society that were held to threaten both individual liberty and the state.
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Michael Freeden’s work on the history of British liberal thought has famously highlighted the ideological links between liberals and socialists in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Freeden’s... more
Michael Freeden’s work on the history of British liberal thought has famously highlighted the ideological links between liberals and socialists in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Freeden’s account has much to commend it, this chapter suggests that his focus on the influence of British liberalism on socialists should be balanced by an appreciation of the corresponding influence of British socialism on liberals. To make this case, the chapter examines the attitudes of new liberal intellectuals to the social ownership and control of industry. It investigates the ideas about social ownership found in the writings of J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse before the First World War; it musters evidence of left-liberal enthusiasm for industrial democracy in the years following 1918; and it outlines the serious consideration given to socialist planning by William Beveridge, the apparent epitome of a centrist liberal, in the 1930s and 1940s.
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It is often suggested that the earliest theorists of neo-liberalism first entered public controversy in the 1930s and 1940s to dispel the illusion that the welfare state represented a stable middle way between capitalism and socialism.... more
It is often suggested that the earliest theorists of neo-liberalism first entered public controversy in the 1930s and 1940s to dispel the illusion that the welfare state represented a stable middle way between capitalism and socialism. This article argues that this is an anachronistic account of the origins of neo-liberalism, since the earliest exponents of neo-liberal doctrine focused on socialist central planning rather than the welfare state as their chief adversary and even sought to accommodate certain elements of the welfare state agenda within their market liberalism. In their early work, neo-liberal theorists were suspicious of nineteenth-century liberalism and capitalism; emphasized the value commitments that they shared with progressive liberals and socialists; and endorsed significant state regulation and redistribution as essential to the maintenance of a free society. Neo-liberals of the 1930s and 1940s therefore believed that the legitimation of the market, and the individual liberty best secured by the market, had to be accomplished via an expansion of state capacity and a clear admission that earlier market liberals had been wrong to advocate laissez-faire.
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Social justice is a crucial ideal in contemporary political thought. Yet the concept of social justice is a recent addition to our political vocabulary, and comparatively little is known about its introduction into political debate or its... more
Social justice is a crucial ideal in contemporary political thought. Yet the concept of social justice is a recent addition to our political vocabulary, and comparatively little is known about its introduction into political debate or its early theoretical trajectory. Some important research has begun to address this issue, adding a valuable historical perspective to present-day controversies about the concept. This article uses this literature to examine two questions. First, how does the modern idea of social justice differ from previous conceptualisations of justice? Second, why and when did social justice first emerge into political discourse?
Revisionist socialists of the 1950s and 1960s are typically depicted as advocates of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ route to economic equality. This article argues that this is an oversimplification: while the revisionists supported the... more
Revisionist socialists of the 1950s and 1960s are typically depicted as advocates of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ route to economic equality. This article argues that this is an oversimplification: while the revisionists supported the welfare state, they also aimed to promote equality by redistributing private property and expanding social ownership, endorsing an egalitarian version of a ‘property-owning democracy’. The article first discusses the political ideals and calculations that motivated the revisionists’ interest in this model of egalitarian strategy and then examines in turn the three mutually reinforcing strands of policy that this goal generated: greater progressive taxation of wealth; measures to diffuse private property ownership and access to marketable skills; and the expansion of novel forms of social ownership.
The utilitarian case for economic equality achieved wide political currency on the British Left during the 1930s. This article examines the reasons for this ideological shift by considering the influence of the distributive prescriptions... more
The utilitarian case for economic equality achieved wide political currency on the British Left during the 1930s. This article examines the reasons for this ideological shift by considering the influence of the distributive prescriptions of welfare economists on British socialists in this period. It clarifies the relationship between efficiency and equity in these writings by analysing the response of socialists to the methodological criticisms of this approach made by Lionel Robbins and others. It is suggested that in their attempts to draw upon the language of economic theory, such utilitarian egalitarians have more in common with contemporary writers on social justice than we might initially think.
A review of Malcolm Petrie, Politics and the People: Scotland 1945-79 (2022)
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A review of Scott Hames, The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation
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A review of Keating (ed.), Debating Scotland & Walker, The Labour Party in Scotland
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A review of Tony Atkinson, Inequality: What Can be Done?