Dr Ben Jackson: List of publications

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.

A review essay on John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Clement Attlee

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?

This article argues that a return to the history of progressive political thought can help us to think afresh about what a renewed centre-left politics might look like today. The article identifies some significant aspects of this history that attracted little attention in earlier debates over the British progressive tradition, in particular debates about social ownership, nationalism and distributism. This revisionist history of British progressivism points the way towards some common ideological ground that could provide a starting point for a new dialogue between different ‘progressive’ political parties and interests.

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.

A retrospective essay on Frank Knight, ‘Freedom as Fact and Criterion’, International Journal of Ethics, 39 (1929) for the 125th Anniversary of Ethics.

The origins and implications of the left’s dalliance with Scottish independence.

Social democracy has often been seen as a pragmatic compromise between capitalism and socialism. This chapter shows that social democracy is in fact a distinctive body of political thought: an ideology which prescribes the use of democratic collective action to extend the principles of freedom and equality valued by democrats in the political sphere to the organization of the economy and society, chiefly by opposing the inequality and oppression created by laissez-faire capitalism. The chapter makes this case by examining three distinct eras in the development of social democratic ideas: the emergence of social democracy in the decades before the Second World War; the so-called ‘golden age’ of social democracy between 1945 and 1970; and the period of social democratic retreat from 1970 until the present.

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.

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.

This chapter gives an account of the history of the idea of a 'property-owning democracy' , and draws out some of the implications of this historical narrative for contemporary debates. In particular, it locates the genesis of the egalitarian model of property-owning democracy in two episodes in the history of political thought: in the rise of commercial republican thinking in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and in the mid-twentieth century high tide of the socialist critique of capitalism. The underlying aim of this historical enquiry is to reconstruct the context in which James Meade developed his thinking on property ownership, and by extension to shed light on the appropriation of Meade’s ideas by John Rawls and later political theorists. The chapter concludes that the history of the property-owning democracy ideal should give pause to those contemporary egalitarians who seek to present the redistribution of private property as a clear practical alternative to either the welfare state or socialism.

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.

This chapter examines the attitude of the free market right to organised labour and this movement's role in legitimising the radical late twentieth century shift in the governing ideology of British industrial relations. It charts the history of the neo-liberal right’s opposition to trade unionism, from neo-liberalism’s earliest years as a subterranean movement against the collectivist politics of the 1930s and 1940s to the intellectual formation of Thatcherism in the 1970s.

Social democracy refers to a political theory, a social movement or a society that aims to achieve the egalitarian objectives of socialism while remaining committed to the values and institutions of liberal democracy. This article examines the historical development of all three forms of social democracy. It shows that social democracy was one of the most creative and durable influences on the politics and economics of the advanced industrialized nations during the 20th century and that, in spite of some setbacks, it retains a distinctive political agenda for the future.

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?