Dr Ben Jackson: List of publications

Introduction to a new edition of Richard Titmuss, Essays on 'the Welfare State'

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.

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.

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.

A review article on Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion and Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe.

This article examines the key arguments and intellectual influences that have come together over recent decades to produce the case for Scottish independence. In particular, the article draws attention to three crucial, but discordant, ideological themes that have become recurrent features of Scottish nationalist discourse: 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.

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.

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.

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.