Dr Ben Jackson: List of publications

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Free Markets and Feminism: The Neo-Liberal Defence of the Male Breadwinner Model in Britain, c. 1980-1997

2019

Journal article

Women's History Review

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.

Richard Titmuss versus the IEA: The Transition from Idealism to Neo-Liberalism in British Social Policy

2019

Chapter

Welfare and Social Policy in Britain Since 1870: Essays in Honour of Jose Harris

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.

Citizen and Subject: Clement Attlee's Socialism

2018

Journal article

History Workshop Journal

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

Introduction

2018

Chapter

Richard Titmuss, Essays on 'the Welfare State'

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

A Union of Hearts? Republican Social Democracy and Scottish Nationalism

2018

Chapter

Making Social Democrats: Citizens, Mindsets, Realities: Essays for David Marquand

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?

The State of Social Democracy and the Scottish Nationalists

2017

Chapter

A Nation Changed? The SNP and Scotland Ten Years on

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.

Progressivism in British Politics: Some Revisionist Themes

2017

Journal article

Political Quarterly

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.

Currents of Neo-Liberalism: British Political Ideologies and the New Right, c. 1955-79

2016

Journal article

The English Historical Review

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.

Neoliberalism, Labour and Trade Unionism

2016

Chapter

The Handbook of Neoliberalism

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.

Hard Labour

2016

Journal article

Political Quarterly

There is something about the Labour Party that makes otherwise rigorous left-wing thinkers misplace their critical faculties.

Keynes, Keynesianismus und die Debatte um Gleichheit

2015

Chapter

Normalität und Fragilität: Demokratie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg

Hayek, Hutt and the Trade Unions

2015

Chapter

Hayek: A Collaborative Biography Part V, Hayek’s Great Society of Free Men

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.

Business & Economics

On Frank Knight’s “Freedom as Fact and Criterion”

2015

Journal article

Ethics

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

Neoliberalism: Wanted, Dead or Alive

2014

Journal article

Historical Studies in Industrial Relations

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

The Left and Scottish Nationalism

2014

Journal article

Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy

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

The Political Thought of Scottish Nationalism

2014

Journal article

Political Quarterly

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.

Social Democracy

2013

Chapter

The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies

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.

Hayek, Keynes, and the Origins of Neo-Liberalism: A Reply to Farrant and McPhail

2012

Journal article

Historical Journal

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 Think Tank Archipelago: Thatcherism and Neo-Liberalism

2012

Chapter

Making Thatcher's Britain

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.

History

The masses against the classes: One Nation Labour and the revival of social patriotism

2012

Journal article

Public Policy Research

Corporatism and its Discontents: Pluralism, Anti-Pluralism and Anglo-American Industrial Relations, c. 1930-1980

2012

Chapter

Modern Pluralism

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.

Socialism and the New Liberalism

2012

Chapter

Liberalism as Ideology: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeden

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.

Property-Owning Democracy: A Short History

2012

Chapter

Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond

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.

Philosophy

Freedom, the Common Good and the Rule of Law: Lippmann and Hayek on Economic Planning

2012

Journal article

Journal of the History of Ideas

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.

Liberalism as Ideology: Essays in Honour of Michael Freeden

2012

Book

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.

Making Thatcher's Britain

2012

Book

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.

An Ideology of Class: Neo-Liberalism and the Trade Unions, c.1930-79

2011

Chapter

Classes, Cultures, and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin

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.

History

At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism: The Free Economy and the Strong State, 1930-1947

2010

Journal article

Historical Journal

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.

T. H. Marshall

2010

Chapter

Encyclopedia of Political Theory

The Rhetoric of Redistribution

2009

Chapter

In Search of Social Democracy: Responses to Crisis and Modernisation

This chapter examines how radical politicians articulated and won arguments about economic redistribution. It draws on evidence from three important episodes of progressive policy-making and electioneering: first, the rhetoric used to justify ‘new liberal’ welfare reforms and fiscal policy in Edwardian Britain, in particular the speeches of Lloyd George; second, the political discourse of the New Deal in the United States in the 1930s, especially speeches and broadcasts by Franklin Roosevelt; and, finally, proposals in Britain during and after the Second World War about the character of post-war reconstruction, as advocated by prominent politicians in the Labour Party, and also by other influential figures such as William Beveridge.

Social Democracy

2008

Chapter

The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

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.

Reference

Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900-64

2007

Book

The demand for equality was 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? This book provides 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, the book 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. It demonstrates that the British Left has historically been distinguished from its ideological competitors on the centre and the right by a commitment to a demanding form of economic egalitarianism. The book shows that this egalitarianism has come to be neglected or caricatured by politicians and scholars alike, and is more surprising and sophisticated than is often imagined.

Justice

2006

Chapter

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy

Revisionism Reconsidered: 'Property-owning Democracy' and Egalitarian Strategy in Post-War Britain

2005

Journal article

Twentieth Century British History

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 Conceptual History of Social Justice

2005

Journal article

Political Studies Review

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?

The Uses Of Utilitarianism: Social Justice, Welfare Economics and British Socialism, 1931- 48

2004

Journal article

History of Political Thought

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

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