My 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.
Scottish nationalism is a powerful movement in contemporary politics, yet the goal of Scottish in... 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.
The demand for equality has been at the heart of the politics of the Left in the twentieth centur... 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.
Cambridge University Press, 2012 (co-edited with Robert Saunders)
Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her governments insp... 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.
Oxford University Press, 2012 (co-edited with Marc Stears)
Liberalism is the dominant ideology of our time, yet its character remains the subject of intense... 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 intellectua... more A short tribute to the late Jose Harris, focusing on her contribution to the field of intellectual history.
Labour governments have often struggled to maintain popularity in challenging economic circumstan... more 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?
A review essay on Colm Murphy, Futures of Socialism: 'Modernisation', the Labour Party and the Br... more A review essay on Colm Murphy, Futures of Socialism: 'Modernisation', the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-1997 (2023)
While it is obvious that Scotland’s political trajectory has significantly departed from England’... 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/.
Although neo-liberalism is often seen as a set of ideas that prioritises the individual, in fact ... 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.
In L. Goldman (eds.), Welfare and Social Policy in Britain Since 1870: Essays in Honour of Jose Harris (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 147-61
An influential strand of Jose Harris’s research has emphasised the importance of idealist politic... 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.
In H. Schattle and J. Nuttall (eds.), Making Social Democrats: Citizens, Mindsets, Realities: Essays for David Marquand (Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 161-73
The aim of this chapter is to consider how far it is possible to distinguish the progressive stra... 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?
In G. Hassan and S. Barrow (eds.), A Nation Changed: The SNP and Scotland Ten Years on (Luath Press, 2017), pp. 315-20
How social democratic is the policy record of the SNP in government? This is a harder question to... more 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.
This article investigates the emergence of neo-liberalism in Britain and its intellectual relatio... 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.
In K. Birch, J. MacLeavy and S. Springer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Neo-Liberalism (Routledge, 2016), pp. 262-70
An important consequence of the rise of neo-liberalism to political power in many nations has bee... 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.
There is something about the Labour Party that makes otherwise rigorous left-wing thinkers mispla... more There is something about the Labour Party that makes otherwise rigorous left-wing thinkers misplace their critical faculties.
Scottish nationalism is a powerful movement in contemporary politics, yet the goal of Scottish in... 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.
The demand for equality has been at the heart of the politics of the Left in the twentieth centur... 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.
Cambridge University Press, 2012 (co-edited with Robert Saunders)
Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her governments insp... 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.
Oxford University Press, 2012 (co-edited with Marc Stears)
Liberalism is the dominant ideology of our time, yet its character remains the subject of intense... 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 intellectua... more A short tribute to the late Jose Harris, focusing on her contribution to the field of intellectual history.
Labour governments have often struggled to maintain popularity in challenging economic circumstan... more 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?
A review essay on Colm Murphy, Futures of Socialism: 'Modernisation', the Labour Party and the Br... more A review essay on Colm Murphy, Futures of Socialism: 'Modernisation', the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-1997 (2023)
While it is obvious that Scotland’s political trajectory has significantly departed from England’... 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/.
Although neo-liberalism is often seen as a set of ideas that prioritises the individual, in fact ... 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.
In L. Goldman (eds.), Welfare and Social Policy in Britain Since 1870: Essays in Honour of Jose Harris (Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 147-61
An influential strand of Jose Harris’s research has emphasised the importance of idealist politic... 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.
In H. Schattle and J. Nuttall (eds.), Making Social Democrats: Citizens, Mindsets, Realities: Essays for David Marquand (Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 161-73
The aim of this chapter is to consider how far it is possible to distinguish the progressive stra... 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?
In G. Hassan and S. Barrow (eds.), A Nation Changed: The SNP and Scotland Ten Years on (Luath Press, 2017), pp. 315-20
How social democratic is the policy record of the SNP in government? This is a harder question to... more 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.
This article investigates the emergence of neo-liberalism in Britain and its intellectual relatio... 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.
In K. Birch, J. MacLeavy and S. Springer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Neo-Liberalism (Routledge, 2016), pp. 262-70
An important consequence of the rise of neo-liberalism to political power in many nations has bee... 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.
There is something about the Labour Party that makes otherwise rigorous left-wing thinkers mispla... more There is something about the Labour Party that makes otherwise rigorous left-wing thinkers misplace their critical faculties.
The aftershocks of the recent referendum on Scottish independence continue to be felt across 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.
A retrospective essay on Frank Knight, ‘Freedom as Fact and Criterion’, International Journal of ... more A retrospective essay on Frank Knight, ‘Freedom as Fact and Criterion’, International Journal of Ethics, 39 (1929) for the 125th Anniversary of Ethics.
In R. Leeson (ed.), Hayek: A Collaborative Biography, Part V (Palgrave, 2015), pp. 208-28
This chapter introduces W. H. Hutt’s work on trade unionism, examines how F. A. Hayek built on th... 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.
A review article of Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion and Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the U... more A review article of Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion and Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe.
Uploads