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Professor Ben Jackson

Professor of Modern History

Dr Ben Jackson

University College

 

01865 (2)76653

benjamin.jackson@univ.ox.ac.uk

I am a historian of modern ideas and politics, with a particular interest in how ideologies have shaped public policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My research examines why there were such significant changes in this period in what was believed to be politically feasible. I study how the seemingly abstract theories of philosophers, economists and sociologists have been used (and misused) by political actors amid the rise of a more economically interventionist state after c.1900 and then the backlash against the state in the name of the market after the 1970s. I have chiefly worked on modern Britain, though I am also interested in international debates about the state and market in this period. I have also written about the intellectual and political history of modern Scotland as a case study of how nationalist ideas were claimed by the left. 

I am the Co-Editor of the Political Quarterly and Chair of the Editorial Board of Modern British History. I serve on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Journal of British Studies and of Renewal. I am one of the conveners of the Oxford Modern British History Seminar. I am Director of the Oxford Centre for Intellectual History 2026-28.

Research Interests

  • The rise of the neo-liberal right and Thatcherism
  • The political thought of British liberalism and socialism
  • The history and politics of Scottish nationalism
  • The history and politics of the Labour Party
  • Twentieth century British social and economic policy

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 (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.

As one of the editors of Political Quarterly, I write short commentaries on contemporary British politics, often trying to place recent events in historical context. Some recent examples are: 

• ‘A Hundred Years of Labour Governments’, Political Quarterly, 95 (2024), pp. 215-8 
• ‘Beveridge’s Wager’, Political Quarterly, 95 (2024), pp. 573-5 
• ‘Poverty and the Labour Party’, Political Quarterly, 96 (2025), pp. 233-5 
• ‘Comparing the Rise of Reform with the Rise of Labour’, Political Quarterly, 96 (2025), pp. 607-9

I teach undergraduate papers in modern British history and the history of political thought. I supervise Masters and DPhil students working on topics in modern British political history, twentieth-century British social and economic policy, and the history of modern political and economic thought. I am happy to hear from prospective research students interested in working in these fields

Publications

Showing 5 publications

  • Tom Nairn and Scottish Politics

    Jackson B

    April 2026 | Journal article | Modern British History

  • Review of Maksymilian Del Mar, Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy and Law (2025)

    Jackson B

    November 2025 | Journal article | Society

  • Thatcherism on a European scale? The Lost World of British Pro-European Neoliberalism

    Jackson B

    September 2025 | Chapter

  • Social Democracy without Foundations? David Marquand and the Historiography of the 'Keynesian Welfare State'

    JACKSON B

    April 2025 | Journal article | Political Quarterly, The

  • Review of Richard Finlay, Scottish Nationalism: History, Ideology and the Question of Independence (2022)

    Jackson B

    July 2024 | Journal article | Contemporary British History