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.

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?

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.

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.

The approach to regulation and business policy that Ed Miliband and his Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna have begun to sketch has attracted its share of criticism from the business sector's less thoughtful partisans. Digby Jones, with predictably unimpressive recourse to cliché, described Miliband's 2011 conference speech as 'a kick in the teeth for the only sector that generates wealth that pays the tax and creates the jobs this country needs' , ending with the cringe-worthy would-be flourish that Miliband's position is 'Pro-business? Not!' (Rigby, Shäfer and Bounds, 2011). But Miliband's nascent vision of 'building a new economy' , while standing in need of much further development, embodies a potentially fruitful approach to constructing a better capitalism. To see how and why, it is useful to take a step back, and to consider both the foundations of the relationship between business and the state, as well as some of the recent pathologies of how that relationship has been allowed to develop.The crash in the world economy, ushered in by the 2007 credit crunch, has claimed many victims. Among those victims is a now-discredited picture of how the state should approach the regulation of business. This picture, which saw government's central task as simply getting out of the way of wealth creation, allowing deregulated private enterprise to get on with generating prosperity, had its roots in libertarian and neo-liberal thinking. Nevertheless, it came to be enthusiastically embraced by parties of the centre and left, and especially by New Labour.Labour's variant on this approach combined quiescent government deregulation with a belief in the sort of under-the-radar redistribution that can only be achieved during times of economic plenty. A slick and rampant financial sector, supercharged by the liberating effects of 'light touch' regulation, would create tax receipts that could be diverted through the bountiful effects of increasing spending on health and education, and increasing the size of the public sector workforce, to those floundering, deindustrialised sections of the country that had not benefitted from the boom. As long as public spending could be kept high, the inequity and instability of a lopsided economy could be safely ignored.Well, it was fine while it lasted, but we have all seen that the good times, such as they were, ended in tears and recriminations. We are left with a spluttering, unhealthy economy, marred by structural infirmities and rampant inequality, wheezing at the prospect of facing the future. We have learned that the embrace of neo-liberalism and deregulation, rather than giving parties of the left a new way of approaching prosperity and social justice, delivered a 20