John Atkinson Hobson

“ So long as the masses are kept down under strong class government, their intelligence uneducated, they remain impotent. But modern conditions of progress demand that a larger and larger proportion of the race shall be brought into the keenest rivalry of life—this keen rivalry demands equality of opportunity for all individuals. Hence the modern democratic movement making for equalization of opportunity intensifies the "struggle," the rivalry of life, and improves the pace of progress. ”

“ It is undeniable that a heresy becomes an intellectual property which rouses in its owner a sense of scarcity value and of personal attachment that are liable to lead him into methods of defence which carry stormy emotional bias and may cause him to transgress the bounds of sweet reasonableness. Thus it is difficult to determine at the outset whether a heresy is a genuinely rational product, the logical correction of wrong thinking, or whether it is a more or less plausible attempt to be peculiar, and to feel superior, in one’s thinking. ”

“ Rivalry in its fiercest form is essential to the progress of the race, and religion stands with the sword of justice in her hand, a divine executioner of the unfortunate.
But what practical conduct does religion enjoin? In order to intensify the rivalry of life it is desirable that population should constantly outrun the means of comfortable subsistence. Hence, the first practical behest of religion is "increase and multiply." ”

“ Of commercial goods, or any other class of goods, those which have a capacity for satisfying wholesome human wants are ‘wealth,’ those which pander to some base or injurious desire of man are not wealth, but ‘illth,’ availing as they do, not for life but for death. Thus he (Ruskin) posits as the starting-point of Political Economy a standard of life not based upon present subjective valuations of ‘consumers,’ but upon eternal and immutable principles of health and disease, justice and injustice. ”

“ Once let us realize that it is the real interest of the individual to act in harmony with the total well-being of the society to which he belongs, and that it is the true interest of this generation to care for succeeding generations—that human nature contains desires making for the realization of this wider self which it would be painful to thwart—ethical conduct is at once justified, and the false antagonism of individual and social welfare disappears. ”

“ Though my heresies have led me to assign supreme significance to the financial situation of the consumer, I cannot pretend to possess intimate knowledge of anybody else’s standard of consumption, and living, as I have done for the most part upon the least defensible of all forms of unearned income, I have not been driven to the nice calculations of expenditure to which most men with families to keep are driven. ”

“ Kidd's conception of the struggle for existence. The struggle for the life of others is as essential a part as the struggle for one's own life — and what is more the sentiments and forces which make for the two are not really separable, because our own life is organically related to the life of others, the family, the generation, the race. Just as the mother does not really sacrifice her own good for the good of others, but seeks her good in the good of others, so it is with the struggle in its wider form. ”

“ In my early approaches towards economic study it had struck me as odd that the private ownership of land and the receipt of its rent seemed a matter of no importance to our political economists. Failing to recognize that rent played any part as a cost of production, they simply accepted it as belonging to the order of nature, beneficial no doubt to its recipients, but not injurious to anybody else. ”

“ Socialism, by putting an end to this rivalry, is retrogressive. But is reason to have her way, and is social progress to be checked by this suicidal policy?
There is another force in eternal strife with reason—that is, religion—the eternal repository of the race-preserving instincts in all ages and all races. Scientific evolution, by ignoring religion—Mr. Kidd says it has ignored it—has neglected the one truly progressive force in history. Intellectual ascendency has never succeeded in maintaining the power and integrity of a race. ”

“ The success which has attended the attempts to stamp out political and economic democracy in Germany, Italy, Japan, and certain other countries where it appeared to be advancing, has cast doubt upon the reality of popular power alike in the political and economic fields. In the struggle between humanism and organized force can we rely upon the victory of the former? Leaving in doubt the lasting strength of dictatorship in countries which have only tasted democracy, we may better test the issue in those countries which have had long experience of popular self-government. ”

“ No socialist community could fail to recognize that marriage and production of children were the most important social acts; that society had a clear right to determine what sort of children should be born, seeing that society had both to support them and to depend upon them for support. I do not mean that such society need unduly and vexatiously interfere with freedom of individual choice, so as to say what marriages should take place, but it would certainly claim to say what marriages should not take place. ”

“ It is this nationalism which prevents politicians and peoples from realizing the vicious nature of the barriers which block trade and impede intercourse between nations. But until the domination of class and economic interests within each nation, which feeds and inspires this nationalism, can be recognized and overcome by an enlightened classless nationalism, a League of Nations will not be endowed with the authority and the power needed for world peace and progress. ”

“ But he has neglected to recognize that all other motive forces are equally "irrational," and that those which incite a man to selfish conduct are just as irrational as any other. Our likes and dislikes, our estimate of pleasures and pains, that aggregate valuation of vital forces which forms the active character of a man or a race, are irrational in the sense that the intellect (Mr. Kidd's reason) only enables one to see correctly the results which attend the pursuit of likes and dislikes. Moral force can never be directly generated by intellectual machinery. ”

“ My pre-War experience, as teacher, journalist, traveller, and general mixer in movements and groups, went to confirm my earlier view that progress would come by a concessionaire policy of the owning classes, together with elements of economic betterment for the workers achieved by public policy and finance. This, at any rate, seemed to be the path to be taken by a people averse alike to idealistic theories and revolutionary practices and conscious of their power to bend their popular Government to meet their urgent economic needs. ”

“ For thinking is in itself a brief fragmentary process, and the piecing together of these fragments into a system of thought, a science, or a philosophy, is seldom (never in the sphere of human conduct) the purely objective, disinterested, reasonable process it professes to be. A completely consistent history, or still more a philosophy, is invalidated, partly because it overrates the rationality of evolutionary thinking, partly because it is hampered by deficiencies of the instrument of language invented for purely practical purposes of communication. ”

“ By concentrating upon a single form of unearned wealth it enables its adherents to evade and arrest the wider claims of Socialism. “A single-taxer” is free to take every economic advantage he may enjoy as capitalist, employer, investor, in dealing with weaker bargainers. While the landowner’s income is wholly unearned, his own business gains are the product of his skill, industry, foresight! ”

“ But the fallacy of unlimited saving in this country was left undetected for the greater part of a century, for this reason. If Britain had been an isolated economic community (as now too late we are seeking to become) we should have been brought up against the limit of effective saving long ago. But so long as we were the only advanced industrial country with a large exportable surplus, there was no limit to our profitable saving. Any nation, like any individual, may save all it chooses, provided other nations are not able or willing to follow the same policy. ”

“ My American experiences brought other aspects of capitalism to the front. Though the lecture tours which I made in the East and Middle West of the United States were chiefly to Universities, other contacts with business men’s and women’s clubs and more popular audiences gave me a clearer understanding of the blend of ruthless competition and equally ruthless monopoly which characterized the economic and political scene in America. ”

“ On the contrary, by enlisting my combative instincts in defence of my heretical views of capitalism as the source of unjust distribution, over-saving, and an economic impulsion to adventurous imperialism, it led me for a time to an excessive and too simple advocacy of the economic determination of history. When I wrote my volume on Imperialism I had not yet gathered into clear perspective the nature of the interaction between economics, politics, and ethics, needed for anyone who might wish to claim the title of Sociologist. ”

“ The nature of most work, the conditions under which it was done, and the payment for it, were determined by the employer in all mechanized industries, and a new proletariat came into existence, divorced alike from all personal control of other factors of production than labour, and devoted to the performance of some single narrow action contributing to a complex co-operative process of production which had no human concern for the great mass of wage-earners. ”

“ Turning from politics to economics and the class distinctions connected with grades of income, can it be questioned that property and the legal ways of acquisition are kept from close rational scrutiny by a traditional and well-cultivated regard for “rights”? Any political changes which can be presented as an invasion of the “rights” of property have a flavour of wickedness about them. Any abolition of class distinctions connected with reputable modes of earning incomes carries at least a presumption of wrong-doing. ”

“ Long before my mind was free to work upon the fundamental issues of economic science, I was caught in the network of a narrower economic heresy which played a distinctive part in all my later thinking. ”

“ How far, how fast, and in what precise directions State Socialism with its control of key industries and its policy of “social services” shall go, will vary in each nation with the structure of its economic system, its natural and human resources, and its traditional psychology. It may well be the case that in some countries, owing to racial unity, slightness of class differences, and habits of co-operation, the sense of “fraternity” is stronger than that of individual liberty and inspires citizens to work consciously for the common good. ”

“ It is no idle taunt to say that philosophy bakes no cakes, or is of no help to a philosopher with toothache. There is no doubt an intellectual satisfaction in pushing consistency and law into their highest reaches. But this does not justify the contempt for fragmentary thought and feeling and their expression in journalism. It is, however, right for me to limit this defence of journalism to writing done under fair and free conditions. ”

“ Since I shall be engaged in work of social criticism, I must myself be exposed to those deflecting influences that operate on others, and though it is not possible to pretend to an impartiality and objectivity which I deny to others, it is possible for me to trace and set forth in my own intellectual career some of the causal and casual occurrences which have determined my own thinking during a period of more than half a century. ”

“ In any human society evolving into such an organism, the whole value of free personality would be lost.
Though Hobhouse, of course, fully admitted the effects of social institutions and intercourse in helping to mould the character of a person, nobody in close acquaintance with him could fail to perceive that his will-power for self-determination in all affairs down to the smallest home detail was unusually strong, and that while freely expending his energy for his own conception of the good of others, he did not easily yield to the efforts of others to influence his line of conduct. ”

“ Fourthly, the fact that unearned income enabled me to devote most of my time and energy to the unremunerative work of writing economic books, though not formally accepted as a justification of such income, must often have presented itself in the light of an extenuating circumstance. It is, indeed, offered by many “intellectuals” as a complete defence of such unearned wealth as provides the requisite freedom to do the best kinds of work. Thus there are so many snares that no man, however reasonable and disinterested he may think himself to be, can be sure he is evading all of them. ”

“ The crude and commonly accepted notion that the general result of the current competitive system was to place the benefits of competition in the hands of “the consumer,” and that, since everybody is a consumer, all improvements of productivity ultimately benefited consumers as a body, was thus put into the scrap-heap, and there began to emerge the view that economic “force” was a main determinant in the distribution of wealth. ”

“ What first prompted me to this endeavour was my sense of the unsatisfactory way in which economists found separate “laws” to express rent, interest, profit, wages. In actual economic processes all the factors of production were required to co-operate, and that co-operation was an organic process which precluded the separate assignment of any part of the products to any one of them. Different kinds and quantities of land, capital, labour were needed for each of these acts of co-operative production. ”

“ He was artist before he became economist, and it was the vital cost of excessive and degraded work that drew him into his passionate campaign. But though in Munera Pulveris he appears to concentrate upon utility in its sense of humanly serviceable consumption as his central theme, his wider economic thesis lies in the correlation of human cost to human utility. A subdivided routine-producer could not be an efficient consumer of any of the more worthy sorts of wealth. Nor could an idle consumer, living not by his labour but on his “means.” ”

“ It may be that Socialism under its present leadership is shedding the dogmatism of its early shape. But it still seems a long way from the formulation of a policy which commands the intellectual assent and the moral enthusiasm needed to break the indifference and traditional servitude of the mass of an electorate unaccustomed to thinking and subject to the wily propaganda of “vested interests” in moments of real or fabricated crisis. ”