John Atkinson Hobson

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So it came about that the heresy of over-saving committed a deadly offence. It contravened the one claim which political economy had to ethical respectability. For the “economic man,” though consciously moved by intelligent self-interest in the pursuit of personal gain, was led “as by an invisible hand” to a line of conduct conducive to the welfare of the community. He could, therefore, figure as a benevolent or kindly being. For it was his function to keep down the costs of production, including wages, to the lowest level, in order that the product of industry should be as large as possible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I thus got a glimpse of the ideology of the new situation in which democracy, as hitherto conceived, was destined to be torn between capitalism and proletarianism, each seeking to use the machinery of the State for economic mastery, and driven by the emergency of the conflict to dictatorships of the right or left. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To argue that modern economics is moving definitely on to a welfare basis of values, alike on its cost and its utility side, that it thus seeks a reconciliation between Socialism and individualism which will avoid the disastrous wastes and perils of class conflict and international strife that proceed from unregulated capitalism, may appear to denote a personal craving on my part for a justification of my economic heresies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The growing “Imperialism” and the growing “Socialism” exhibit the same danger of an absolute State control. “In the light of this idea, that the State exists for the individual, not the individual for the State, all existing institutions must be tried, and they will stand or fall according as they can bear the searching test.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ My experience of this Ethical Society led me to regard it as excellent in its assertion of free discussion, but as committed so strongly to the stress on individual moral character, as the basis of social progress, as to make it the enemy of that political-economic democracy which I was coming to regard as the chief instrument of social progress and justice. This moral individualism was not, however, equally developed in the other ethical societies which were coming into existence at the close of the century. ”

“ The great lesson of the War and the even more important lesson of the Peace thus brought home to me the truth that justice as well as charity begins at home. It is impracticable to hope for peace and justice in international affairs unless the conditions for internal peace and justice within the nations have already been substantially obtained. ”

“ Units of capital and of labour are not infinitely divisible. In any given manufacturing business the minimum unit of real capital may be the whole plant of a mill, or, at any rate, one expensive machine: the unit of labour is for most purposes the week’s employment of a worker’s time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fair play for the several advanced nations with their expanding trade and population, security for the interests of the backward peoples in areas thus opened to development and migration, and more broadly the utilization of the world’s economic resources for the equal benefit of all mankind — such was the practical ideal which a League of Nations or other international system should envisage and seek to attain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For progress can only come by a break away from authority or convention. But this break-away disposition is not necessarily the free play of a reasonable mind. It may be a pugnacious self-assertion of superiority over the accepted thought or faith of others. It is more attractive to fight for one’s own property than for the common good. ”

“ In fact “humanism” is coming to be regarded as the guiding principle for industry alike on its productive and consumptive side. The recognition that it is a function of the State to establish minimum wages and maximum hours is the most definite application of this principle, more “revolutionary” in its nature than any of the fragmentary nationalization of industry which is everywhere proceeding. For this public guarantee of wages and leisure strikes at the very roots of profiteering capitalism. ”

“ Though, as will be seen, post-War disturbances have had some effect on our traditional attitudes, the failure of our workers, even of aprofessedly Socialist Labour Party, to agree upon any general intelligible policy attests the truth of my assertion that the application of reason and justice to drastic reforms is or appears to lie outside the limits of our national character. It may be that the conservatism of the cliché, “human nature being what it is,” can be overcome by some power of “sudden conversion” in the political-economic mentality. ”

“ Orthodoxy, the acceptance: of authoritative theories and opinions, apart from their intrinsic truth or value, is an attitude of mental and social security, a disposition to swim with the tide and to enjoy the benefits of respectability. Orthodoxy may be the right creed it claims to be, and its followers may give a reasonable acceptance to it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The danger that besets Labour-Socialism is its failure to recognize the fact that over a large area of industry, prize-money, in the shape of profit, must continue to be a serviceable method of getting the best results of inventive ability, risk, and enterprise, into the productivity of industry. The notion that a sense of public service will operate upon all types of mind so as to get the best they have to give in contributions towards technological and business ability, cannot be accepted for purposes of present practical progress. ”

“ The defence of capitalism, the repudiation of dangerous doctrines, is not a direct conscious motive in the mind of our economists. It proceeds, partly from a genuine belief in the rightness of the established system and of the “economics” which expand and justify intellectually this system, partly from a sincere rejection of the Socialist case, as expounded by its literature. But it is none the less closely associated with a strong class feeling for friends and associates whose interests lie in the preservation of the capitalist system. ”