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This chapter demonstrates that Hobson's radicalism was not inherited, but something he had to learn after he came to London in the mid-1880s and began writing ‘A London Letter’ for his father's newspaper in Derby. During this period, he wrote his books, The Physiology of Industry and Evolution of Modern Capitalism. The chapter also investigates the links between Hobson's New Liberal stance and traditional radical thinking from Paine onwards, with special reference to the way that he developed the concept of unearned income as handed down from John Stuart Mill. His famous doctrines of underconsumption and oversaving were directly linked to his concern with the ‘unearned increment’, a concern that reached its climax in the Edwardian period with his most elaborate statement of the concept of surplus in the Industrial System.

This chapter shows the complex ways in which Hobson's views on imperialism were influenced by his encounter of the First World War and the beginning of the next. During the First World War, his views gradually shifted back towards those he had put forward in Imperialism: A Study, as evident in The New Protectionism and especially in Democracy after the War. After the war and through to the mid-1930s, his views moved in the opposite direction, back to those expressed in An Economic Interpretation of Investment though without ever quite matching the heady optimism of that work. After the war, and to some extent because of it, Hobson's views as expressed in Imperialism: A Study slowly became more acceptable in academic circles and on the left of politics. The chapter ends with a brief summary of Hobson's views on imperialism over the period 1887-1938.

This chapter charts the development of Hobson's ideas before and during his visit to South Africa in 1899 and shows how books such as The War in South Africa and The Psychology of Jingoism arose out of that visit. It also tries to illustrate the tension between his interest in financiers as a body of men capable of using politics for their own sinister ends and his growing awareness of the evolution of a new kind of capitalism based on the growth of big business. The chapter ends with a sustained analysis and critique of Part I of Imperialism: A Study and of the sections of Part II that are directly linked to the economic analysis presented by Hobson in Part I.

This chapter introduces the book as aiming to discuss the evolution of J. A. Hobson's thoughts on economic imperialism from his earlier comments on the subject in his father's newspaper in the late 1880s to the publication of the third edition of Imperialism two years before his death in 1940. Imperialism had been Hobson's most comprehensive treatise on the subject and his most impassioned and readable contribution. It was also the book he chose to republish, without serious amendment, just before his death and is now assumed, by most readers, to be the alpha and omega of his thinking. However, the book may not be representative of his views during his lifetime. Looking at Hobson's writings from the late 1890s onwards, the ideas presented in ‘An Economic Interpretation of Investment’ were, perhaps, more representative of his thinking — and of the radical tradition that he was part of.

This chapter shows that, in the Edwardian period, Hobson's thinking on imperial matters was, at worst, schizoid and, at best, puzzling. One strand of his writings was in a direct line of succession from Imperialism: A Study. He also printed numerous articles in which he warned of the dangers of parasitism and its consequences. This was accompanied by a stream of writings contradicting some key arguments in Imperialism: A Study. His advocacy of free trade led him into dangerous intellectual territory. In An Economic Interpretation of Investment, Hobson presented imperialism not as a reversion to militancy and barbarism so much as a necessary stage in an economic globalisation that would eventually lead every area of the world, whether advanced or backward, towards liberty and prosperity.

This chapter looks at Imperialism: A Study in the context of modern knowledge of the size, distribution, and ownership of foreign investment and its place in the British economy. It tests the book's argument that the costs of empire were paid by the nation as a whole, but only a very small elite got the benefits. Three brief case studies are also presented. The first is concerned with the background to the occupation of Egypt in 1882, the second with the origins of the Boer War of 1899-1902, and the third investigates the British role in the scramble for China between 1895-1914. There may be more mileage in future in developing Hobson's thoughts on the rise of big business and cartels in Imperialism: A Study and in The Evolution of Modern Capitalism than in pursuing the more traditional lines of Hobsonian thinking.

This chapter shows that Hobson's conversion into a radical critic of imperialism and of imperial expansion was even more prolonged than his transformation into a New Liberal. It also shows how his critique of imperialism was an important moment in a long-standing but evolving radical discourse. It was not until 1898 that Hobson successfully merged his radical stance on domestic issues with his growing hostility to imperial expansion. In ‘Free Trade and Foreign Policy’, he brought his theory of underconsumption and oversaving together with his new aversion to imperialism when he claimed that oversaving led to foreign investment and that the need to find more outlets for the latter was the key to understanding modern imperial expansion. His chief concern in 1898 was the scramble for China rather than the storm brewing in South Africa.

This chapter focuses on Part II of Imperialism: A Study, the part least often read in modern times. Part II was twice as long as Part I and contained some of Hobson's finest writing. In it were discussed a range of issues that he undoubtedly believed were of equal importance to the more nakedly economic arguments at the beginning of the book. In Part II, Hobson first investigated the political, social, and ideological forces making for expansion in Britain and then went on to discuss the impact of imperialism upon Africa, India, and China and upon the settlement colonies, the emerging Dominions. The chapter ends with a short survey of the reception of Imperialism: A Study. It shows that Imperialism: A Study was not received with acclaim even among those opposed to British policy in South Africa.

The writings of Michael Freeden contain a sustained engagement with the history of twentieth-century liberalism. John Atkinson Hobson (1858–1940) emerges from Freeden’s narrative as an early (and unsung) hero, whilst John Rawls (1921–2002) is portrayed as a late (and overpraised) villain. This chapter reassesses that stark contrast in the context of the discussion of utopia to be found in the writings of these two thinkers. There are undoubtedly some significant differences between Hobson and Rawls (not all of which redound to the advantage of the former), but they share a willingness to engage in ideal description provided it is suitably tempered by ‘realism’. This shared reaction might be said to exemplify the position of left liberals, who lack the outright hostility towards utopianism found in some other strands of liberalism (such as the ‘cold-war liberalism’ of Isaiah Berlin and others).

Freeden’s work on the history of British liberal thought has famously highlighted the ideological links between liberals and socialists in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Freeden’s account has much to commend it, this chapter suggests that his focus on the influence of British liberalism on socialists should be balanced by an appreciation of the corresponding influence of British socialism on liberals. To make this case, the chapter examines the attitudes of new liberal intellectuals to the social ownership and control of industry. It investigates the ideas about social ownership found in the writings of J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse before the First World War; it musters evidence of left-liberal enthusiasm for industrial democracy in the years following 1918; and it outlines the serious consideration given to socialist planning by William Beveridge, the apparent epitome of a centrist liberal, in the 1930s and 1940s.

This chapter outlines the attempts of journalists in the New Age and the New Statesman to understand and evaluate the events of the Russian Revolution as they occurred, with reference to such figures as Alfred Orage and Julius West. It then describes elements of early nationalities discourse in the writings of Leonard Woolf and J.A. Hobson, who debated the potential of a League of Nations as the basis of a postwar peace. These discourses about the Revolution and League would begin to change as the Revolution developed and Woodrow Wilson threw American weight behind the League.

This chapter analyzes two renowned “new liberal” thinkers, J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse. It first highlights how they figured themselves within narratives charting the evolution of liberal thought and practice, allowing them simultaneously to pay homage to their predecessors while carving out a space for the new liberal project. It then discusses their writings about the settler colonies in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Their accounts of colonialism undermine neat distinctions between “domestic,” “international,” and “imperial” politics and political theory. For Hobson and Hobhouse, as well as for many of their contemporaries, the colonies exhibited characteristics of all three: constitutive elements of the empire, they were nevertheless semi-autonomous states purportedly composed of people of the same nationality and race as the inhabitants of the United Kingdom.