John Atkinson Hobson Quotes

[T]he tendency of growing civilisation on the national scale has been more and more to divert the struggle for life from a struggle with other nations to a struggle with environment, and so to utilise the fruits of reason as to divert a larger and larger proportion of energy to struggles for intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods rather than for goods which tax the powers of the earth, and which, conforming to the law of diminishing returns, are apt to bring them into conflict with other nations.

Nations are represented not merely as self-centered, independent moral systems, but as, in some degree, mutually repellent systems. This notion is partly the product of the false patriotic teaching of our schools and press, which seek to feed our sense of national unity more upon exclusive than inclusive sentiments. Nations are represented as rivals and competitors in some struggle for power, or greatness, or prestige, instead of as coöperators in the general advance of civilization.

[T]he instinct for control of land, drives back to the earliest times when a wide range of land was necessary for a food supply for men or cattle, and is linked on to the "trek" habit, which survives more powerfully than is commonly supposed in civilised peoples. ... The animal lust of struggle, once a necessity, survives in the blood.

This is, in fact, the philosophical defence of progressive socialism, that human progress requires that one after another the lower material animal functions shall be reduced to routine, in order that a larger amount of individual effort may be devoted to the exercise of higher functions and the cultivation by strife of higher qualities.

We now stand face to face with the main objection so often raised against all endeavours to remedy industrial and social diseases by the expansion of public control. ...The strife, danger, and waste of industrial competition are necessary conditions to industrial vitality.

The richly nourished patriotism of war breeds divisions and antagonisms which are easily exploited afterwards by political, racial, religious, and cultural passions, but most of all by economic interests.

If the interests of consumers and the interests of producers weighed equally in the eyes of governments, as they should, the strongest of all obstacles to a peaceful harmonious society of nations would be overcome. For the suspicions, jealousies, and hostilities of nations are inspired more by the tendency of groups of producers to misrepresent their private interests as the good of their respective countries than by any other single circumstance.

All progress, from primitive savagedom to modern civilisation, will... appear as consisting in the progressive socialisation of the lower functions, the stoppage of lower forms of competition and of the education of the more brutal qualities, in order that a larger and larger proportion of individual activity may be engaged in the exercise of higher functions, the practice of competition upon higher planes, and the education of higher forms of fitness.

It is untrue that the world market is strictly limited, with the consequence that every advance of one group of traders is at the expense of another group. The world market is indefinitely expansible and is always expanding...

Higher progress can only be purchased by an economy of the work of lower progress, the free, conscious expression of higher individuality by the routine subordination of lower individuality.

As nations advance towards civilisation it becomes less needful for them to contend with one another for land and food to support their increasing numbers, because their increased control of the industrial arts enables them to gain what they want by conquering nature instead of conquering their fellow-men.

The case is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to utilise a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, and which we call Art, we pass outside the limits of matter and are no longer the slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns. So long as we continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel, we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours, clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, i.e. artistic, goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we shall be likewise free.

Economic nationalism means protective and discriminative tariffs, and a conservation of national, imperial or allied resources within a circle of favored beneficiaries.

Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking.

Industrial progress would undoubtedly be slower under state-control, because the very object of such control is to divert a larger proportion of human genius and effort from these occupations in order to apply them in producing higher forms of wealth. It is not, however, right to assume that progress in the industrial arts would cease under state-industry; such progress would be slower, and would itself partake of a routine character—a slow, continuous adjustment of the mechanism of production and distribution to the slowly-changing needs of the community.