Top 15 John Atkinson Hobson Quotes

Is it not the larger and the longer hope and interest of America to live as a great partner in... a society of nations, rather than to live a life of isolated prosperity... ?

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

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.

The money received for sales has no other significance or value than its power to buy, and trade can only be imaged truly as an exchange of goods for goods in which the processes of selling and of buying are complementary.

Perhaps the worst of the three fallacies, and in a sense the deepest-rooted, is the concept of export trade as of more value than import trade.

Envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce... the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding.

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...

The imputation of political significance to... statistics, taken either in aggregate or in relation to separate countries, as if they were themselves indices of public gain or public loss, has most injurious reactions upon the intelligent understanding of commerce.

The generally accepted image of international trade is one in which a number of trading communities... are engaged in striving each to win for itself, and at the expense of the others, the largest possible share of a strictly limited objective—the world market. ... So far as world or international trade is rightly presented as a competitive process, that competition takes place not between America, Britain, Germany, but between a number of separate American, British, German, firms. The immediate interests of these firms is not directed along political lines.

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.

On what a slippery slope ...international morality reposes.

Corporations are in a sense moral monsters; we say they behave as such and we are disposed to treat them as such. The standard of international morality, particularly in matters of commercial intercourse, is on a still lower level.

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.

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.