ABSTRACT
J.A.Hobson was born in British liberalism’s golden age, and died at a time when liberalism seemed finally eclipsed. 1858 was a year of prosperity, of domestic stability, and of political optimism; it also marks the start of a long period of international peace so far as Britain was concerned. By contrast, 1940 was the year in which Germany overran Belgium, Holland and northern France, and Britain’s real war with her began. Much of Hobson’s writing in the years between, and particularly in the 1910s and 1920s, was devoted to trying to account for and if possible reverse this devastating fall from grace. For Hobson it was more devastating than for some others, because of his early ‘steeping’, as he put it in a lecture in 1920, ‘in the principles of Cobden and his British school of liberals’.1
