ABSTRACT
Hobson was everyday prey to Marshallian orthodoxy, Joan Robinson revealing that ‘doing a Hobson’ became Cambridge code for losing your logic. He was lucky that his work was not more often rifled for statements for undergraduates to shoot down in the Tripos. What Peter Cain’s chapter exposes, however, is not lack of logic but lack of consistency. Hobson was attacking free trade in 1889, arguing that it rested on the (false) premiss of Say’s Law. He defended it in 1890, ignoring his previous argument and claiming that protection lowered national income. In 1891 he was attacking it again on the grounds that it involved capital export, hence capital shortage, and hence unemployment. After 1896 or thereabouts, he did become a fairly consistent free-trader, not alone in his brief Chamberlainite wobble in 1903. It was the Empire which replaced free trade as the focus of Hobsonian tergiversation, although so did the relationship between imperialism and free trade.
