ABSTRACT
J. A. Hobson is best known as an underconsumptionist pre-decessor of Maynard Keynes, and as a critic of imperialism. Hobson was never to hold an academic post, or be elected to the Political Economy Club, or hear anything but the most occasional, half-hearted and condescending praise from more respectable economists. Hobson’s three biographies, John Ruskin, Social Reformer, Veblen and L. T. Hobhouse acknowledge his three main intellectual debts. To Hobson, the social mind is the ultimate arbiter of social welfare, its decisiveness coming from the similarity of individual minds. Hobson’s conception of the individual and social organisms, together with his definition of reason in economic life, leads on to his attack on the foundations of marginalism. Hobson’s main criticism of the marginal principle is that it assumes ‘that the human mind can and does get rid of qualitative differences by referring them to a quantitative standard’.
