English historicist economist, closely associated to the Marxian and Socialist schools (he was particularly fond of John Ruskin). Hobson was nonetheless an accomplished author, journalist, historian, economist and critic of the materialist methodology of both Classical and Neoclassical economics, he is the closest thing to the American iconoclast Thorstein Veblen that the British Isles produced. However, professionally speaking, he was a more extreme outsider than Veblen: hounded first by the Classical and then the Marshallian orthodoxy, Hobson never attained an academic post, was basically barred from the Political Economy Club and ceaselessly ridiculed in that bastion of Marshallian thought, the Economic Journal.
Hobson's famous 1891 critique of the Classical theory of rent and proposed generalization anticipated the Neoclassical "Marginal Productivity" theory of distribution. However, he later (1909) disputed the "product exhaustion" thesis of that theory, a criticism which several contemporaries (such as Marshall) answered with difficulty. Hobson's fame rests perhaps on his development of a theory of underconsumption (1889, with the businessman and mountaineer A.F. Mummery), which anticipated that of John Maynard Keynes and a theory of imperialism (1902) anticipating Vladimir Lenin. He extended these ideas into an undercomponsumption theory of the trade cycle. His work on social welfare (1901, 1914, 1929) was only slightly better received in his day. Hobson's stock has since risen, not only for the afore-mentioned contributions, but also for his "evolutionist" outlook on economy and society (1894).
Major Works of John A. Hobson
Resources on John A. Hobson