Read the book – it’s Hobson’s choice.
Has the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition actually read J A Hobson’s “Imperialism”? That is the question posed by today’s Times.
J A Hobson (not to be confused with J R Hartley) “Imperialism: A Study” 1902. As I remember it was a green book with a black spine or was it a black book with a green spine? I think our copy went in the book cull of 2017 when we moved house. It probably went to Oxfam – going the same way as “Green Eggs and Ham” and the “Very Hungry Caterpillar”. Books from a different era outgrown by our family.
To be fair, I read a lot of Lenin as a student as my course on Russian History required. But pre cursors to Lenin, like Hobson, that was going a bit too far so poor old Hobson, was, I’m sorry to say, earnestly bought but never read.
Also when I was a student there was a seemingly very sincere post grad who went around giving his socialist pamphlets to all those who would stop and listen for a few moments. Having given up and taken one it was only sometime later that I noticed that after a few pages of hackneyed guff about the “commanding heights” of the economy the pamphlet blamed all the world’s ills on China and the “yellow peril”.
So politicians, beware the book you have never read, but sits pretentiously on your bookshelf ready to embarrass you in the future! And if you haven’t read it – best to own up!
Here’s my top 5 of books people of a learned and Liberal persuasion pretend they have read. In reverse order:
- The Power of the Powerless – Vaclav Havel
- Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft
- The Economic Consequences of the Peace – J M Keynes
- Two Treatises of Government – John Locke
- And of course, the big Daddy of them all coming in at Number One “On Liberty” – John Stuart Mill
Which ones have I actually read? All the way through? I couldn’t possibly comment. What about you?
* Ruth Bright has been a councillor in Southwark and Parliamentary Candidate for Hampshire East
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11 Comments
Agree with the general tenor of Ruth’s comments. History can often spring a surprising trap. Try Churchill’s views on eugenics whe he was Liberal Home Secretary for example.
Oddly enough, from my distant memory of the days when I was at UCL, I recall that Hobson was a Liberal when he wrote the book in question just after the Boer War and that it wasn’t until after the First World War that he joined the I.L.P. He was also a friend of Joe Bourke’s pal and inspiration Henry George.
A close reading of some of the Asquith family’s attitudes to Edwin Montagu would raise a few eyebrows these days….. although they were certainly a more tolerant lot than the Tory Party.
Read Hansard for the attacks on Montagu by the Tories during the Amritsar massacre debates for a flavour of it…… and of course on the Marconi debate on Samuel and Isaacs.
Different times.
I bought and read some books by Vaclav Havel, in English, when in Prague.
I also went to a theatre in west London and watched three of his plays in one Saturday afternoon and was therefore not at the Poll Tax demonstration (which became a riot).
Havel was imprisoned by the communists. the prison governor was asked to keep an eye on him and write regular reports.
The governor found that writing reports was difficult, and there was nothing to say, so he asked Havel to write the reports. Havel said that he did not want to inform on anyone, especially not himself.
He became President of post-communist Czechoslovakia and spent his first few hours designing uniforms, so as to graphically demonstrate that there had been a change of regime.
He received numerous prestigious international awards.
Every time he was elected President of Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic he ordered an amnesty for prisoners with short sentences. He visited and spoke to a gathering of Romany Gypsies who had tended to be socially disadvantaged over jobs, housing and recipients of verbal abuse when visiting dance halls.
He was a heavy smoker, so there were worries about his health, but the British Ambassador assured us that “he was always available when needed”.
Richard – the trouble with the stuff Havel wrote in prison is that he meanders around verbally to try to get round the prison censor and it is in translation so it is sometimes a bit hard going! Worth it though and very sad that he is out of fashion as a thinker.
David – My favourite pretentious comment of all time from one of my lecturers was: “I have read Max Weber in five languages and not got on with him in any of them!’
Off to vote now……..Ruth
Well, I have read On Liberty, and I’ve read some of A Vindication of the Rights of Women…
Yay!!! Go Daniel x
Would anyone dare write a critique of Shakespeare if the same microscope that seems to follow Corby everywhere were used?
Would Jonathan Freedland write the same Guardian articles were the foreward written about “The 39 Steps”, “Greenmantle”, etc. My childhood ‘William’ and ‘Biggles’ books would not pass such scrutiny and as for the comments about ‘the Margate End of Pier shows’ in “Three Men in a Boat” the less said the better.
These books represent what passed for mainstream thinking of 100+ years ago ( John Buchan and John Hobson died within months of each other)
I sometimes thank heaven that my degree did not require such reading as Hobson and that my pleasure in reading Buchan, Crompton, Johns and Jerome are not spoied by their dated format.
I’ve read Keynes, Locke and Mill: does that qualify me for a consolation prize, perhaps? And I once met Havel…. ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ has some good arguments for integrating the European economy, east and west, which I’ve used on occasions in academic and political discussions. Locke isn’t a full Liberal in our terms, but a relevant ancestor. Anyone who wants to question the fully Liberal nature of early ‘liberals’ should read the 1689 Declaration of Rights: it’s virulently anti-Catholic in places.
Hobson, Hobhouse and T.H Green were all influential Liberal thinkers and radicals that together developed modern social liberalism in the late Victorian era.
Their writings provide a revealing insight into how reflective liberals thought about the future of world order as the Victorian era came to an end and the 20th century dawned.
Hobson explored the relationship between democracy, empire, and international politics charting the evolution of liberal thought while carving out a space for the new liberal project.
Both Hobson and Hobhouse wrote about the settler colonies in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Their accounts of colonialism undermine neat distinctions between domestic, international and “imperial” politics or political theory. For Hobson and Hobhouse, the colonies were semiautonomous states purportedly composed of people of the same “nationality” and “race” as the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The British colonial empire, according to this perspective, could be viewed as an embryonic intermediary institution occupying the space between the territorially delimited modern state and an all-encompassing world state. Grounded in the cultural singularity of the “British race,” it promised to unite colonial communities scattered across the planet, creating a vast polity that would maintain or expand British geopolitical strength while acting simultaneously as an agent of global progress. This was the apotheosis of British imperial ambition.
The New Statesman carries a good article on the history of anti-semitism on the left https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/05/j-hobson-jeremy-corbyn-and-history-left-wing-anti-semitism writing “Hobson’s views were derived largely from his belief that the Boer War was being fought on behalf of Jewish financiers, a view that was widespread on the British left at that time. In 1900 the Trades Union Congress passed a resolution claiming the war was being fought “to secure the gold fields of South Africa for cosmopolitan Jews, most of whom had no patriotism and no country”. Even the great Keir Hardie wrote in Labour Leader, the newspaper of his Independent Labour Party, that “modern imperialism is really run by half a dozen financial houses, many of them Jewish, to whom politics is a counter in the game of buying and selling securities”.
If we’re talking Liberal writers and relevant ancestors, I’d have to include John Donne and Charles Dickens.
‘No man is an island’ is a pure statement of what I take to be Liberalism…. and it’s possible to make a case that Donne was the first ‘Liberal’ MP (for Brackley – and then for Taunton). He was not without blemish (but then which of us is not ? ).
Nor was Dickens without blemish…. but there is a strong social liberal strain in his work – particularly attacks on the chilly utilitarian Benthamites (a parallel with the Orangista tendency ?).
There’s also a case to be made for William Cobbett. Rural Rides is a classic.
‘No man is an island’ is a pure statement of what I take to be Liberalism.’
Good spot David.
And of course, in the words of P.F. Clarke, ‘it was Hobson who hunted down the individualistic fallacy’ of classical liberalism not only in economics but in ‘all its guises’.
Bill – I am not on speaking terms with the relative who tracked a copy of P F Clarke’s “Lancashire and the New Liberalism” down for me, it cost them a fortune!
David – William Cobbett: “the labourer must have his belly full and be free from fear; and this belly full must come to him from out of his wages, and not from benevolence of any description”. Gorgeous.
William Wallace – We are in “I danced with a man, who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales” territory here. I am “talking” on LDV with someone who met Vaclav Havel. Feeling very star struck indeed.