Ruskin and the Emergence of Hobson’s New Liberalism

It was Ruskin who convinced Hobson that society was an organism rather than simply the sum of the individuals it contained. Although the latter resisted the idea that economics was no more than a branch of ethics (which Ruskin's critique of the market often implied) he did argue strongly that economic activities had to be seen as part of a complex ‘life', modifying that life and being modified by it.

As Roger Backhouse has shown (Backhouse 2010), within that qualitative framework Hobson was a utilitarian; and the latter also saw Ruskin in the same light (Hobson 1904, 85-6). Indeed, Hobson thought his main task as an economist was to translate Ruskin’s insights, which were scattered through­out his works, into a thorough study of ‘costs’ and ‘utility’, where the main aim of policy was to reduce the first and raise the second as much as possible (Hobson 1904, 97-100). Following Ruskin, he recognised, for example, that cost as measured by money failed to account for the non-monetary costs of brutal, back-breaking, monotonous labour which made the lives of so many unfulfilling in the extreme.

Hobson had to reject some of Ruskin’s most basic ideas. He had no truck with leadership by elites, whether aristocratic or otherwise, frankly em­braced democracy and championed the idea of social mobility through education. At the same time, as a supporter of a reformed capitalism rather than a socialist, he was not, like his fellow Ruskinian William Morris, an egalitarian but, as we shall see, a believer in equality of opportunity, a stance that involved accepting that factors of production could receive differential payments depending on circumstance (Hobson 1904, 176-209). True to that approach, Hobson also argued that the payment of interest was legitimate in so far as it aided growth (Hobson 1904,144-8). And, despite his belief that the good life would be enhanced if more people worked on the land, Hobson knew that Britain could never again become an agricultural society nor was it desirable that it should do so.

Since he was a Darwinian and liberal in the Spencer-Green evolutionary mould, he could not accept wholesale Ruskin’s ideas about intrinsic value. He agreed with Ruskin that much of what was produced and consumed was illth, but he accepted Mill’s - and later Pigou’s - point about exchange determining value in the market and also believed that what was deemed valuable would change over time (Hobson 1904, 101-6). But the differ­ences between them on this issue were not so great as they seemed on the surface. Ruskin accepted that, in a world ignorant of what wealth really was, exchange value ruled in practice. Hobson thought that, once the people were free of poverty and sufficiently educated, they would develop a common view on what the good life was. That would lead them to produce and consume only those goods and services which they had learned to appreciate had the value that would sustain that common life.

Mixing together Ruskin with Spencer, Green and Hobhouse, Hobson believed that society was evolving in a direction which allowed for greater creative freedom, a greater use of the powers of mind and imagination. The role of the social reformer was to hasten on this transformation by urging the adoption of policies which would reduce the unproductive surplus and transfer it to those members of society who needed it for growth both in material, and in mental and moral, terms. For, like Ruskin, Hobson was convinced that the expenditure of the owners of the unproductive surplus was a key factor in maintaining the degrading conditions of work and life endured by the working majority (Hobson 1914, 158). Unnecessary or excessive consumption inexorably begat degrading production and the reverse was also true. There was ‘a necessary relation between getting and spending' (Hobson 1914, 294).

Hobson's attitude to machinery and its place in life was much more cautious than Ruskin's since he recognised its importance in enhancing productivity and its role in abridging wearisome labour. He knew that machinery had come to dominate in the production of many of the necessaries of life but, since these businesses often had monopolistic tendencies, it was right that the state should intervene to regulate prices and ensure decent minimum wages for the workforce (Hobson 1902, 141-54, 174-86). In the longer term, however, as excessive incomes were eliminated by taxation, average living standards rose and leisure time increased, Hobson expected that the bulk of people would spend relatively less of their income on the standardised products of the machine process and more upon individually produced commodities which would reflect the emancipation of the imaginative and moral powers he was convinced had hitherto been squeezed out of people's lives by the pressures of poverty and excessive physical toil. As he put the essence of the matter in 1901:

If social progress be interpreted in purely quantitative terms and taken to consist in the multiplication of human life at a low level of character, using an increased control over natural resources...

It is worth noting that this picture of the good life melded together Ruskin’s stress on the importance of art and artistic expression with the small-scale capitalist economy that radicals since Paine had hoped to see. It is a reminder, too, that Hobson was always a believer in a mixed economy rather than the thoroughly socialised one that the Fabians proposed (Thompson 1994).

Hobson’s vision of the gradual unfolding of the good life in a purified market system modified by government was alien to Ruskin’s static and elite-led society and also far removed from Morris’s anarchic world of plenty brought to fruition by proletarian revolution. But there is no denying the affinities between Hobson’s utopian vision and theirs, or their mutual conviction that the uninhibited pursuit of profit under capit­alism was incompatible with the welfare of society. Like them, Hobson was convinced that the role of machinery and of division of labour - in which, as Ruskin said in The Nature of Gothic, the man was often divided as well as the labour - had to be limited and far more time devoted to creative occupations, reducing the costs of work in terms of painful human effort and enhancing its utility. Like both Ruskin and Morris, Hobson had a very strong sense of the inhibiting effects of overspecialisation, both mental and physical, and his work betrays a deep longing for a society in which all would participate in the production of its routine commodities (Hobson 1914,314) and where everyone would be able to express themselves in craft or similar kinds of work where the division of labour and its alienating effects were not experienced (Hobson 1902, 181-3, 224-37).

Nonetheless, as seen above, he was worried, as were both Ruskin and Morris, by the possibility that progress would actually take a quantitative path and that could spell disaster. ‘We have’, he claimed in 1914, ‘grown so accustomed to regard business as the absorbing occupation of man... that a society based on any other scale of values seems inconceivable’. Previous high civilizations which had valued the good life above material possession had rested on a basis of unfree labour, but civilisation had now reached the point when, ‘for the first time in history two conditions are substantially attained which make it technically possible for a whole people to throw off the dominion of toil. Machinery and Democracy are these two conditions’ (Hobson 1914, 241).

Together, these forces could make industry ‘the servant of all men’ but only if, ‘after the wholesome organic needs are satisfied, the stimulation of new material wants should be kept in check’ and he continued: ‘for if every class continues constantly to develop new complicated demands, which strain the sinews of industry even under a socially-ordered ma­chine economy, taking the whole of its increased control of Nature in new demands upon Nature for economic satisfaction, the total burden of Industry on Man is nowise lightened. If we are to secure adequate leisure for all men, and so displace the tyranny of the business life by the due assertion of other higher and more varied types of life, we must manage to check the lust for competitive materialism which Industrialism has implanted in our hearts’ (Hobson 1914, 242). Or, as he put it elsewhere, ‘Absorbed in earning a livelihood, we have no time or energy to live.’ So it was important ‘to keep life simple in regard to material consumption’ (Hobson 1914, 290, 315-16). One casualty of an unchecked desire for material progress would, he thought, inevitably be democracy itself. ‘More leisure is a prime essential of democratic government. There can be no really operative system of popular self-government as long as the bulk of the people do not possess the spare time and energy to equip themselves for effective participation in politics.’ Other forms of voluntary social interaction would also be hindered and the growth of social consciousness retarded (Hobson 1914, 248-9).

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