HOBSON

Hobson

Hobson

This paper highlights the ideas of John A Hobson, the famous British economist about imperialism. Hobson was unsympathetic to most of the orthodox economic views of his time, but also he confesses that he never felt at home with full-blooded socialists (Winslow, 1948, 91). He had no use for Marx's labor-cost theory of value or for the Hegelian dialectic, which, he says, "used an empty intellectual paradox to impart an air of mysticism into quite intelligible historic processes."

The central idea in any theory of economic imperialism is "surplus value." Hobson's conception of surplus value differs from that of Marx and his ...