HOBSON, MACHINES, AND HISTORY

There remains no definitive biography of Hobson and since his own memoir was restricted to his intellectual formation there is, for such an eclectic and popular writer, a relative dearth of detail or anecdote. Before considering his work on machinery, therefore, it is first necessary to situate him in relation to the historiography of the period. The status of Hobson's economic thought remains as disputed today as it was during his lifetime and so serves as a useful marker of the contested nature of that field. Hobson was frequently dismissed by neoclassical contemporaries such as Alfred Marshall as a dilettante who did not understand the subject sufficiently. However, to restrict an assessment to the orthodox voices that have, in retrospect, formed a master discourse in economics would not fully represent his reception by contemporaries. To a broader range of critics, including H. N. Brailsford, Hobson was “the most original and persuasive thinker of his day on economic questions.”Footnote ¹⁰ The Ratcliffes' suggestion that “[a]n epoch in economic thought was made when, with his friend Mummery, he published (1889), The Physiology of Industry,” appears less eccentric in light of John Maynard Keynes's agreement that the book was the first of “many volumes in which for nearly fifty years Mr Hobson has flung himself with unflagging, but almost unavailing, ardour and courage against the ranks of orthodoxy.”Footnote ¹¹ Of Hobson's many other interlocutors the most significant was Lenin who, despite dismissing him as a bourgeois reformer, made use of Hobson's celebrated critique of imperialism in his own work.Footnote ¹² This ambivalent reception continues to the present and is marked by the recent appearance of entries on Hobson in both orthodox and radical dictionaries of economics.Footnote ¹³

Hobson was, of course, aware that his work divided opinion and offered a succinct account of the reasons. In his autobiographical Confessions of an Economic Heretic, written shortly before his death, Hobson explained that the two “heresies” he was seen to have committed ran to the heart of both orthodox economics and Victorian morality.Footnote ¹⁴ Hobson questioned the basis of the classical economic theories that prescribed laissez-faire and also the principle that thrift and saving were incontrovertibly good. The latter formed part of Hobson's belief in the possibility of underconsumption, a theory that stressed the dangers of oversaving (especially by the idle rich) as part of a demand-side account of economic depression. Although not the first to hold these views, Hobson was ostracized by academic economists and prevented from lecturing in the University of London.Footnote ¹⁵ In these heresies, according to one commentator, could be “found the explanation of the singular fact that Mr. Hobson has never occupied any position as a teaching economist in this country.”Footnote ¹⁶ Hobson made a virtue out of necessity and, instead, forged an independent career writing and lecturing, free from what he considered the dogma of academic economics.Footnote ¹⁷

Despite this iconoclasm, Hobson's work can be seen as consonant with New Liberalism: a strand of social-liberal thought that emerged in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ Although recognizing Hobson's centrality to this milieu, both Stefan Collini and Peter Clarke accord Hobson less prominence than they do Graham Wallas, J. L. Hammond and L. T. Hobhouse, while in a more recent landmark study of this period, John Burrow regrets that despite tugging at his conscience, Hobson needed to be excluded due to a lack of space.Footnote ¹⁹ Michael Freeden has done most to rehabilitate Hobson by stressing his contributions to the canon of political thought.Footnote ²⁰ Nonetheless, Hobson's preoccupation with the machinery question has been consistently overlooked. A possible reason for this is that the question of machinery has rarely been acknowledged as a political one and so has not greatly interested historians of political thought.Footnote ²¹ This trend within British intellectual history becomes especially visible with respect to Hobson and so represents a lacuna that this article seeks in part to address. Two of Hobson's first three books were The Physiology of Industry (1889) and The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1894), and his interest in machinery continued over the following twenty years. Yet Freeden's 1978 book The New Liberalism—which does place Hobson in center stage—contains no mention of machines or technology.Footnote ²² This reflects a great deal of the general histories written about Britain's second industrial revolution, and, strangely, a search of the indices of the four books discussed above reveals no reference to any of the terms “machine,” “technology,” “technical,” “industry,” or “mechanical.”Footnote ²³ Similarly, those landmark studies of the long fin de siècle that do engage with material conditions are colored by a form of presentism that skews their attention towards those artifacts that would in hindsight go on to shape the world of today.Footnote ²⁴ While it is clearly important to chart the arrival of the first automobiles and airplanes around the turn of the century, the year 1901 was more significant for being the historical high point of British industrial employment; with millions then at work in factories, their experiences are perhaps of greater contemporary significance than the relatively small number of automobiles on the roads.Footnote ²⁵

The history of technology has often had an awkward relation to broader questions in British history and so has remained strangely marginal.Footnote ²⁶ However, when understood in its fullest context as both knowledge and practice, theory and object, technology (and its history) can suggest modes of explanation that are otherwise inaccessible. For a small group of social investigators in late nineteenth-century Britain, and above all for Hobson, machinery was the connective tissue that bound political economy to ethics, aesthetics, and politics. In order to make sense of Hobson's thought and its context we must, likewise, engage with what was clearly one of his major concerns. Despite the centrality of machinery to the history of economic thought, it has tended to be conceptualized too thinly to have been taken up by many historians as a concern in itself, with “technology” often serving as an unexamined code-word for an inevitable force of historical change, experienced in a uniform way.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, the history of the concept of “technology” itself—this crucial twentieth-century keyword—has yet to be written, and so its use remains marked by habitual anachronism: the word “technology” did not exist in its current English form before around 1900 and yet historians deploy it routinely in a way long prohibited in comparable cases.Footnote ²⁸ It is sometimes the case that historians reproduce the trends they study. Just as nineteenth-century attempts to investigate the role of machinery were often conducted haltingly, in impoverished isolation from broader forms of social inquiry, so the question of technology has remained at the edges of the broad canvas of historical research, investigated more often as a specialist problem in a subfield of the history of science, rather than as a part of social, political, or intellectual history.

This historiographical sequestration of technology is ironic since the historical mode has often been the starting point for those social investigators who have sought to discuss the effects of machinery. This was especially true in late nineteenth-century Britain, a society in the midst of rapid technological change, in which the first histories of industrialization were also beginning to be written.Footnote ²⁹ This was Hobson's mode, but by treating machinery diachronically—as a historical phenomenon—he was also highlighting its contingency as a social and economic factor. Hobson believed that the machine had been determinative for the past and the present but, unlike many of his influential contemporaries, he held that its role in the future was still to be debated and decided, rather than being self-evident or natural.Footnote ³⁰

A STUDY OF MACHINE PRODUCTION

Hobson's ethicism and his holism are often mentioned as forming his organic conception of political economy; however, it is not always easy to know how this worked in practice. The case of machinery provides a concrete example of what an ethical political economy looks like and why holism was a necessary approach to producing it. If Hobson's concern was to preserve the human element of economic analysis, this meant thinking about what people actually experienced and how they behaved, both at work and after it. This Ruskinian impulse directed attention to consumption as well as production, and demanded some account of the machine, since, to Hobson, the machine appeared to have determined production completely and, indirectly, consumption as well.Footnote ³¹ Only an analysis that was systematic enough to include these diverse elements, and yet was unconstrained by narrow, disciplinary boundaries could account for the diffuse impact of machinery—and this was what Hobson attempted.

The central statement of Hobson's thinking on machinery comes in The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production. Initially published as part of Havelock Ellis's popular “Contemporary Science Series” in 1894, it was expanded in the course of four editions and was among Hobson's most frequently reprinted books.Footnote ³² In The Evolution of Modern Capitalism, Hobson reprised the classic themes of the machinery question previously posed between 1815 and 1848, addressing the problems of technological unemployment, wages, the working day, skill, working conditions (both physical and psychological), the spatial concentration of factories, monopolies, and product quality, restating them for his own time.Footnote ³³ Hobson concluded that while some specific problems associated with machine production had been addressed by the factory legislation that had accumulated since the mid-century, the fundamental difficulties had not been tackled.

Setting out his aims, Hobson claimed that the text was intended as a bridge between “the wider philosophic survey of treatises on Social Evolution and the special studies of modern machine-industry contained in such works as Babbage's Economy of Manufactures and Ure's Philosophy of Manufactures.” The principle of evolution was employed in order to mark the subject matter as one “in process of organic change” as opposed to a static phenomenon. Hobson explained his focus on machines in this way:

Hobson presented his subject as “bewildering” and “complex,” while his claim that it had been “so imperfectly explored” reflected the dearth of existing analyses of technology. Although Britain was in the midst of its second industrial revolution, there was, in 1893, no obvious work to which one could turn for an account of machinery as a social and economic phenomenon. It was for this reason that he signaled Babbage and Ure as his points of reference and so indicated his continuity with the machinery debates of the 1830s. Although these works were sixty years old at the time Hobson wrote this text, they remained the place for him to begin.Footnote ³⁵

By using the phrase “machinery as a factor in industrial evolution,” Hobson was not merely setting out evolution as a favored mode of analysis, so typical of this period among social investigators, but he was also following the founders of economic history—W. J. Ashley and William Cunningham—in applying the idea of evolution specifically to industry.Footnote ³⁶ This phrase also allowed Hobson adroitly to allude to Arnold Toynbee's idea of the “Industrial Revolution”—a concept that was at this time beginning to take hold as a recognized historical framework—while simultaneously rejecting its general validity. Like Ashley and Cunningham, Toynbee himself had been ambivalent about the idea of revolution: an idea that appealed to publishers more than it did to historians who sought—then as now—to question its fitness as a model for change. In this sense, Hobson can be seen as participating in a process through which the Toynbean tradition of industrial historiography was gradually refined but that did not produce any disciplinary legacy in the twentieth century. Like some of his predecessors, Hobson sought to assimilate a diverse range of elements into one narrative, although his ambition was more singular. Hobson wanted to make sense, specifically, of how machines had shaped working conditions, economic prospects, and social life; but, unlike the historians, Hobson's story would be told in the language of ethics. The resulting text takes an unusual form, combining history and economics, and is thus marked by inevitable strengths and weaknesses. Remarking on this eclecticism, critics have questioned the extent to which Hobson was truly a historian.Footnote ³⁷ However, this is to misapprehend the intent of an ethicist who was polemical as much as analytical, and who was therefore happy to synthesize the work of others in assembling his case rather than taking the disinterested and nuanced approach later valorized by professional historians. The final chapters of the book, which discuss the nature of the industrial city and the role of women in the workplace, would have been unlikely to find space in many orthodox works of economics; and similarly, Hobson's creation of a single narrative extending from premodern history to an analysis of the Standard Oil Company, is an example of the unitary vision that a political account of machines has demanded but rarely found, in the 1890s as in the present.

Hobson's key insight in The Evolution of Modern Capitalism was to reconnect the dissenting theory of underconsumption to the rise of machine production. A founding axiom of orthodox economics was Say's Law, according to which production and consumption would tend to a happy state of equilibrium in which underconsumption was a theoretical impossibility. When this general theory emerged in the earlier nineteenth century it had been contested by various figures but nevertheless became a central precept of economic science.Footnote ³⁸ Hobson, on the other hand, saw underconsumption as a constant risk in a machine-based system of laissez-faire and, in particular, as the cause of the economic stagnation Britain had suffered to different degrees for two decades. The symptom of underconsumption was in what Hobson considered the unproductive surplus; that is, excessive profits neither reinvested in physical plant nor spent on consumption. While the notion of the surplus has been rightly highlighted as the signal feature of Hobson's brand of underconsumptionism, his account of the origins of surplus has not been discussed.Footnote ³⁹ Hobson's controversial first book, The Physiology of Industry (1889), had outlined the demand-side mechanisms through which underconsumption caused stagnation (such as oversaving); his most famous book, Imperialism (1902), went on to describe the political outcome of this phenomenon by accounting for Britain's overseas expansion in terms of its need to dispose of surplus products. In the period between Hobson's writing of these two landmark books, underconsumption was brought into stark relief by the related—but analytically distinct—phenomenon of overproduction in Britain's factories. Considering this first decade of Hobson's career within this framework can help illuminate the emergence of his political analysis of machinery. It was in The Evolution of Modern Capitalism, written roughly halfway between The Physiology of Industry and Imperialism (in 1893–94), that Hobson produced an account of machinery that blamed it for exacerbating this anomalous feature of capitalism. The idea that an economy could simultaneously underconsume and overproduce was anathema to neoclassical economists and, yet, Hobson saw this double scourge as both the cause of British economic depression and also the motivation for the nation's ruinous overseas adventures.Footnote ⁴⁰

On the home front, Hobson could not have been clearer: machine production was both “the efficient cause of industrial disease” and the only way to analyze it.Footnote ⁴¹ Despite its potential benefits, machinery had precipitated the economic depression of the 1890s and was the concrete element in Hobson's larger underconsumptionist schema. Although central to his notion of the surplus, his critique of political economy and, eventually, of imperialism, the idea of the machine has not figured in accounts of Hobson thought. This is all the more puzzling given that The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production was among Hobson's most visible works and was constantly updated in the light of new theoretical and empirical data.Footnote ⁴²The Evolution of Modern Capitalism was frequently mentioned in Hobson's obituaries, yet, in modern commentaries, the book is often passed over, while its true focus—machinery—is elided by the frequent removal of its crucial sub-title.Footnote ⁴³The Evolution of Modern Capitalism is vital for understanding Hobson's trajectory and restoring the book's centrality helps makes sense of Hobson's otherwise inexplicable assessment of it years later: “as I look back upon it, I find that it contains in germ nearly all the departures from economic orthodoxy which my subsequent writings disclosed.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Hobson came to write the book because the Fabian William Clarke, originally commissioned by Havelock Ellis, was unable to fulfill the commitment and passed it on to him instead.Footnote ⁴⁵ If one infers from this piece of good fortune that machinery was an incongruous topic for Hobson to have taken on for a monograph, this would be a mistake: having written a detailed article on the subject the previous year, he was perfectly primed.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hobson had been asked to write a book on capitalism and could have taken any of several approaches rather than focus on machines. However, during the year in which he was drafting the book, Hobson had become increasingly active at the South Place Institute, giving and attending various lectures and discourses at what was, perhaps, the liveliest intellectual space in 1890s London. The urgent question of industrial unrest—set against the backdrop of the ongoing Royal Commission on Labour—had led the institute to devote its Sunday afternoon lecture series of 1893–94 to the theme “workers on their industries.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Although intended to provide a forum for “possible remedies for their grievances,” each week—on forty-eight consecutive occasions—representatives of different trades, from bricklayers to typesetters to engineers, reported gloomily on the effects of machinery on their particular industries. Notwithstanding the air of defeatism, the series was deemed to have been a success, occupying the Institute for two years and being much better attended than the contemporaneous evening lectures on the growth of British imperialism. As well as being topical, the lectures provided a rare set of first-hand testimonies presented with a singular focus on the means of production.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is almost certain that Hobson would have attended this series while composing The Evolution of Modern Capitalism. Given that he gave several discourses himself during the course of the series—the South Place equivalent to a Sunday morning sermon—Hobson would have been in the same building just before the weekly lectures began. It is easy to imagine these discussions about machinery percolating into his thought, and shaping his conviction that it was through this particular lens that the evolution of capitalism should be viewed.

In his earlier book The Problems of Poverty (1891) Hobson included a short section concerning Alfred Marshall's belief in the positive influence of machinery. At that time, although Hobson noted certain of the costs incurred in the division of labor, he accepted the substance of Marshall's claims for machine work and was especially positive about its impact on consumers.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the course of the following year, two books on machinery were published by R. W. Cooke-Taylor and Joseph Shield Nicholson that sharpened Hobson's perspective. A year before publishing The Evolution of Modern Capitalism, Hobson rehearsed his theoretical claims in a polemical article that placed Marshall, Nicholson, and Cooke-Taylor into a productive disagreement and that allowed him to elaborate his own assessment of machinery. Cooke-Taylor was the son and namesake of a famous free-trader of the 1840s and had become Her Majesty's Inspector of Factories. This expertise led him to author several volumes on the factory system, the latest of which Hobson had read and which he found implausibly optimistic.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nicholson, on the other hand, was an established academic economist whose essay about machinery can be seen to have shaped Hobson's views most profoundly on the subject.

JOSEPH SHIELD NICHOLSON

It is only by tracing the influence of Nicholson that one can make sense of Hobson's trajectory with regard to the machinery question. Joseph Shield Nicholson (1850–1927) was Professor of Political Economy at Edinburgh and a disciple of his adopted country's best-known economist, leading the Times to say at his death that “He knew his Wealth of Nations like the Scottish peasant knows his Bible, and believed in it almost as thoroughly.”Footnote ⁵¹ Nicholson was awarded the first ever Cobden Prize—named in honor of the free-trader Richard Cobden—for his 1878 essay on machinery that was reissued as a book in 1892 and gained widespread attention.Footnote ⁵² Nicholson's was the first economic study of machinery published in English during the 1890s and was Hobson's most significant source on the topic. Whereas “many writers of repute had clearly and fully discussed the good effects of Machinery, hardly one had noticed the evils inherent in its use.”Footnote ⁵³ The problems caused by machinery may have been obvious to many, but had not been analyzed in detail by those within the orthodox tradition of political economy. Nicholson was therefore offering a corrective to the received view articulated by the French political economist Michel Chevalier, whom he claimed “writes in an optimist view which appears to me unwarranted.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The political contours of this debate are not straightforward to navigate with twentieth-century categories of left and right that, in any case, are not reliable predictors of attitudes to technological questions. The British reception of Marx and Engels remained patchy at this time and, notwithstanding Marx's critique of the division of labor under capitalism, a position on the political left would by no means entail a critique of machinery per se.Footnote ⁵⁵ Attitudes to machinery among socialists were as diverse during the period—from William Morris to the technocratic Fabians—as they were among economic conservatives. Hobson was neither a socialist nor a conservative and it is instructive that he was agnostic with regard to the market so long as the role of machinery could be radically redefined within it.Footnote ⁵⁶ For a mainstream economic thinker such as Nicholson who subscribed to free trade, the question of machinery was potentially a vexing one since it threw up simultaneously radical and orthodox conclusions for which there were few precedents within the received corpus of political economy. This was precisely the sort of challenge that appealed to Hobson.

Nicholson's investigation concluded that the greatest evils of machinery were the irregularity of work and the fluctuation of wages that were “the inevitable result” of a machine-based economy out of control. Yet despite such claims, Nicholson's essay is curiously ambivalent. The relentlessly negative detail of his own discussion does not appear to diminish the overall tenor of the narrative, which is governed by the assumption that the introduction of machinery is usually beneficial. This discrepancy can be explained by the different types of material included in the analysis and by the different explanatory levels on which they operate. On the one hand, Nicholson reported the enormous forces at work during mechanization, and the statistics of European industrial growth he quoted were testament to the sublime power of machines to change whole economies. Quoting Chevalier's figures with relish, he claimed that in 1840 one man plus a machine could do the same amount of cotton spinning that in 1769 would have taken three hundred and twenty men. By 1855, the French economist had recalculated this to a ratio of seven hundred to one. The production of cotton paled into insignificance, according to Nicholson, when compared with the impact of steam power in general. A recent calculation by a German economist had shown that the total steam power in the world was equivalent to the force of twenty-five million working horses. However, this machine force was generated without the need for any food, except that of the miners digging the coal, whose tiny energy consumption as compared with that output by the coal they produced was in a ratio of one to a thousand.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such awesome transformations were recounted in a range of contemporary texts and can be seen contributing to the more general discourse of “fear and wonder” that helped manufacture consent for new technology.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, the focus of such discussions tended to remain at a macro level and had no way to incorporate the local impacts of mechanization, which were only registered in more subjective idioms. This representational problem perhaps explains the sudden shift in register that occurs in the middle of Nicholson's essay when he suddenly inserts the following lines of verse:

Although unattributed, these lines would have been familiar to many readers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1843 poem about child labor, “The Cry of the Children.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The absence of personal testimony from traditional forms of economic discourse may have invited Nicholson's somewhat gauche use of poetry to indicate that all was not well in the factories. The final line quoted, in which the children plea for a stop to the machines, is a strange intervention into a prize-winning essay in Cobdenite political economy, and demonstrates the tension between different approaches to industrial questions existing within a single text. Nicholson's essay exemplifies the more general trend in which the discussion of machinery bifurcated into the incommensurable languages of technical economics on the one hand and Romantic laments on the other. Although writing before the systematic study of industrial health or fatigue, the assumed progress represented by higher wages and factory legislation appears untainted by the accumulating evidence of the “pulmonary mischief” and other ills suffered by factory workers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Recognizing the difficulty of assimilating such discrepant data, it was on two points in particular that Hobson would extend Nicholson's analysis in a skeptical direction. First, any increase in wages was worthless if it cost workers time and energy since they would be left unable to benefit from the increase. Second, any evaluation of machinery depended on the scale of the analysis. That is to say, it was not fair to compare the benefits at a global level, with the costs at a local one.Footnote ⁶¹ If the only expression of the costs of machinery was to be found in poems and laments, then this was not the basis for a proper analysis, and still less could it contribute to social reform.

In a passage that Hobson read very closely, Nicholson sought to explore the structural properties of the machine economy, beginning with the effects of improved transport and communication. An analogy with meteorology was often assumed to hold by economists: just as air moves between areas at different pressures, capital and labor were seen to move accordingly to the locations where they would operate most profitably.Footnote ⁶² In reality, however, Nicholson claimed that such a comparison was misleading since, with respect to the new facility of information, labor was much less mobile than capital: “it is, I think, clear that the capitalist has gained by far the most. Of all markets the labour market is the least organized.” Whereas the capitalist considers a range of external facts, from rumors of war to speculation, crop yields and more, “hardly one of them is considered even by the most intelligent workmen before its effect is felt. Thus Capital has taken full advantage of its increased means of obtaining knowledge, Labour scarcely at all.”Footnote ⁶³ To Nicholson, this fact vindicated Adam Smith's claim that “man is of all baggage the most difficult to be transported.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Nicholson was fond of this phrase, which he used on several occasions and took to be a truism of industrial relations.Footnote ⁶⁵ It was, however, a slight misquotation, as Smith actually used the word “luggage” rather than “baggage” in the original passage.Footnote ⁶⁶ Nicholson's influence can thus be gauged by the fact that his error in quotation was introduced into the work of several other writers—including Hobson—who went on to quote Smith but with Nicholson's exact mistake.Footnote ⁶⁷

Nicholson sought to relate the specific damage done to workers to a more panoramic view of the machine economy with the use of an organic metaphor. A century earlier, Smith had warned that it would be unwise for Britain to rely on too few outlets for its products: the dependence on colonial markets, for example, had dangerously skewed the economy. “Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders scarce incident to those in which all the parts are more properly proportioned.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Smith wrote this passage with regard to colonial policy, but for Nicholson it could now be read as directly relevant to the dangers attaching to machinery, which served to concentrate industry into an unbalanced monolith, exposed to even worse fluctuations than those caused by the colonial trade. With half a million people by 1881 working in factories producing cotton, any small fluctuation in its price was potentially devastating.Footnote ⁶⁹

Nicholson argued that while the machinery of communication had distributed markets around the world, it had also bound the economy more closely together and exacerbated the problem:

The Greek “μέγα ζῶον” in this passage means literally “large animal” and was intended to indicate the macrocosmic organic unity of the global economy of the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷¹ Economic writers—from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century—have frequently adopted natural scientific metaphors to articulate their normative visions.Footnote ⁷² For Nicholson, it was preferable that the economy resemble a starfish, admired for its durability, rather than a large animal, which was vulnerable to the smallest attack on any part of its body. In his essay, therefore, the idea of the machine emerges as unstable, its valuation shifting throughout: at times Nicholson appears to have been as awed by mechanization as many of his contemporaries, convinced of its glorious inevitability, while at others he abhorred its effects in displays of stereotypical Romanticism. As well as advancing a view of the economy as organic and highlighting its tendency to concentrate capital, Nicholson's essay hinted at a holistic approach to the machinery question that gave Hobson his point of departure.Footnote ⁷³

EMPLOYMENT: QUANTITY

Hobson's 1893 article “The Influence of Machinery upon Employment” was his first serious engagement with machinery and formed the basis for all of his subsequent writings on the subject. Unlike Nicholson, who had only focused on wages, Hobson—whose article was published in Political Science Quarterly—addressed the influence of machinery on employment in general. Hobson had already written about the irregularity of machine work in 1891, but Nicholson's account allowed him to advance a more global understanding of how the influence of machinery was to make all forms of work more irregular.Footnote ⁷⁴ Nicholson's proposed solution was for moral renewal in root and branch, as he appealed to captains of industry to show noblesse oblige by increasing wages in order that workers might be better acculturated.Footnote ⁷⁵ For Hobson this was no solution because it failed to compensate workers for the loss of their most precious asset, namely, time. In any case, machinery had always tended towards the opposite: decreasing wages while alienating workers from their culture. As far as Hobson was concerned, these tendencies demanded an ethical debate about the rightful place of machinery, which had yet to be conducted.

Hobson began with one of Nicholson's themes and turned it into the framing question for his investigation: Does machinery really increase the overall amount of employment, as its apologists argue? Orthodox economics appeared to produce a paradox: “[A] new machine always displaces and throws out of employment a certain amount of labor . . . . What is meant, then, by the statement so frequently made, that machinery gives more employment than it takes away?”Footnote ⁷⁶ Hobson examined this counterintuitive (yet orthodox) claim that although the introduction of machines might cause a number of jobs to be lost, the overall number of jobs would always rise due to the expected fall in prices.Footnote ⁷⁷ Hobson pointed to the enormous assumption on which this claim was made—that the efficiencies achieved using machines would result in lower prices rather than simply swelling profits—and chose to open his argument by merely bracketing the problem, which implicitly undercut the foundations on which the pro-machine orthodoxy was built. There was no guarantee—or indeed any evidence—that capitalists passed the savings achieved through mechanization on to their customers rather than keeping them for themselves.

To consider how far prices stimulated demand in theory, Hobson took Alfred Marshall's notion of the flexibility of demand as the most sophisticated analysis of this relation available. However, a problem immediately arose: Marshall's theory required an “extremely intricate knowledge of the circumstances of each case.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Applied to more than one class of manufactured good, this calculation would yield vastly discrepant results. Each case of machine production and consumption was so different as to render a general theory improbable. Hobson concluded sharply that

Hobson was skeptical of general claims about the benefits of machinery since these were supported neither by detailed individual studies nor by historical investigations. A historical account of the Industrial Revolution explained how Britain came to be in its leading position, but the British experience was a special case that did not admit of generalization and “cannot be taken as a measure of the normal effects of the application of machinery.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Hobson cited census data to show that both the relative and the absolute number of people employed in manufacturing had actually fallen from the mid-nineteenth century, while the number of machines had continued to increase.Footnote ⁸¹ This was the only available measure of the overall trend, and Hobson found no evidence to support Marshall's claim that machinery increased employment; rather, it seemed as though the opposite was the case. Certain growth areas such as distribution had witnessed an absolute rise in employment over the same period. However, while the total amount of distribution had increased, the number of those employed had not risen proportionately. Machines, therefore, caused a relative decline in employment for the quantity of goods being distributed.

To help make sense of these trends Hobson introduced an original distinction to thinking about machine work, based on the “proximity to the machine” of different workers, as exemplified by the cases of railways and shipping. Machinery played different roles in these two industries, being much more integral to the operation of a steamship than it was to that of a railway. Only a handful of workers, such as engineers, stokers, and guards, were “in close direct association with the machine,” while an attendant “army” of other workers were engaged indirectly by the railway, from clerks to ticket collectors to navvies and plate layers.Footnote ⁸² For this reason, total railway employment actually increased proportionally faster than the total mileage of the system. Steamships, on the other hand, grew in size and developed in tandem with the influence of machinery. New engines, bigger ships, and more streamlining allowed a greater tonnage to be carried with relatively fewer people employed. In half a century, total tonnage had increased fourfold, but the attendant increase in employment was less than threefold.

This led Hobson to the general finding that in the trades examined machinery had caused a decrease in employment relative to production. Even in associated industries such as transport, “the increase in employment is in inverse proportion as machinery is introduced . . . as a dominating factor.” In other words, if machinery became integral to a growing industry, employment increased at a slower rate than elsewhere, and any displaced labor found employment in areas that were “less subject to machinery.” Insofar as the effects of machinery had been registered at all, therefore, Hobson concluded “that the net influence of machinery is to diminish employment so far as those industries are concerned into which machinery directly enters, and to increase the demand in those industries which machinery affects but slightly or indirectly.”Footnote ⁸³ Nicholson's argument had focused on the effects of machinery on the regularity of employment, and it was to this that Hobson now turned. Orthodox economists claimed that disturbances to employment caused by machinery should be seen as temporary. This idea had already been criticized by Nicholson, and Hobson concurred: with added incredulity, he reminded readers that “the loss of employment may be only ‘temporary,’ but as the life of a workingman is also temporary, such loss may as a disturbing factor in the working life have a considerable importance.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Hobson now went beyond Nicholson's focus on the initial impact of machinery at the moment of its inception to examine the ongoing issue of the “normal effects of machine production.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The fact that employers had often invested large sums of capital in new machinery meant that it was in their interest to keep their factories running consistently. This helped them achieve the greatest return on their investment and seemed to promise regular employment for workers. However, the result of new machinery was, in fact, the opposite. Citing Nicholson, Hobson claimed that machine-made commodities were subject to the greatest fluctuations in prices because of the great quantity of production. This, in itself, led the levels of wages and employment to fluctuate more than ever before, and was an effect compounded further because these were the only controllable variables remaining in a production process in which an increasing proportion of capital was being fixed in the form of machinery. Extending Nicholson's conclusions, Hobson could now account for the effects of machinery as a whole:

While individual machines (and their owners) may have operated productively according to a comprehensible internal logic, the net effect of all of the machines was another thing entirely. When taken together as a whole, machines ran amok: they introduced chaotic, unpredictable outcomes that nonetheless determined markets and consequently employment. Anticipating the skepticism of his readers, Hobson said they might rightly wonder how machines could be responsible for such fluctuations. It was at this point in the argument that Hobson introduced the phenomenon of overproduction, presented within the larger framework of his theory of underconsumption.

While orthodox economists denied the very possibility of general overproduction—they held that goods would always be exchanged—businessmen, according to Hobson, found that the facts suggested otherwise. When markets were “congested with goods that remain unsold,” causing prices to fall, Hobson asked “Would it not be better for economists to recast their theory, so as to be in harmony with facts?”Footnote ⁸⁷ The history of economic thought shows that to stipulate an upper limit to production or consumption has been unorthodox: to deny Say's law, as Hobson did by asserting the simultaneous existence of both overproduction and underconsumption, marked his card as a heretic.Footnote ⁸⁸ The initial conceptualization of these two phenomena had occurred with the earlier onset of machine production around 1800 and, for Hobson, pointed to similar macroeconomic problems in the 1890s. Scholars of underconsumptionism have rarely connected the theory to later discussions of machine production. Yet, the existence of de facto superabundance appears implicitly in ideas of underconsumption from their beginnings.Footnote ⁸⁹

According to Hobson, machinery had broken the essential link between supply and demand, making it impossible to manage and regulate production effectively. In a historic shift, machinery introduced a new species of glut, independent of the trade cycle:

This passage helps explain how Hobson came to his macrocosmic vision of a world interconnected by machinery. It was immediately following this passage that Hobson cited Nicholson's description of the world economy as a large animal. The content of this organic metaphor, therefore, derived from his analysis of how machinery destabilized employment. While Hobson would go on to develop macroeconomic perspectives on the business cycle, trade, distribution, and empire, these early texts place machinery in the foreground. Indeed, Hobson's account of economic change can appear almost monocausal: machinery is often regarded as autonomous and described in the active voice, crystallizing as both the cause and emblem of contemporary economic chaos. Machines produce the irregularity that is characteristic of modernity, and provide the necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for such evils as the formation of trusts, cartels, and, eventually, imperialism.Footnote ⁹¹ If the introduction of machinery was to be assessed by political economists in relation to the quantity of employment then, to Hobson, the question of its impact remained an open one. The impact of machinery on the quality of employment, however, raised a further set of issues that Hobson then set out to consider.

EMPLOYMENT: QUALITY

Despite Adam Smith's insistence that the goal of all productive labor was consumption, economists from J. S. Mill onwards had struggled to accommodate it convincingly within their various schemas, even as they paid lip service to its importance.Footnote ⁹² And although political thinkers like William Morris had promulgated concepts such as “shoddy” as a criticism of poor quality production, this remained at some distance from an economic analysis. We have seen that from Hobson's point of view machinery encouraged overproduction, but he also believed that it drove a particular form of standardized mass consumption. It was Hobson's belief that cultivating higher forms of consumption among the public would counter the producer bias of the economy and also result in better forms of work through the nexus of the improved tastes of the consumer.Footnote ⁹³ This line of argument would be developed more fully in Hobson's later and self-consciously Ruskinian works such as Work and Wealth (1914); however, he was already connecting the question of consumption with that of the regularity of employment as early as 1893.

In “The Influence of Machinery upon Employment,” Hobson argued that demand for the goods that are the “necessaries” of life was easy to predict whereas demand for “comforts and luxuries” was whimsical and “less amenable to commercial calculation.” The production of “necessaries” was thus ripe for mechanization and had the effect of driving workers into the less-mechanizable production of luxuries: “unsteady industries . . . which are most exposed to the influences of taste, caprice or changing income.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Not only did machines destabilize markets through overproduction, but they also placed greater numbers of workers into the types of jobs that were intrinsically unstable. With little option available to them, the technologically unemployed could be seen turning to the production of “luxuries,” which Hobson therefore derided not only for their politico-aesthetic character but for their effects on employment as well.Footnote ⁹⁵

Hobson claimed that as well as making labor more irregular, the net influence of machinery was to drive labor in three new directions. First, the increasing capacities of machine tools meant that the tasks of making and maintaining machines would eventually become mechanizable themselves. The result would be to leave workers increasingly occupied with the backroom tasks relating to this machine-servicing machinery, with human intervention therefore occurring at an increasing distance from the point of production. While these back-room tasks would be new jobs, there would inevitably be fewer jobs relative to a given quantity of consumption (which was the explicitly stated aim of mechanization).

Second, machinery resulted in a “multiplication of merchants, middlemen and retailers” that did not necessarily benefit the consumer.Footnote ⁹⁶ The rise of this “distributive work” was something Hobson lamented, as he regarded selling to be a lesser form of occupation than making.Footnote ⁹⁷ Third, and perhaps more optimistically, Hobson claimed that the rise of machine production would create a countermovement among consumers for non-machine goods. “New wants,” claimed Hobson, were created for goods too irregular to admit of machine production. Hobson imagined an avant-garde consumer who would reject the uniformity of standardized goods and drive consumption to evolve along new lines: “so long as individuals desire to satisfy more fully their present wants, and combine to develop new wants forming a higher or more intricate standard of comfort,” the loss of employment caused by machinery would be offset by the demand for these new, non-standardized goods.Footnote ⁹⁸ Hobson's ethics empowered the consumer to reorient the economy and thus provide a potential solution or, at least, a counterweight to the problems arising from machine work.

Having examined these objective effects of machinery, Hobson turned to its subjective effects; that is to say, the experiential quality of labor. Hobson defined the scope of this analysis curtly as “i.e. skill, duration, intensity, etc.,” as if these classic parameters of the machinery question would be familiar to his readers. It was a premise widely shared that the main advantage of machine over human labor was in its application of motive force, delivered with greater power and precision. From this it seemed to follow—and indeed it had been argued by economists such as Marshall—that machinery would take over the operation of automatic, monotonous, and exhausting tasks, leaving human labor to do other things instead.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, Hobson pointed out that even if the labor displaced by machines became

The need for such a statement—so apparently obvious—reveals the powerful background assumptions of progress governing the discourse into which Hobson was intervening. The word “yet” reveals Hobson's belief in a higher order of autonomy on the part of machinery. As more workers are displaced into less automatic forms of work, he argued, work itself becomes subject to an increasing division of labor and specialization. Once these “higher grades” of labor become routinized in such a way, they too become susceptible to mechanization and so the way is paved for what Hobson called “a new invasion of machinery.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This ever-expanding circle of mechanization was endorsed by those seeking greater economies of production but was viewed by Hobson with suspicion as part of a cycle the inevitability of which did not make it any less pernicious.

Hobson cited the report on cotton factories used by Nicholson to show that new working conditions were as bad as ever, militating against the claims—advanced by Marshall and especially Cooke-Taylor—that the benefits of mechanization would accrue to workers.Footnote ¹⁰² Any “saving of muscular or other physical effort afforded by the intervention of machinery” was more than countered by the tendency of bosses to “force the pace” of work and to increase the hours of labor. In a penetrating reading of The Economy of Manufactures, Hobson caught Babbage giving the game away on this point, when he had claimed that machinery affords a check “against the inattention, the idleness, or the knavery, of human agents.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Hobson noted that this new rhythm of the workplace was only made possible by the historical development of “cheap illuminants.” The use of artificial lighting in the workplace had removed that barrier to productivity raised by the daily fall of darkness, as “a part of nature's rest is annexed to the working day,” disrupting the natural rhythm of day and night.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Considering the “growing monotony of production” alongside the length of the working day made Hobson skeptical of the supposed benefits of mechanization to the worker, while the prize of increased real wages—adduced by supporters of industrialization—was undermined by the “curtailment of the portion of time in which he figures as consumer.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The worker was thus seen as exhausted from tending machines and having been robbed of the chance to enjoy the fruits of this labor. This dispiriting fate prompted Hobson to reflect on one of the century's most striking lines: J. S. Mill's “somewhat rhetorical verdict” could nonetheless be “almost justified” when he had claimed in 1848 that it was “questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As with Hobson's essay, Mill's infamous line had come in the context of his own reflection into the question of why machinery had delivered such great returns on capital but so few benefits to workers. While not endorsing Mill's pessimistic conclusion, Hobson differed from the received wisdom of many contemporaries in maintaining that the machinery question should at the very least remain an open one. The scale of machinery's impact on the economy was obvious, yet the ways in which it was put to use were not above scrutiny. Almost uniquely, Hobson sought to connect the question of consumption with workers' quality of life, wages, and regularity of work as part of a single, continuous inquiry rather than as separate issues considered in ineffectual isolation.

A MACHINE CORPUS

Following Hobson's career forward through the years that followed the publication of The Evolution of Modern Capitalism reveals the way in which machinery remained a cornerstone of his social and political analysis. This consistent focus on machinery was not the only way in which Hobson was unusual: having been blackballed from a university appointment because of his opposition to the neoclassical orthodoxy, he continued his intellectual work outside the academy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By the second half of the 1890s Hobson's public profile had increased with journalism and books published on a variety of subjects. London in the 1890s was a hotbed of political activism and played host to a number of left-leaning groups: liberal, radical, and socialist. This ferment gave rise to a thriving discourse in journals and societies, in which Hobson became a key figure. Hobson was actively involved with the Fabian Society but found his intellectual niche in the broader church of the Ethical Movement and having attended South Place (discussed above), he went on to play a central role in the production of its primary journal. Shortly after its foundation in 1898, Hobson joined Stanton Coit as editor of Ethical World, which changed its title to Democracy and then Ethics as it evolved through the 1900s. The aim of the journal was to encourage a science of ethics and, among other things, it regularly treated industrial problems while attacking orthodox political economy.

Hobson had also been involved with the earlier launch of Commonwealth in 1896. The journal was intended to provide radical, social critique and evinced a form of patriotism rooted in William Blake, who was cited in the first issue. Despite the superficial nostalgia of its Morrisian layout and typography, Commonwealth was explicitly forward looking. Hobson wrote the first article: a direct challenge to what he considered the myopic views of progress offered by writers such as Marshall, who had argued that higher wages would benefit workers and improve their intelligence simply through their contact with new machinery.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the face of this seemingly naïve optimism, Hobson claimed that

In this very first article of a brand new journal of politics, Hobson gave center stage to the paradox of machine production. The question of machinery—its promise contrasted with its actual effects—was seen as the master key to interpreting both the economy and society in general.

The same progressive sentiments motivated those who formed the Rainbow Circle: a dining and debating club that met monthly in London from 1894. This was an elite private sphere in which Hobson could develop his arguments alongside his more public participation with the Ethical Movement. Members of the Rainbow Circle included both eminent and young radicals and liberals, among them a future prime minister in Ramsay MacDonald. After luxurious dinners, members would hear a talk, typically on a question in politics, economics, or ethics, which was then discussed. Hobson was a founding member and spoke at the second meeting, giving a paper entitled “The Economic Deficiencies of the Manchester School,” in which he rehearsed his criticism of the orthodox account of “economic man,” and argued for the importance of consumption to political economy.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This meeting came shortly after the first publication of The Evolution of Modern Capitalism and so Hobson's interest in consumption can be seen to have developed contemporaneously with his study of machinery.

It was shortly after this that Hobson began work on his biographical study of John Ruskin that provided a further setting in which his views on machinery would develop. Among Hobson's intentions in that work was to sketch a version of political economy that would be committed to social reform, a combination made flesh in the figure of the Victorian sage. Hobson's aim was to support a view of Ruskin as “first and above all else a Political Economist” (a view made perhaps more mischievous for having been expressed already by the maverick Patrick Geddes in his 1884 work, John Ruskin, Economist). But, although the book was entitled John Ruskin, Social Reformer, the focus of subsequent scholarship has fallen mainly on the economics rather than the reform. Hobson claimed that Ruskin had provided “no greater service” than in his protest against the dominance of machine-based manufacturing and so was “right in his preachment against the grave danger of mechanising life at the present time.”Footnote ¹¹¹ In advocating quality over quantity, Hobson merely ventriloquized Ruskin's well-known, if heterodox, positions on questions of taste. On the nature of machine-work, however, Hobson departed from Ruskin entirely, forcefully rejecting the belief that work with machinery was necessarily degrading and so ought to be reserved for an especially low or “Helot” class of person.Footnote ¹¹² Such a negative view was as implausible to Hobson as the opposite argument—advanced by enthusiasts such as Cooke-Taylor and to an extent by Marshall—that machinery improved workers' characters. The evident problems caused by machines as well as the unconvincing solutions proposed by those few contemporaries to have addressed the question (including Ruskin) were unacceptable to Hobson, whose commitment to reform continued in subsequent works.

In 1900 Hobson contributed to a volume edited by his collaborator Stanton Coit in which his position regarding machinery had hardened. In his essay “The Ethics of Industrialism: a Diagnosis,” Hobson depicted industrial capitalism as a system in meltdown and argued that solutions had become a matter of urgency.Footnote ¹¹³ This essay is rightly noted by Michael Freeden as an example of Hobson's call for a systematic approach to social problems, but the cause of the problems under discussion: that is, machinery, is not mentioned.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Hobson diagnosed a series of profound “maladjustments” between social and economic conditions that could only be understood by examining their origins in the Industrial Revolution:

In this essay, Hobson reprised his previous themes but with more surety and gusto, now claiming that “dehumanising influences emanate from the reign of machinery” and that machine work destroys all spontaneity and pleasure. The responses to the iniquities of the Industrial Revolution had been, according to Hobson, emotional and sentimental and so “demanded a purely charitable treatment of the social maladies of a diseased industrialism.” In particular, claimed Hobson, the portrayal of downtrodden workers in industrial fiction tended to attribute their plight to a particular cause such as an evil or negligent boss. Such examples of individual suffering did not admit of generalization and so missed finding their true cause. In Hobson's view the prevalence of such responses conspired to prevent a proper “understanding of the momentous issues that were gathering in the world of industry.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ By contrast, Hobson's economic study of machinery aimed to provide an analysis that was compelling, systematic, and ethical. Hobson produced a new synthesis that refined the perspectives of Ruskin and Morris in the language of political economy, thereby creating his worldly yet optimistic belief in the possibility of reforming the relation of human and machine.