John A. Hobson

“This new and enlarged edition of The Evolution of Modern Capitalism contains additions and alterations so great as to constitute it in effect a new book.”

“We now stand face to face with the main objection so often raised against all endeavours to remedy industrial and social diseases by the expansion of public control. ...The strife, danger, and waste of industrial competition are necessary conditions to industrial vitality.”

“Much individual enterprise in industry does not make for industrial progress. A larger and larger proportion of the energy given out in trade competition is consumed in violent warfare between trade rivals and is not represented either in advancement of industrial arts or in increase of material wealth.”

“History does not show greed of gain as the motive of the great steps in industrial progress. The love of science, the pure delight of mechanical invention, the attainment of some slight personal convenience in labour, and mere chance, play the largest part in the history of industrial improvements. These motives would be as equally operative under state-control as under private enterprise.”

“The substitution of industrialism for warfare is not... understood to imply a diminution of individual enterprise, but an alteration in its application.”

“This is, in fact, the philosophical defence of progressive socialism, that human progress requires that one after another the lower material animal functions shall be reduced to routine, in order that a larger amount of individual effort may be devoted to the exercise of higher functions and the cultivation by strife of higher qualities.”

“Under socialized industry progress in the industrial arts would be slower and would absorb a smaller proportion of individual interest, in order that progress in the finer intellectual and moral arts might be faster, and might engage a larger share of life.”

“Higher progress can only be purchased by an economy of the work of lower progress, the free, conscious expression of higher individuality by the routine subordination of lower individuality.”

“Corporations are in a sense moral monsters; we say they behave as such and we are disposed to treat them as such. The standard of international morality, particularly in matters of commercial intercourse, is on a still lower level.”

“On what a slippery slope ...international morality reposes.”

“The imputation of political significance to... statistics, taken either in aggregate or in relation to separate countries, as if they were themselves indices of public gain or public loss, has most injurious reactions upon the intelligent understanding of commerce.”

“It is untrue that the world market is strictly limited, with the consequence that every advance of one group of traders is at the expense of another group. The world market is indefinitely expansible and is always expanding...”

“Envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce... the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding.”

“Perhaps the worst of the three fallacies, and in a sense the deepest-rooted, is the concept of export trade as of more value than import trade.”

“The money received for sales has no other significance or value than its power to buy, and trade can only be imaged truly as an exchange of goods for goods in which the processes of selling and of buying are complementary.”

“If the interests of consumers and the interests of producers weighed equally in the eyes of governments, as they should, the strongest of all obstacles to a peaceful harmonious society of nations would be overcome. For the suspicions, jealousies, and hostilities of nations are inspired more by the tendency of groups of producers to misrepresent their private interests as the good of their respective countries than by any other single circumstance.”

“The richly nourished patriotism of war breeds divisions and antagonisms which are easily exploited afterwards by political, racial, religious, and cultural passions, but most of all by economic interests.”

“Economic nationalism means protective and discriminative tariffs, and a conservation of national, imperial or allied resources within a circle of favored beneficiaries.”

“Is it not the larger and the longer hope and interest of America to live as a great partner in... a society of nations, rather than to live a life of isolated prosperity... ?”