Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class: The Economic Thought of Thomas Hodgskin.

• Author: Zuluaga, Diego

Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class: The Economic Thought of Thomas Hodgskin

Alberto Mingardi

Oxford: Routledge, 2021, 160 pp.

The temptation for political movements to claim venerable thinkers from the past among their own is sometimes irresistible. But the truth is often more complicated. That seems to be the case with Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), the radical English writer and campaigner of whom Alberto Mingardi has recently written a highly readable intellectual biography. Even though Hodgskin's Wikipedia entry continues to describe him as a socialist, Mingardi shows that many of his views on the rights of workers and the benefits of commercial society were highly sympathetic to classical liberals.

Hodgskin was an autodidact who grew up poor yet rose to become senior editor of The Economist, nibbing shoulders with the most prominent thinkers of his time, such as Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Herbert Spencer. An early stint in the Royal Navy, which he was sent off to join at age 12 by his well-off but spendthrift hither, seared him with a lifelong dislike of coercion and arbitrary power. His earliest published work, An Essay on Naval Discipline, was a reaction to this experience. In it, he made an uncompromising case against impressment--forced enlistment--which Hodgskin believed unjust, inefficient, and based on the erroneous assumption that Britons would not voluntarily sign up to defend their country.

Mingardi ably situates Hodgskin's life and writings in their historical context. It was not advocacy for the dictatorship of the proletariat that made Hodgskin a radical, but his opposition to aristocratic privileges that tipped the scales against workers and the poor. Even though some of his writings had socialist-sounding titles (such as Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital and Popular Political Economy), Hodgskin's critique of capitalists focused on their use of the legislative process to alter economic outcomes in their favor, different from what they would have been in a truly free market. Were Hodgskin alive today, it is likely--from Mingardi's telling--that he would rail not against capitalism but against what we now call crony capitalism.

Many of Hodgskin's views aligned with those of modern libertarians. He was a lifelong free trader and an optimist regarding the gradual improvement of man's condition thanks to industrialization. He vehemently opposed Malthusian fatalism, arguing that "the...