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Updated: June 11, 2025
Another writer, Thomas Hodgskin, honorary secretary of the Birkbeck Institution, who published a tract called Labour defended against the Claims of Capital, or the Unproductiveness of Capital proved , and afterwards gave some popular lectures on political economy, has been noticed as anticipating Socialist ideas.
Hall and Owen and Hodgskin inherited the thoughts of Ogilvie and Spence and Paine; and if they did not give them substance, at least they gave them form for a later time. Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek.
Property Locke derives from a primitive communism which becomes transmuted into individual ownership whenever a man has mingled his labor with some object. This labor theory of ownership lived, it may be remarked, to become, in the hands of Hodgskin and Thompson, the parent of modern socialism. The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes, pre-eminently social in character.
Cogan's Journey up the Rhine, from Utrecht to Frankfort. 2 vols. 8vo. 1794. The style of this work is lively and interesting: its pictures of manners and scenery good; and it contains a learned disquisition on the origin of printing. Dr. Cogan resided the greater part of his life in Holland. Travels in the North of Germany. By Thomas Hodgskin, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. 1820.
He can see, he says, why something should go to the maker of a road and something be paid by the person who gets the benefit of it. But he does not see why the road itself should have anything. Hodgskin writes without bitterness, if without much logic. It is not for me to say whether modern Socialists are well advised in admitting that these crude suggestions were anticipations of their own ideas.
Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin, and J. F. Bray were all seeking to find the economic causes of the wrongs suffered by labor and endeavoring, in some manner, to devise remedies for the immense suffering endured by the working classes.
The manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation. The literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray, exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope.
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