John Atkinson Hobson: Heretic, Forerunner and Forgotten

John A. Hobson is known for his path breaking study of imperialism. Nevertheless, Hobson’s corpus, which was formed with his important contributions to the discipline of economics, was left to oblivion. There have been many reasons behind this. Most importantly was the excommunication of the social reformist economic view of Hobson by neoclassical orthodoxy. This excommunication resulted in the fact that so many important theses of Hobson went unnoticed. These theses, intitionally, were the precursors for the later Keynes-Kalecki line. On the other hand, even his study about imperialism, which made him renowned, has not been deeply investigated. Particularly, the second part of the book, in which the politics of imperialism are analyzed, has been nearly unknown. The basic aim of this paper is both to unfold the originality and novelty of Hobson’s economic thinking and to evaluate his theory on imperialism in detail.