“Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects.” — Thomas Hodgskin
Is government the source of our rights? I fear that today many people would say yes. Not infrequently it is said that the government or the Constitution grants us freedom of speech or press or the right to own property. This offends the natural-law tradition that was essential to the genesis of classical liberalism (“liberalism”) and the vital institutions it spawned. While some prominent early liberals sought to overthrow natural law in favor of the seemingly more-scientific utilitarianism, the heart and soul of liberalism is — and remains — the natural law. The philosophy would be impoverished without it.
Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) well understood this. He deserves to be better known than he is. Hodgskin was an early editor of The Economist and an important influence on Herbert Spencer, who also worked at that publication. Hodgskin is something of a puzzle for many people. He is often described as a Ricardian socialist, but in his case the label is misleading. Having lived before the marginal revolution, in which Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school, and other economists provided an alternative to the Adam Smith/David Ricardo labor theory of value, Hodgskin did regard labor, rather than utility, as the source of economic value.
But calling him a socialist is bound to confuse. He was indeed a critic of “capitalism,” by which he and others back then meant government intervention on behalf of capital to the prejudice of labor. But he was no advocate of state control of the means of production. On the contrary, he was a influenced by the radical market economist J. B. Say and believed violations of laissez faire, such as tariffs, are what exploited workers by depriving them of their full, market-derived product. Only in a fully free and openly competitive environment void of privilege (“Middle English, from Old French, from Latin, a law affecting one person“) could laborers achieve justice. (Hodgskin developed his sympathy for labor while in the navy, where he observed the cruelty toward sailors. He himself was disciplined and eventually court-martialed and discharged.) As David Hart and Walter Grinder (pdf) write, “The radical individualist Thomas Hodgskin … gives a clear example of the application of the libertarian nonaggression principle to the acquisition and exchange of property. He also implies that those who benefit from ‘artificial’ property rights, that is, by force and state privilege, comprise a class antagonistic to the producing class.”
How unfortunate that siding with workers against government intervention on behalf of business has come to considered anti-libertarian! There was a time when one could write a book, as Hodgskin did, titled Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital without being thought a communist. (A modern example is here.)
