Yet, when Professor Pearson passes from a society of individuals to the society of nations, which we call humanity, he insists upon retaining the older, cruder, irrational method of securing progress, the primitive struggle for physical existence. Why? If it is profitable and consistent with progress to put down the primitive struggle for life among individuals with one another, the family and tribal feuds which survive even in fairly developed societies, and to enlarge the area of social internal peace until it covers a whole nation, may we not go farther and seek, with hope, to substitute international peace and co-operation, first among the more civilised and more nearly related nations, and finally throughout the complete society of the human race? If progress is helped by substituting rational selection for the struggle for life within small groups, and afterwards within the larger national groups, why may we not extend the same mode of progress to a federation of European States, and finally to a world-federation? I am not now concerned with the grave practical difficulties besetting such an achievement, but with the scientific theory.
Although a certain sort of individual efficiency is sacrificed by repressing private war within a tribe or nation, it is rightly judged that the gain in tribal or national unity and efficiency outweighs that loss. May not a similar biological and rational economy be subserved by substituting government for anarchy among nations? We admit that a nation is strengthened by putting down internecine tribal warfare; what finality attaches to the arbitrary social group we term a “nation” which obliges us to reverse the economy applicable to tribes when we come to deal with nations?...
But to ascribe finality to nationalism upon the ground that members of different nations lack “the common experience necessary to found a common life” is a very arbitrary reading of modern history. Taking the most inward meaning of experience, which gives most importance to the racial and traditional characters that mark the divergences of nationality, we are obliged to admit that the fund of experience common to peoples of different nationality is growing with great rapidity under the numerous, swift, and accurate modes of intercommunication which mark the latest phases of civilisation. It is surely true that the dwellers of large towns in all the most advanced European States, an ever-growing proportion of the total population, have, not merely in the externals of their lives, but in the chief formative influences of their reading, their art, science, recreation, a larger community of experience than existed a century ago among the more distant members of any single European nation, whether dwelling in country or in town. Direct intercommunication of persons, goods, and information is so widely extended and so rapidly advancing that this growth of “the common experience necessary to found a common life” beyond the area of nationality is surely the most markworthy feature of the age. Making, then, every due allowance for the subjective factors of national character which temper or transmute the same external phenomena, there surely exists, at any rate among the more conscious and more educated sections of the chief European nations, a degree of true “like-mindedness,” which forms the psychical basis of some rudimentary internationalism in the field of politics. Indeed it is curious and instructive to observe that while some of those most insistent upon “like-mindedness” and “common experience,” as the tests of a true social area, apply them in defence of existing nationalities and in repudiation of attempts to absorb alien nationalities, others, like Professor Giddings, apply them in the advocacy of expansion and Imperialism.
After yesterday's digression on Hobson's imperialism, David Gordon called my attention to a short, biting (1963) essay by Gordon Tullock, who had then just published The Calculus of Consent. The piece anticipates my point that Lenin's reading of Hobson has clearly shaped Hobson's reception. Oddly, Tullock does not remark on the rent-seeking argument that drives Hobson's analysis (or so I claimed.) Tullock is wrong to treat Hobson as an anti-capitalist. But Tullock's main point is spot on: "Thus the fact that Hobson attacked the empires of the capitalistic nations of his day cannot he used as evidence that he opposed empires in general, any more than Kipling's harsh words about the Russian empire proved that he opposed all empires." (160)
But given Buchanan's genuine interest in European federation (recall here; and here) it is a bit odd that Tullock says nothing about the content of Hobson's vision of empire. For, Hobson promotes a European federation, which, mid-twentieth-century, when Tullock was looking back at the reception of Hobson was not utopian anymore.
To see what Hobson is getting at it is important to recognize that Hobson distinguishes between different kinds of nationalism. His positive conception of a "genuine nationalism" is explicitly indebted to J.S. Mill (recall also). It is pacific in nature and it is ground in mutual solidarity of people (recall) "united among themselves by common sympathies," which Hobson quotes. This good kind of nationalism, which anticipates (recall) Hazony's conception, can generate a form of colonialism that Hobson endorses. But by 'colonialism' he means what the ancients meant, "migration of part of a nation to vacant or sparsely peopled foreign lands, the emigrants carrying with them full rights of citizenship in the mother country, or else establishing local self-government in close conformity with her institutions and under her final control, may be considered a genuine expansion of nationality, a territorial enlargement of the stock, language and institutions of the nation." (Introduction) This Tullock noticed. The key point here is 'vacant or sparsely populated.' Hobson, perhaps naively, thinks such settler ("genuine") colonialism need not become the genocidal and inhumane practice he denounced. As I noted yesterday, and as Tullock anticipates, it is not obvious Hobson's proposals have the resources to block the bad things from occurring.
As an aside, long before the 1619 project, Hobson was -- not unlike Las Casas -- completely forthright about the genocidal nature of much European imperialism. Hobson repeatedly and critically calls the reader's attention to deliberate policy of extermination of peoples who stood in the way of European expansion. This is, for him, the effect of bad nationalism. (He also recognizes an aggressive form of nationalism that is more defensive in character.) This is the reason why Hobson could become the hero of some anti-imperialists (which Tullock mocks). Hobson does so in a chapter that seems to embrace the superiority of Europeans, and the need for a kind of soft eugenic policy.+
With that in mind, let me now turn to Hobson's proposal of a European federation of pacific nations which includes at least some of its colonial projects. Hobson echoes Kant's call for a "federation of European States," as preparatory to "a world-federation." Now, as any reader of Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim will notice, colonialism and fondness for European federation are not incompatible. And, in fact, as Chris Brooke loves reminding me when the European Union was founded in the 1950s it still contained an imperial hinterland. (Long before Brexit, Algeria and various once Dutch possessions left the Union.) That is to say, Hobson anticipates Hayek's vision of European federalism (recall) in which great European powers maintain some trappings of empire.*
That Hobson proposes a European federation follows naturally from his liberal analysis of the sources of imperialism. Tariffs, protectionism, and rent-seeking all cause and reinforce imperial projects in states with the economic development and resources to do so. And so a federated free trade region would simultaneously undermine imperial interests, reduce friction among the federated, and be more prosperous and so have resources to invest in public goods (including elements of a welfare state). In this sense Lenin is right that Hobson does really anticipates Kautsky's more social democratic vision for Europe.
Let me close with a final remark. Hobson thinks that under modern conditions nations develop and peoples far apart have increasingly similar lives. And he thinks that while modern economies and technologies help intensify national feeling they, simultaneously, create more like-minded nations and so the possibility of a different kind of sympathetic process. That World War I proved, what theorists of sympathy already knew, that such like-mindedness can intensify the nature of mutual conflict, does not refute Hobson's insight. It just reminds us that even the grounds for optimism about a pacific, federated internationalism committed (recall) to liberty must be tempered by a sense of its fragility.
*Some other time I want to look more closely at Hobson's ideas about the relationship between 'super' and 'lower' peoples.
+There is an irony here; in that Hobson kind of anticipates Mises interest in projects of trusteeship, but simultaneously offers the arguments why that is likely to fail.
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