Thomas Hodgskin Quotes

Thomas Hodgskin was an English socialist writer on political economy, critic of capitalism and defender of free trade and early trade unions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the term socialist included any opponent of capitalism, at the time defined as a construed political system built on privileges for the owners of capital. Wikipedia

✵ 12. December 1787 – 21. August 1869

Thomas Hodgskin: 21 quotes0 likes

Famous Thomas Hodgskin Quotes

“[I]t is nevertheless proper to make men aware that the price they pay for attempting to uphold the artificial right of property, is nothing less than the enormous sum of misery inflicted in the name of law and government.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 157

“The natural right of property far from being protected, is systematically violated, and both government and law seem to exist chiefly or solely, in order to protect and organize the most efficacious means of protecting the violation….”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 53

“Among the legislative classes embodied into, and constituting the government, we must place the landed aristocracy. In fact, the landed aristocracy and the government are one—the latter being nothing more than the organized means of preserving the power and privileges of the former.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 51

“Those who make laws, appropriate wealth in order to secure power.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 49

“The law, as to preserve life is that of individuals, is a set of rules and practices … intended to appropriate to the law-makers the produce of those who cultivate the soil, prepare clothing, or distribute what is produced among the different classes, and among different communities.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 46

“What is the law?—Who are the law makers?”

Thomas Hodgskin

The law is a great scheme of rules intended to preserve the power of government, secure the wealth of the landowner, the priest, and the capitalist, but never to secure his produce to the labourer.—The law-maker is never a labourer, and has no natural right to any wealth.—He takes no notice of the natural right of property.—Manifold miseries which result from his appropriating the produce of labour, and from the legal right of property being in opposition to the natural.

p. 44
The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832)

Thomas Hodgskin Quotes

“The power of making laws was long vested in those—and still is vested in their descendants—who followed no trade but war, and knew no handicraft but robbery and plunder.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 32

“Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 14

“Wherever the right of property is placed on a proper foundation, slavery, with all its hateful consequences, is unknown wherever this foundation is rotten, freedom cannot exist, nor justice be administered.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), p. 12

“[G]overnments are not producers, they have no commodities on their road to the market, and can have no claim whatever to issue paper-money. Even exchequer bills are wrong,…”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 212

“Governments have meddled incessantly with money, which in our time has been the fruitful parent of intricate discussions and painful changes.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 179

“Slave-owners and rich men, among a crowd of slave-descended famishing labourers, lead probably a more anxious and toilsome life in protecting their property, and in enforcing obedience to their orders, than the slaves whose labour they extort.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 31

“Domestic slavery, combined with systems of foreign conquest and usurpation, ruined the empires of antiquity.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 30

“The journeymen, however, know their own interest better than it is known to the legislator; and they would be all richer if there were not an idle capitalist in the country.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825), p. 93

“But it is quite plain that the sum the weaver will be disposed to give for the thread will depend on his view of its utility.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825), p. 84

“The skill and the art of the labourer have been overlooked, and he has been vilified; while the work of his hands has been worshiped.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825), p. 66

“The labourers are still more unfortunate in being descended from bondsmen and serfs. Personal slavery or villanage formerly existed in Britain, and all the living labourers still suffer from the bondage of their ancestors.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825), p. 22

“The simple means of making the race frugal is to supply the wants of no man and to leave every man the produce of his own labour.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Travels in the North of Germany (1820), p. 86, Vol. 2

“The evils of society cannot be remedied by acts of parliament.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Travels in the North of Germany (1820), p. 98, Vol. 2

“The evil of confinement is not to be remedied by outrage, but it is so great an evil, that it looks like tameness of apathy to be perfectly resigned to it.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Travels in the North of Germany (1820), p. 165, Vol. 1

“[T]he real business of men, what promotes their prosperity, is always better done by themselves than by any few separate and distinct individuals, acting as a government in the name of the whole.”

Thomas Hodgskin

Source: Travels in the North of Germany (1820), p. 292, Vol. 1

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