Thomas Hodgskin was the most influential economist of the reform movement of the 1820s and 1830s. His influence endured, albeit in an attenuated form, to shape, for example, aspects of both Chartist ideology and Karl Marx's labor theory of value. Hodgskin's anticapitalist analysis was a powerful counter to the thought of David Ricardo and orthodox political economy, and it constituted a shift in radical economic thought of profound significance. Hodgskin shifted the focus of critical attention from landowners to capitalists and provided the intellectual basis for popular radical and trade-union organization. Although Hodgskin's name is now less familiar than Robert Owen's to the nonspecialist reader, as an author Hodgskin was arguably the more important of the two, and his work has continued to attract critical attention from historians of both economics and the reform movement.

Thomas Hodgskin was born on 12 December 1787; he was the son of a storekeeper...