Leonard Hobhouse

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864 to 1929) was a British liberal political theorist and sociologist, a leading early proponent of social liberalism and of the New Liberalism of the early twentieth century. He read Greats at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, worked as a journalist and trade union secretary, and in 1907 became the first Martin White Professor of Sociology at the University of London, a chair he shared in historical importance with Edward Westermarck as the first sociology professorship in the United Kingdom. He founded and edited The Sociological Review. His best known book is Liberalism (1911), and he argued that property has a social dimension because wealth is partly a collective product.