When Tony Blair and New Labour came to office in Britain late in the 20th century,John Atkinson Hobson( 1858-1940) was rediscovered and republished. In spite of his prolific work( over 50 books),he had sunk into oblivion. Yet John Maynard Keynes paid tribute to him( T he General T heory of Employment,Interest and Money,1936) and recognized his debt to this"heretic"of economics. Hobson's contribution to the history of economic thought is a major one,thanks to his stimulating analysis of under-consumption. His book Imperialism,A Study( 1902) was Lenin's bedside reading. But Hobson was no socialist: he w as a"N ew Liberal",belonging to a group of theoreticians who thought that classical liberalism had to be changed radically if it was to have any future.