Thomas Hodgskin 12 December 1787 – 21 August 1869 was an English socialist writer on political economy, critic of capitalism as living as defender of free trade together with early trade unions. In the behind 19th & early 20th centuries, the term socialist identified any opponent of capitalism, at the time defined as a construed political system built on privileges for the owners of capital.
Hodgskin's father. who worked at the British Admiralty dock stores, enrolled him in the navy at the age of 12. Coming into conflict with the naval discipline of the time, Hodgskin was retired by the Navy at the age of 25. Publication of his Essay on Naval Discipline brought Hodgskin to the attention of radicals such as Francis Place. In 1815 Hodgskin travelled in France and Germany, experiences which he later documented in his Travels in the North of Germany.
Entering the University of Edinburgh for study, Hodgskin later came to London and entered the utilitarian circle around Place, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. With their support, he spent the next five years in a programme of travel and study around Europe which resulted inter alia in abook, Travels in North Germany 1820. He married Eliza Hegewesch in Edinburgh in 1819.
In 1823, Hodgskin joined forces with Joseph Clinton Robertson in founding the Mechanics Magazine. In the October 1823 edition of the Mechanics Magazine, Hodgskin and Francis Place wrote a manifesto for a Mechanics Institute.
Despite his high outline in the agitated revolutionary times of the 1820s, he retreated into the realm of Whig journalism after the Reform Act 1832. Hodgskin had a variety of seven children to support. He became an advocate of free trade and spent fifteen years writing for The Economist.