Summarizing Thompson's argument improves it; but Hodgskin's pamphlet is admirably clear and economical. The first thing to note is the authorial voice; unlike all the writers considered so far, Hodgskin speaks as a labourer to labourers. This voice reflects what he was, only if we accept his definition of labour, which embraces mental as well as manual work. He was the son of a storekeeper in the naval dockyard at Chatham. He went to sea as a cadet, rose to lieutenant, and was discharged when, in his own words, ‘I complained of the injury done me, by a commander-in-chief, to himself, in the language I thought it merited; he had unjustly deprived me of every chance of promotion from my own exertions, and that was robbing me of every hope.’ Of such stuff are radical critics of society made. There followed hard times; but eventually, he succeeded in making his living as a writer and journalist. Hodgskin was a professional intellectual. In the difficult years after he left the navy, he studied philosophy and wrote a treatise On Mind, which failed to find a publisher and is now lost. We may compare him, then, to Ogilvie, Godwin, and Coleridge, also professional intellectuals; but whereas they were products of educational institutions – the Scottish universities, an English public school and Cambridge, dissenting academies – Hodgskin was largely self-taught. In this he resembles Owen; but Hodgskin has a better-disciplined mind.