Hobson's Choice

“To be or not to be?” wondered Hamlet. With his friends conspiring against him and the enemy at the doorstep of Denmark, the desperate prince could either face the difficult situation or run away. Take it or leave it, as Thomas Hobson (1544-1631) would say.

For many years Thomas Hobson served the British king as a mail carrier, operating between London and Cambridge. As the distance between the two cities was considerable, Hobson had at his disposal several horses, which he often lent to the students and faculty of the famous university. But when he realized that his clients only borrowed the few best horses, leaving the remaining forever unused in the stable, he quickly changed the rules. From then on anyone could either take the horse next in line or go on foot.

Facing Hobson's choice, his customers had little room for maneuver. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the eponym quite bluntly as “an apparently free choice when there is no real alternative; the necessity of accepting one of two or more equally objectionable alternatives.” It became fairly popular in the second half of the seventeenth century due to John Milton's poems. “Here lieth one who did most truly prove, that he could never die while he could move,” began the famous Hobson Epitaph.

“A Hobson's Choice for the New Year,” announced the New York Times in one of the first issues of 1964. It forecast that the Kennedy administration would soon have to decide whether “the United States [should] deliberately aid officer corps in underdeveloped countries for political rather than military purposes.” A different, but no less pessimistic, view the daily gave its younger readers: “People who are unhappy about their marriage also have a Hobson's choice,” a children column explained the idea of divorce.

Tough choices also await foreigners. “It appears Israeli voters have been left with a kind of Hobson's choice, in which they're going to have to vote against the candidate they like least or fear most,” reported Time days before a parliamentary election in Israel. What worried Israelis paled in comparison with the crisis in Haiti. In an article about Haitians who fled their homes when a civil war broke out, Christ Black of Boston Globe wrote that “refugees themselves gave the impression that leaving was a Hobson's choice, considering the near-impossibility of receiving any help.”

Despite the solid definition, many writers abuse the usage of “Hobson's choice.” Wikipedia complains that the eponym “is often misused not to mean a false illusion of a choice, but simply a choice between two undesirable options.” In most cases, says the free encyclopedia, “dilemma” or “alternative” would be more appropriate. Perhaps, the closest to the original meaning of “Hobson's choice” was one restaurant in Cambridge that offered a choice between the dish of the day and an empty stomach. Unsurprisingly, the place was named “Hobson's Choice.”