John Ruskin's Political Economy (Routledge Studies in the History of Economics, 32)

JOHN RUSKIN’S POLITICAL ECONOMY

This volume offers an exciting new reading of John Ruskin’s economic and social criticism, based on recent research into rhetoric in economics. Willie Henderson uses notions derived from literary criticism, the ‘rhetorical turn in economics’ and more conventional approaches to historical economic texts to re-evaluate Ruskin’s economic and social criticism. By identifying Ruskin’s rhetoric, and by reading his work through that of Plato, Xenophon and John Stuart Mill, Willie Henderson reveals how Ruskin manipulated a knowledge-base. Moreoever, in his analysis of the writings of William Stuart, John Bates Clark and Alfred Marshall, the author shows that John Ruskin’s influence on the cultural significance of economics and on notions of economic well-being has been considerable. Far from being mad, Ruskin attempted a methodological/scientific critique of political economy. He fixed on ideas of ‘natural laws’, ‘economic man’ and the prevailing notion of ‘value’ to point out gaps and inconsistencies in the system of classical economics. Though he wrote vigorously against the idea of formal systems of thought, some of his work has implications for the future development of economic analysis. By linking the consumer directly with the product being valued, he hit upon ideas of value which have elements in common with Jevon’s notion of marginal utility. He also took values into the heart of John Stuart Mill’s scientific domain of ‘production’. Harmony, for Ruskin, can only be achieved through the use of human reason guided by a sense of justice. Whilst he left no formal system of economic analysis, he had a huge impact on the ways in which economists, and wider society, began to move towards alternative policy and welfare contexts. Some of his ideas on individual economic responsibility, this book shows, speak to us directly today. Willie Henderson is Deputy Head in the School of Continuing Studies, University of Birmingham. He is author of Economics as Literature, and co-editor of Economics and Language; both published by Routledge.

ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS

1 ECONOMICS AS LITERATURE Willie Henderson 2 SOCIALISM AND MARGINALISM IN ECONOMICS 1870-1930 Edited by Ian Steedman 3 HAYEK’S POLITICAL ECONOMY The socio-economics of order Steve Fleetwood 4 ON THE ORIGINS OF CLASSICAL ECONOMICS Distribution and value from William Petty to Adam Smith Tony Aspromourgos 5 THE EONOMICS OF JOAN ROBINSON Edited by Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, Luigi Pasinetti and Alesandro Roncaglia 6 THE EVOLUTIONIST ECONOMICS OF LÉON WALRAS Albert Jolink 7 KEYNES AND THE ‘CLASSICS’ A study in language, epistemology and mistaken identities Michel Verdon 8 THE HISTORY OF GAME THEORY, VOL 1 From the beginnings to 1945 Robert W. Dimand and Mary Ann Dimand 9 THE ECONOMICS OF W. S. JEVONS Sandra Peart 10 GANDHI’S ECONOMIC THOUGHT Ajit K. Dasgupta 11 EQUILIBRIUM AND ECONOMIC THEORY Edited by Giovanni Caravale 12 AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS IN DEBATE Edited by Willem Keizer, Bert Tieben and Rudy van Zijp 13 ANCIENT ECONOMIC THOUGHT Edited by B. B. Price 14 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL CREDIT AND GUILD SOCIALISM Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt 15 ECONOMIC CAREERS Economics and economists in Britain 1930-1970 Keith Tribe

16 UNDERSTANDING ‘CLASSICAL’ ECONOMICS Studies in the long-period theory Heinz Kurz and Neri Salvadori 17 HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMIC THOUGHT E. Kula 18 ECONOMIC THOUGHT IN COMMUNIST AND POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE Edited by Hans-Jürgen Wagener 19 STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF FRENCH POLITICAL ECONOMY From Bodin to Walras Edited by Gilbert Faccarello 20 THE ECONOMICS OF JOHN RAE Edited by O. F. Hamouda, C. Lee and D. Mair 21 KEYNES AND THE NEOCLASSICAL SYNTHESIS Einsteinian versus Newtonian macroeconomics Teodoro Dario Togati 22 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON MACROECONOMICS Sixty years after the ‘General Theory’ Edited by Phillipe Fontaine and Albert Jolink 23 THE FOUNDING OF INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS The leisure class and sovereignty Edited by Warren J. Samuels 24 TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS A Mengerian Perspective Sandye Gloria 25 MARX’S CONCEPT OF MONEY: THE GOD OF COMMODITIES Anitra Nelson 26 THE ECONOMICS OF JAMES STEUART Edited by Ramón Tortajada 27 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMICS IN EUROPE SINCE 1945 Edited by A. W. Bob Coats 28 THE CANON IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS Edited by Michalis Psalidopoulos 29 MONEY AND GROWTH Selected Papers of Allyn Abbott Young Edited by Perry G. Mehrling and Roger J. Sandilands 30 THE SOCIAL ECONOMICS OF JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY Markets & Virtue Evelyn L. Forget 31 THE FOUNDATIONS OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE The Economics of Pierre de Boisguilbert Gilbert Faccarello 32 JOHN RUSKIN’S POLITICAL ECONOMY Willie Henderson

JOHN RUSKIN’S POLITICAL ECONOMY

Willie Henderson

London and New York

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 2000 Willie Henderson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form of by any means electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Henderson, Willie, 1947– John Ruskin’s political economy/Willie Henderson. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in the history of economics: 32) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-20067-9 (hc.: alk. paper) 1. Ruskin, John, 1819–1900—Views on economics. 2. Economics—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series. HB103.R8H46 99-31060 330´.092—dc21 CIP ISBN 0-415-20067-9 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-02426-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17226-4 (Glassbook Format)

KITTY In memoriam

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Preface

xi xiii

1 Reason, rhetoric and John Ruskin 1 2 Why read Ruskin on political economy?

21

3 Ruskin on economic agency

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4 Xenophon, Ruskin and economic management

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5 Plato and Ruskin: searching for economic justice

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6 John Ruskin reading John Stuart Mill

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7 Systematic and anti-systematic thinking: Ruskin and Mill revisited

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8 William Smart (1853–1915): economist and Ruskinian?

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9 Ruskinian influences on other theorists: John Bates Clark an1d Alfred Marshall

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Notes Bibliography Index

176 188 197

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been produced under difficult personal circumstances. I acknowledge, with gratitude, the support and patience of my colleagues in the School of Continuing Studies in the University of Birmingham. Particular thanks must go to Carolyn Hicks, Sheila Magrath, Stephen Nixon and Sandra Courtman who were prepared to listen to me talk about Ruskin, and other matters, when I was particularly low. Thanks also go to Roger Backhouse, the late Sir Alec Cairncross, Peter Cain, Andrew Skinner, Tim Hewison, Deirdre McCloskey, Adrian Winnett and Elizabeth Wright, for comments on selected pieces of the final text. Their encouragement has also been invaluable. I am grateful to J. S. Dearden for a personal communication concerning William Smart and to St George’s Guild for information concerning Smart’s membership of the Guild. I must also thank the Business Archives of the University of Glasgow, the British Library, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, including staff in the Glasgow Room, the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, and staff at the Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster. I have benefited greatly from the co-operation of these great institutions. I thank the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for their co-operation. I am happy to record, also, the co-operation of the staff at Brantwood, Ruskin’s home in the Lake District. The Nuffield Foundation is thanked for the award of a grant under their valuable Small Grant Scheme. This enabled me to visit the libraries and archives mentioned above. I also thank the staff of the Nuffield Foundation for their consideration and understanding when the work was interrupted. My thanks also go to Annalisa Henderson and Angus Henderson for the comfort and support they provided to me before and after the death of Kitty Zanagara Henderson in April 1998. I returned to this work shortly after Kitty’s death. I found the concentration required difficult to achieve and hugely demanding of energy. Working on John Ruskin’s political economy helped suspend the pain of grief. This book is dedicated, as I promised, to Kitty’s memory.

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My motives for starting to write the book were mixed. Those for continuing with it had very little to do with anything that could be considered, in any direct sense at least, academic. The work focused my mind during a period of considerable distress and, no doubt, from time to time the confusion caused by this distress comes to the surface. I started the work with only a slight knowledge of Ruskin or, indeed, of the vast and impressive scholarly output devoted to evaluating his works. Ruskin is marginalized in the history of economic thought, so I can be excused. As a newcomer to Ruskin criticism, I have been both encouraged and intimidated by the existing literature. Encouraged because it means that there is a readership interested in re-examining his ideas. Intimidated because of the high quality and extensive nature of the secondary field. I hope that in the pages which follow that I have adequately illustrated my indebtedness to the work of others. I am conscious that I have only scratched away at the surface of Ruskin’s writing, overwhelmed by its sheer volume. I would have found this work difficult to research had it not been for the existence of The Works of John Ruskin on CD-Rom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This has proven to be an excellent research tool. Profitable use had been made of the search function and dictionary. I am grateful to those who spent time in its compilation. I came to Ruskin by a circuitous route. Whilst working on a series of essays on marginalized nineteenth-century economics texts, a chance conversation with the economic historian Peter Cain led to the suggestion that I add Ruskin to the list of writers. This I did, and the longer-term outcome has been this booklength work on Ruskin’s Political Economy. My interest developed from a consideration of the rhetoric of economics. This is a field which was opened for theoretical discussion by Deirdre McCloskey. Within this field I have been concerned with the role of metaphor and language development and use in economics. Latterly this led to applying rhetorical and other textual analyses

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to marginalized texts in the history of economic thought where I have attempted to integrate economic and rhetorical understanding. So I did not come to a study of Ruskin via the secondary literature on him but via the rhetoric of economics. This concern has marked the essays in this book although not quite in the manner that I had originally intended. My original intention was to attempt a series of essays which supplied alternative frames to the same material in Ruskin. This intention turned out to be too ambitious. The idea of different frames still holds in what follows: each of the main chapters provides a different way of looking at Ruskin. However, the cumulative purpose of a more conventional book wins out. I have attempted to move Ruskin closer to his audience but also closer to established economics or quasi-economics writing. It was only towards the end of the writing that I realized, after reading Judith Still’s work on Feminine Economies, that, in moving Ruskin’s texts closer to other economics texts, I was dealing not simply with economic knowledge claims but, more especially, with the representation of economic knowledge. Ruskin appears to me now to be struggling with representational issues as well as methodological and policy issues. This, no doubt, ought to have been obvious to me from the outset for it is the stuff of rhetoric. But it was not. I am happy that there is enough both of the idea of various frames and the idea of economic knowledge, including its rhetorical and cultural significance, to feel that something that is different from what others have achieved in presented. The intertextual analyses adds to the existing literature and the inclusion of some mainstream economists provides a new frame for reading forwards from and backward to Ruskin’s works. Although Ruskin has not been approached in what follows through the established critical literature, that literature has been extensively consulted. I have been impressed, in particular, by those scholars who have had the courage to look beyond conventional judgements on Ruskin’s political economy and who have been prepared to undertake archaeological work to reveal a potential knowledge base. Critical and non-prejudicial reading which looks to Ruskin’s sense rather than his madness, is essential. Without being too kind to Ruskin, I feel that I have discovered in Ruskin methodological issues and analytical insights relevant to the longer-term development of economic understanding. This is so for his discussion of economic science, ethics and poverty. I hope that I have also demonstrated, to historians of economic thought, for it does not need to be demonstrated to literary historians, that nineteenth-century economics texts can be interrogated successfully by methods of rhetorical analysis and literary criticism as well as by more conventional methods. Ruskin saw the cultural significance of economic thinking and attempted a broad-based critique of it. Ruskin’s political economy is interesting not because he developed

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significant tools of economic analysis but because he worked on ideas that were suggestive of the possibility of such tools. The exploration, however flawed, of Ruskin’s economics rhetoric set out in what follows, presents, I hope, some surprises. The connections explored in the final two chapters are, in this sense, interesting.

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1 REASON, RHETORIC AND JOHN RUSKIN

Ruskin’s popularity and readership Kenneth Clark, who re-established Ruskin’s reputation in the 1960s, argues that, in the whole second half of the nineteenth century ‘he was accepted by all thoughtful people as one of the impregnable figures in English literature’ (Clark 1964: xi). This is a very comforting notion of Ruskin’s reputation though it does not correspond to Ruskin’s own view of his standing. In the middle of the period to which Clark is referring, Ruskin reacted to the evaluation of his many critics whom, he felt, complained of the ‘effeminate sentimentality of Ruskin’ (Fors Clavigera, C&W, 28: 21). Even if ‘all thoughtful people’ were to be narrowly defined, Ruskin was subjected also to recurrent criticism and satirical abuse. Ruskin’s first commercial success was Sesame and Lilies, an elegant, persuasive and gendered approach to cultural and social values, which proved to be popular with female readers. Other writings from the 1860s were either only just successful, such as The Crown of Wild Olives which received critical reviews, or complete failures at the time, such as Ethics of the Dust (seen by Quentin Bell as his ‘worst book’) and Unto This Last, his first major work of economic criticism. Munera Pulveris, an attempt at a systematic, socially-oriented, political economy based upon Ruskinian definitions of key economic notions, can be described as an enduring flop. Fors Clavigera, a major work of social comment, started in 1871 to ‘quiet’ his conscience and to ‘rightly help others’, was seen, and has been seen frequently and inappropriately since, as rambling evidence of mental instability (Fors, C&W, 28: 485). The Spectator of October 7, 1871 complained of its ‘watery and rambling verbiage’ and ‘silly and violent language’ (Intro., Fors, C&W, 27: xxii). The influential critic, Leslie Stephens, an admirer of J. S. Mill, came out very strongly against the early letters. This is a judgement that he maintained, writing of Ruskin’s ‘incapacity’, in Fors Clavigera, ‘for consecutive writing’ (quoted in Bell 1978: 112). Recent scholarship sees Fors Clavigera as a ‘masterpiece’ and as answering the social incoherence promoted by libertarianism by developing alternative views

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of order, regulation and self-restraint (Hilton 1985: x; Stoddart 1992–3). The first letters of Fors Clavigera added to the off-beat reputation that he had earned in the 1860s upon publication of his works of social and economic criticism. Ruskin’s popularity is a phenomenon of the late 1870s and after, when reappraisals of his work began to appear, even within formal economics discussion. Perhaps a distinction is to be made between his general standing in terms of art criticism and literature and his standing with respect to the development of his political economy and social criticism. However, his Modern Painters (1843 and 1846), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851, 1853), i.e. the works of the earlier part of his literary life, concerned with art and architectural criticism, were known, according to Maidment, only to a small and critical group of professionals. The first of his books to be noticed in The Times was the second volume of The Stones of Venice (Conner 1979: 106). These were his only ‘true’ books in the sense that they were ‘written deliberately in volume form’ (Maidment 1982: 31). Both price and topic placed them out of the reach of a general readership, whilst his first public lecture to a ‘general audience’ did not take place until 1853. Lecturing slowly grew in significance from then on, becoming the focus for the development of essays later pulled into book form such as The Two Paths and A Joy for Ever (first referred to as The Political Economy of Art) which were the product of lectures from 1856 to 1859 (Spear 1984: 129; Maidment 1982: 32). Unto This Last, his greatest work on economic criticism, sold only 800 copies between 1862 and 1873. His social thinking did gain followers in the late 1870s and 1880s with appreciations appearing in popular publications (Stoddart 1990: 5–6). But this was just as frequently abused on grounds of utopianism and impracticality, Fors Clavigera being a special target. And this is so even after the reappraisal of the late 1870s and early 1880s which saw not only the increased sale of many of his books but also the start of Ruskin Societies devoted to debating his reformist ideas. His writings on political economy had caused him great pain in preparation and production. He had spent, at times, ‘sleepless nights’ trying to puzzle his way through problems of wealth and poverty. He eventually complained about his lack of support, especially from the Church (Collingwood 1900: 354). Ruskin’s aim in these works had been to subvert the existing, and very well defended, social and economic morality which he saw as based upon a false and degrading image of human motivation. He hoped to replace it with a notion of economics and economics agency founded upon justice and a ‘true’ understanding of wealth. He wanted a wide audience, willing to act upon his views, not an audience of systematic experts. It may be thought that Ruskin, the amateur, found a professional basis for accessing such an audience when he became, in middle age, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. He held this post twice (1870–8 and

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1882–5) and claims to have left it, for the first time, not for reasons of health but because he was ‘looked upon as a lively musical-box instead of a man who knew his science and his business’ (Arrows, C&W, 34: 547). But if he were to gain acceptance for his version of social economics he needed, in the meantime to make dramatic use of this position. What he wished for was nothing short of a radical transformation of economic behaviour and expectations, including that of policy-makers, and of political economy as a subject. Its practitioners, he held, were short of lexical and etymological understanding for they did not know ‘. . . the alphabet even of the science they profess’ (letter to C. E. Norton, 18 August 1869). By January 1876 he begins ‘to question very strictly with myself’, asking how it is that St George’s ‘work does not prosper better in my hands’ (Fors, C&W, 28: 485). (The iconography of St George will be considered below, p. 19.) This phrase captures Ruskin’s sense of failure with respect to the development of a persuasive ethical economics capable of overcoming the miserable lot of the poor. His feeling of failure was such that, in his depression, it prevented him, during the writing of parts of Fors Clavigera, seeking escape in reading, drawing and geological pursuits. Ruskin societies, and the birthday greetings that they sent to Brantwood,1 have been some consolation but, given his madness, especially after 1889, it is difficult to know what these could have meant to him. His reputation has always been variable. He has tended to be seen as an isolated and eccentric amateur, a dilettante, whose emotionalism departed, ‘from the norms of male discourse’ and who suffered marginalization as a result (Birch 1988: 312). Only recently Ruskin’s work has begun to shake off the notion of having merely an amateurish knowledge-base. Wilenski, writing in the 1930s, talks of his life as a life of ‘play’ and of ‘self-indulgence’ whilst also acknowledging his genius and social conscience (Wilenski 1933: x). Hilton writes of his work being subjected, then and since, to the ‘dismissive prejudices of a period’ (Hilton 1985: x). Amongst his most severe critics were those who felt that, in writing on social economics, Ruskin had blundered into a subject for which he had neither the temperament, experience nor patience. Economics, then and now, had a reputation for cold logic and systematic thinking, based, at least in the field now known as micro-economics, upon a set of axioms derived from a simple set of premises. To the economically informed, Ruskin’s prose seemed chaotic and ‘feminine’ when compared to the clarity and ‘masculinity’ of Mill’s (Birch 1988). Ruskin’s reputation for sound ideas are somehow influenced by the economic conditions and assumptions of the particular period: ‘in’ when the market has clearly failed, as in the financial crash of the early 1870s or in the 1930s when Wilenski was writing, and otherwise ‘out’. In trying to understand Ruskin’s text today, the contexts and expectations which readers bring are key. In terms of the

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environment and the development of towns, there is currently a growing awareness that Ruskin’s work is informed by a solid knowledge basis (Wheeler 1995: 6). Furthermore, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, for example, can now be understood, given global warming, as a work of major significance. How his texts are framed changes their meaning. If his social criticism is read in the context of the impoverishment of Central America or sub-Saharan Africa, his treatment of poverty and wealth become very relevant. It is time, given that Thatcherite, market-led solutions are being re-examined in a period of Hegelian synthesis inaugurated by New Labour, for his contribution to the development of economic ideas to be reconsidered. The essays here will concentrate upon a few texts which will be detached from his whole output and moved closer to economically informed writing by other authors. As Ruskin’s economics will therefore be separated from his whole corpus, this chapter will provide, as a point of departure, an overview of the integrated nature of his concerns. Ruskin’s life and works are not well known to those interested in the development of economic thinking and there is some merit, and some danger, in considering his biography and its relationship with his economic criticism. And, since his aesthetics and rhetorical development together inform his economic criticism, it is worthwhile tracing out the links and moves that enable Ruskin to turn confidently from art to social criticism. Ruskin according to Ruskin, and some others There are several sources for Ruskin according to Ruskin: his diaries, his letters, his fluid and loosely structured works, particularly Fors Clavigera, and his autobiography, Praeterita. The first two illustrate Ruskin in the ordinary business of life. They chart his journeys, his experiences, his reading, ‘drawing, observing, geologising’ and the development of his social conscience (Norton, quoted in Intro, C&W, 7: xxiii). Though self-regarding, he did not always keep a diary. However, when he was away from home it was his habit to write daily to his father. His journeys gave him the chance to observe (he had trained his eye since childhood) and to reflect on the economic circumstances of Alpine villagers or city-dwellers in places where industrialization had not yet touched, and so contrast conditions in urban England with those elsewhere. The miserable conditions that he saw during his tour of 1848 aided his turn towards social criticism, initiated earlier during a visit to Lucca (see p. 15). In his letters, such as those to Charles Norton, Ruskin is often in full pursuit of the issues that dominated his thinking at the time. The few letters on the subject of political economy are full of forceful attacks and vehement argument and give an

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accurate sense of his radicalism. Fors Clavigera, a development of the letterform that he had experimented with in Time and Tide, is, according to Hilton, a better source for thinking about Ruskin’s self-understanding than the carefully filtered autobiography Praeterita, for it shows Ruskin struggling with political, economic and cultural issues central to his maturity (Hilton 1985: x). His autobiography is a problematic work for those wishing to reconstruct the Ruskin biography. He started writing it in 1885, when his reputation as ‘the Prophet of Brantwood’ had been established, and continued to do so, on and off, until 1889 when he was overwhelmed by the instability which had caused him problems intermittently from 1878. It has deeply marked the pursuit of the Ruskin biography as in the works of early biographers such as T. E. Cook. It is only with later scholarship, starting with Wilenski, then Viljoen, and pursued by Hilton and others, that its influence as a source for biographical reconstruction has been reduced. Praeterita, for all its directness, is, like any autobiography of worth, a work of literature as well as of personal history. It is a selective and controlled reflection upon past pleasures. In its efforts ‘to present a humane and attractive personality’ in the face of his mental condition, it is no less constructed than any of his other writings (Sawyer 1979–80: 28). Ruskin, an only, and isolated, child, was born into a comfortable, pious, demanding and, occasionally, adventurous household on the 8 February 1819. He remained under its direct and indulgent influence for a period which stretched well beyond conventional adolescence. He honoured his father and mother. He reveals in Fors Clavigera, written late in life, that he never ‘disobeyed his mother’ (Fors, C&W, 28: 81). In the margins of his copy of Plato’s Laws, which he translated in his maturity, he adds at the relevant sections, ‘The law of duty to parents. Sublime’ and ‘The great passage on duty to parents’ (Plato, Nomoi, pp. 116, 588). Such passages, public and private, show that his sense of family and of duty was profound. Ruskin’s mental health was delicate from the age of twenty-one (1840) when he suffered depression and symptoms of what was feared to be consumption, following a romantic infatuation for which his lonely childhood had not prepared him. The recovery process took nearly eighteen months. Norton’s sense of Ruskin’s life-long ‘boyish gaiety of spirit’, Cook’s sense of ‘Ruskin’s cheerful talk and happy ways’, and Furnivall’s delight in his sympathetic nature, ‘boyish fun’ and his ‘partly feminine’ charm, should not be crowded out by the fact that he was often depressed (Cook 1911a: 231; Cook 1911b: 293). Ruskin could be good company. Depression recurred in the years 1847, 1862–4, and during 1867, the year in which Ruskin first began to fear the possibility of insanity. Spells of intense work alternated with lethargic periods when he could not focus his energies. However,

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creativity and depression are often associated, and though Ruskin suffered, those engaged in challenging the cultural values of a generation often do. Think of philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau or Wittgenstein. Depression is sometimes a concomitant of creativity. But the first devastating bout of insanity, the result of mental stress and, perhaps, genetic pre-disposition, did not occur until early in 1878 (Wilenski 1933: 22; Spear 1984: 81). The disturbances continued at intervals during the 1880s just as he was achieving a popularity that had eluded him in the earlier part of his life. After a very troubled and inactive decade, Ruskin died early in 1900. Praeterita was started in January 1885 and published in parts during the years 1885–9. The last chapter was written, with great difficulty, in the summer of 1889 before a fifth attack of madness in the autumn of that year (Wilenski 1933: 24). Ruskin writes the autobiography to mull over life’s pleasures and as a way of counterbalancing his instability. Painful events are excised from the writing, but not, of course, necessarily from his own mind or from those of, at least, some of his readers (Cockshut 1994: xxix). His marriage to Euphemia Chalmers Gray, which was annulled in 1854 on the grounds of lack of consummation, is not mentioned. Whatever the details of the marriage, which lasted nearly five years, it seems to have brought Ruskin some stability even if it did not bring fulfilment. Its dissolution had implications for his future: knowledge of his marital failure spoiled any chance of marrying Rose la Touch. Ruskin’s problematic emotional development is a fitting subject for a biographical project, for his emotional capacities informed his writing. This statement must be accepted, however, only with caution. Ruskin’s texts are not of uniform style: Praeterita is, for example, substantially different in the characteristic way in which ideas are shaped when compared to the methods used in Unto This Last and both are different in their structural detail from the writing in the open-textured Fors Clavigera. Ruskin’s style and ideas developed over his long productive life as time and taste altered. The self-aware Ruskin made significant rhetorical choices sometimes to meet earlier criticisms (Kacher 1974: 30). He attempted to match audience and mood, an ability enhanced in those works which grew out of public lectures, and is capable of sustaining an argument as well as of losing the thread. Conner suggests that Ruskin invested paintings and buildings with human emotions almost as a substitute for his own lack of emotional success with real personalities (Conner 1979: xii). This identification is seen at its most morbid and most literal after the death, in May 1875, of Rose la Touch (also mentally ill) whose textual presence in Praeterita is ‘carefully edited’ (Cockshut 1994: xxix). He had met Rose when she was eleven and waited until she was eighteen before proposing marriage. He did so in February 1862. He had to wait until 1872 to be

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refused. Such was his distress upon her death, that he identified Rose with St Ursula as presented in the painting by Carpaccio. Shut away in his room, he made a detailed copy of St Ursula’s Dream. He later imagined, in his grief, that he was receiving messages from Rose through the intermediation of the saint (Wilenski 1933: 21; Spear 1984: 80). For Ruskin, art operated at more than one level. The art object, such as a landscape or a portrait, was a thing in itself but also a metaphor for nature or for human nature. This interchange of painting and persons or images or objects and persons had already become part of Ruskin’s method of social analysis, especially with respect to the image of economic man. Knowledge of his psychological problems, which some thought they had perceived from his emotive writing long before knowledge of his problems were made public, has supported much unjust and lazy criticism of his work. Difficult or obscure or associative or unpalatable writing is dismissed too quickly as evidence of instability (Spear 1985: 13; Sawyer 1979–80: 26). His mental problems should not be ignored as they were by the earlier biographers, partly following Ruskin’s own practice in Praeterita and partly at the insistence of Joan Severn, whom Hilton constructs as Ruskin’s controlling guardian at Brantwood (Hilton 1985: xi). Spear is very clear on this for he is intent on reaching a ‘sympathetic understanding’ of Ruskin by concentrating, in the context of historical circumstances, ‘upon Ruskin’s sanity’ (Spear 1984: xii). Ruskin’s mental problems should not be allowed to become the prejudicial framework for evaluating Ruskin’s writing. His texts are ‘rich’ and can sustain critical readings without reference to the assumed state of his mental health. The ‘death of the author’, a tenet of postmodernist textual criticism, ought to be kept in mind when any search for ‘meaning’ turns too easily to Ruskin’s health rather than his writing. There is, however, an interplay between Ruskin’s life and his writings, as Hilton points out (Hilton 1985: ix). Awareness of this form of intertextuality, provided it is not prejudicial, can help make sense of his books (Hilton 1985: ix; Conner 1979: xi; Sawyer 1979–80: 26). Political economy, a subject and social process which gave him so much anguish, is also absent from the account developed in Praeterita. Yet his critique of economic man, of so-called natural laws, of value and economic motivation, which only comes into its own from the late 1850s, is central to the developing projects of his middle years. Ruskin had measured, for example, from the publication in 1860 of material which formed the basis of ‘the central work’ of his life, i.e. Unto This Last, ‘the beginning of the days of reprobation’ (Cook 1911b: 2). It was not that there were no voices raised in support, for there were some positive reviews of the Cornhill essays in minor newspapers, and there was always Carlyle. Rather, in the words of Ruskin’s father, that ‘opinions so opposed to Malthus, The Times and the City of Manchester’ could not be readily defended

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(21 July 1860, quoted in Cook 1911b: 5). That there was more at risk in attacking the notions of the Manchester School than there was in the promotion of a particular school of painting, was something that Ruskin’s father, John James, knew by instinct. He had suppressed the radical letters which Ruskin had written in 1852 for publication in The Times. Their theme was the true responsibilities of government with respect to taxation, election and education.2 Ruskin only learned this lesson by experience. He needed to be sure of his audience and this security was removed by the Cornhill controversy. Ruskin, by his own admission, had not been, by then, schooled in adversity (Praeterita, 1949, p. 35). His reaction to the criticism was as his father had feared. According to Cook, Ruskin was so upset by the attacks that he exiled himself from England, making only brief visits, for over two years, spending his time in some degree of solitude in Switzerland and in France (Cook 1911b: 18). That his writings had not found favour was a serious blow. Periodicals were an effective means of accessing a guaranteed readership and to be suspended from one potentially influential journal was, in career terms, a setback. Ruskin’s Continental visits were usually, to adapt Wilenski’s terms, work as play rather than conventional holidays, and this long stay was no exception. There, he gathered strength for another attempt on political economy, eventually published as Munera Pulveris (1872) but based upon the essays published in Fraser’s Magazine during 1863. He prepared by a further reading of preferred classical sources such as Plato and Xenophon. His productivity was, like his spirits, low and in the period from 1861 to 1863, his only output was the Fraser’s essays and two public lectures. He wrote, in March 1863, after the publication of the first essays in Fraser’s Magazine on political economy, to Norton expressing his feelings: The peace in which I am at present is only as if I had buried myself in a tuft of grass on a battlefield wet with blood, for the cry of the earth about me is in my ears continually if I did not lay my head to the very ground. The folly and horror of humanity enlarge to my eyes daily.

(Intro., C&W, 17: xl) Ruskin paid a high personal price for the acuteness of his observation and the heightening of his understanding achieved through his forceful and dramatic imagination. Publication of the articles had been cut short by Froude, the editor, after the essay published in the April edition. Ruskin had caused more hostility. The Cornhill rumpus had hardly cooled when a second set of angry reactions to his work in the well-established Fraser’s led to another suspension. Despite trying to adjust to criticism, Ruskin’s views on political economy were now unacceptable

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to two significant journals. After the essays which became Munera Pulveris, whose opening chapters at least attempt to mimic the organizational and definitional aspects of an economic ‘principles’ text, Ruskin in practice abandoned any attempt to produce a closed, systematic political economy. He turned to the lecture, the newspaper letter, literary essay (carefully tested in public lectures where he could sense the audiences’ reactions) and finally to the sustained epistle. Such texts could hold economic ideas without necessarily focusing on systematic economic questions. Ruskin, sensitive to changing tastes, cast around in order to secure the readership for which he yearned. But social and economic behaviour remained a target for his satire. The first epistles, collectively published and rewritten as Time and Tide, lead to his final, innovative work of social criticism, Fors Clavigera, published in monthly instalments, consistently from 1871 to 1878, and thereafter, because of the state of his health, intermittently. Ruskin also turned to practical action, in the 1870s, as one means of renewing his attack upon the assumptions underlying economic motivation. It is clear, as the business-like Octavia Hill pointed out, receiving Ruskin’s public censure as her reward, that Ruskin was not a skilled administrator (Wilenski 1933: 129). Nor was he politically adept. He did not seek direct political influence: this came in the end through an appreciation of his works. Ruskin’s concerns were essentially cultural in a highly expanded sense. He was concerned about how life ought to be lived. Ruskin’s political economy was inherently social in the sense that he repudiated the notion of a separate, segregated economic domain. The turn to practical action, whilst it undoubtedly had practical ends in mind, is perhaps best seen as an act of social rhetoric, a demonstration in a social narrative of possibilities which Ruskin had already created in text. The various activities allowed Ruskin to model in life, rather than in mere text, motivations and behaviours, those of landlords and of land-owners in particular, alternative to those implied by the notion of ‘economic man’. He had given drawing lessons at a Working Men’s College and had, during the mid-1850s, encouraged Rossetti, whom he financed, to do the same. The experience of meeting working men convinced Ruskin of the possibilities of individual and collective improvement. The practical action after the initial failure of his social criticism was of varied intensity and significance. From the mid1860s, he turned from indirect to direct action. He joined a committee discussing questions of employment and unemployment, founded the Guild of St George, the iconography of which will be examined briefly later, the Oxford School of Drawing and the Sheffield Museum. In 1872 he financed a street-sweeping experiment in Seven Dials, a poor district of London, and financially assisted Octavia Hill in working for the amelioration of housing conditions in London.

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In 1874 he encouraged, in line with his thinking that one way to social reform was through influencing the actions, and particularly the pastimes, of the governing classes, a group of undergraduates to take part in building a road to Hincksey, an Oxfordshire village. Ruskin disliked the normal social pastimes – hunting, shooting and fishing – and the false gifts to poor tenants of the outcome of the shoot that such pastimes entailed. His complaint was that the European upper classes lived life as if it were ‘one large Picnic party’ (Fors, C&W 27: 39). In teaching the upper classes their duties, he is reflecting also the preoccupations of Xenophon. Like Harriet Martineau, Ruskin hoped for an upper class that was worthy of the affections of working men (Henderson 1995: 72). The Hincksey episode is to be read in a textual context. Ruskin believed in fair rents, compensation for any improvements made by tenants and in fixity of tenure for agricultural tenants. He had set out the arguments in Fors Clavigera from 1871 to 1874 (Cook 1911b: 574). It is also to be read in a social context. Knowledge of the contrasting material circumstances of the villagers of Hincksey, a rural slum in the grip of agricultural depression, and of their landlords, the Harcourts, is essential to a proper reading of the event. As Hilton points out, one of the concerns of the event as social narrative is, in effect, about the responsibilities of property owners, i.e. about economic agency (Hilton 1974: 227). Those undergraduates involved included individuals as contrasting as Alfred Milner and Oscar Wilde (Hilton 1974: 229). Milner, who was to become pro-consul in South Africa immediately after fighting the Boer War, was not known in later life for Ruskinian sympathies. Oscar Wilde, who seems to have incorporated Ruskin’s idea on ‘face’ (see p. 18) into his Picture of Dorian Gray, insisted, during the road-building, on commenting upon the ‘beauties’ of the colour of the soil turned up during construction (Conner 1979: 129–30; Whitehouse 1934: 33). The educational outcomes were not necessarily as Ruskin intended! The road, furthermore, was rough. But the idea of gentlemen scholars doing something for poor people, by dint of their own labour, was radical enough to be debated ‘in the whole spectrum of the English press’ (Spear 1984: 182). Here was a dramatic initiative, consistent with the thrust of his social analysis, taken by an Oxford professor, which reached beyond art to society. Ruskin, in the second half of his life, in contradiction to the spirit of accumulation and getting on which marked the social activities of his contemporaries, disposed of income and capital and personal possessions in support of a variety of good causes. He gave some of his much-loved Turners to the University of Oxford, and expressed disappointment at seeing them again without the added thrill of ownership. Even when under his father’s financial control, Ruskin had used some of his allowance to support Rossetti, whose artistic struggle to find a market Ruskin understood. It is as if he were challenging, in his

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manner of disposing of his income and wealth, the common accumulative instincts of his class. Indeed, he recommended, optimistically, such behaviour in Munera Pulveris: the ‘true ambition of an economist should be, to die, not as rich as possible, but as poor as possible, calculating the ebb tide of possession in true and calm proportion to the ebb tide of life’ (MP, C&W, 17: 276–7).3 Such sentiments are a direct personal challenge to Mill’s founding principle of economic science, that more is always better. By 1885 Ruskin had spent his inherited fortunes (he had received another considerable sum following his mother’s death, at the age of ninety, on 5 December 1871). Ruskin wrote on the prudential need for saving for old age (a ‘natural law of human life’), saving out of a modest income being classified in his political economy as an inequality justly arrived at. He did not, however, make any deliberate financial effort to ensure his own financial security. Fortunately, the increasing popularity of his works in the late 1870s and 1880s, towards which he had worked, meant that his income from publishing and republishing grew. Capitalgain windfalls realized from the disposal of paintings also helped. Little of this is explored in Praeterita, which makes it ‘an extended rumination on his childhood rather than a statement of Ruskin’s purposes in adult life’ (Hilton 1985: ix). According to Viljoen, it is so unbalanced that the account that it provides, of Ruskin’s relations with his father and mother, essential to an understanding of Ruskin’s intellectual, moral and emotional development, seriously misleads. It suggests that the brilliant but psychologically damaged, guilt-ridden Ruskin was the result of Margaret Ruskin’s nurturing, control and narrowing religious outlook. (Viljoen 1956). Ruskin had a refined social conscience, but it was saturated with guilt. This guilt was heightened by depression. Freudian psychology would suggest that moral development is promoted by both parents in a two-parent household, and that sexual identity, also, is influenced by social relations within the household (Brown 1965: 351). Another genius relevant to the development of Ruskin’s economic criticism, J.S. Mill, also was subjected to an ‘unusual and remarkable’ childhood (Mill [1873] 1924: 1). Laski describes the educational experiment, to which Mill was subjected, as reading ‘like a record of medieval torture’ (Laski, in Mill, 1924: x). It is not inappropriate to compare Ruskin’s experience of life with that of Mill. Not only was their approach to written argument marked in different ways by that experience, but Ruskin’s economic writing confronts, and is compared by Ruskin’s contemporaries with, Mill’s rhetoric as developed in his Principles of Political Economy. Whilst there was no direct social link between Ruskin and Mill, they were often on opposite sides of an argument. There are, however, major intertextual links between Mill’s Principles and Ruskin’s Unto This Last (see Chapter 6). Unlike Ruskin, of whom great things were simply expected (‘bishop’, ‘poet’,

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and his own preference, ‘geologist’), Mill was systematically groomed for genius. The intended outcome of Ruskin’s daily training in the bible, under his mother’s detailed supervision, was the instillation of the Christian ethic and a career in the Church and not, as it turned out, the laying down of powerful understanding of language and of its effectiveness in use when backed by moral force. Though Ruskin’s talents were encouraged, by his father in particular, the curriculum was haphazard (Cook 1911a: 13–18). He was ill-prepared for university studies at Oxford and as a result his performance was variable. Ruskin’s erratic career, by contrast to Mill’s relatively more focused one, developed by chance. It was influenced by the gift, in 1832, when he was but thirteen, of a copy of Rogers’ Italy. What absorbed Ruskin was not the poetry but the etchings of Italian scenes, drawn by Turner, which carefully matched the text. Mill, as a result of a lack of a proper emotional basis within which to live his life and of the narrow but concentrated educational activities of his childhood, also experienced nervous problems. He suffered some sort of nervous breakdown in 1826, due in part to overwork, with a very severe recurrence in 1836, which left him with a permanent twitch over one eye (Bain 1882: 37, 42–4). Mill had to negotiate an independent intellectual life around, between, and in the face of his father’s works and legacy, even if, with respect to his economics writing, particularly in his Principles, this was achieved through textual compromise and synthesis. He had to find an emotional basis different from the narrow utilitarianism of his father and did this in the discovery of literature and emotionally charged poetry. In the end, Mill not only found some basis for independent thought but also found a partner capable of sharing his life in every way. Ruskin, who fell romantically in love with the notion of love at several points in his life, never did. Ruskin remained dependent upon his father’s judgement and money for a much longer period than Mill did on his, despite Mill following, at least with respect to employment, in his father’s footsteps. When his marriage was annulled, Ruskin chose to return to live in the family home. This was an act of weakness. Power relations within the household were complex: they were experienced by Ruskin as a mixture of indulgence and control. He escaped this by lengthy periods of Continental travel. Nonetheless he does seem to have mourned the loss of his ‘beloved’ father after the latter’s death on 3 March 1864. In a letter to Acland of 9 March 1864, he outlines the relationship with a chilling accuracy for he talks of ‘the loss of a father who would have sacrificed his life for his son, and yet forced his son to sacrifice his life for him . . .’. Had John James hoped to satisfy, vicariously, his own frustrated ambitions? In Praeterita, Ruskin talks of the fact that his own ‘powers of independent action, were left undeveloped’ (Praeterita, 1949, p. 39). If the father achieved leverage upon him, then Ruskin acted with complicity in this, for, whatever the psychology of the relationship, he benefited

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willingly from his father’s financial and managerial support, and the protection that this offered from the vexing details of adult life. When Ruskin finally took control of his financial affairs, initially at any rate, he made a mess. Ruskin, after his father’s death, wrote and gave in quick succession a series of lectures which were the bases for Sesame and Lilies, The Ethics of the Dust and The Crown of Wild Olives. He also took to calling Carlyle ‘Papa’ (Spear 1984: 86). Turning friends into family remained a feature of his life thereafter, suggesting, again, a personality emotionally trapped in some form of adolescence. In Unto This Last, Ruskin had frequently resorted to the family as a metaphor from which to argue about society. Praeterita is written in a direct style which has tended to be taken at face value, ‘directness’ often being taken for ‘truthfulness’ and a comparative lack of rhetoric and its implications. But Ruskin well understood the nature of myths and in his autobiography, according to Spear, he is constructing a ‘myth of his own life’, something he had already accomplished in the pages of Fors Clavigera (Spear 1985: 14; Sawyers 1979–80: 7). There are, nonetheless, many discomfortingly honest and direct statements. Heading the list of the ‘dominant calamities’ of his early life is: ‘I had nothing to love’ (Praeterita, 1949, p. 35). This line is an echo of what he wrote to Rossetti in 1855, sometime after the collapse of his marriage: ‘I have no friendships, and no loves’ (quoted in Conner 1979: 126).This structures his life as one of intellectual and, more significantly, emotional isolation.4 Praeterita, though at the time, in terms of critical reviews at any rate, it ‘simply suffered an ill-deserved neglect’, is a good read and an outstanding work of nineteenth-century autobiographical literature (Bradley 1984: 19). This is especially true of the earlier parts where Ruskin was more successful at maintaining his emotional and intellectual stability. What emerges is a Ruskin, more reasonable and less irritable than his social criticism suggests. Bell calls it ‘his masterpiece’ but in this he must be intending its prose style rather than its accuracy as a reflection of a lived life (Bell 1978: 10). Praeterita, unlike the autobiography written by J. S. Mill, charms. However, Ruskin’s life, driven by a desire to communicate, was in fact shot through with vehement passions, inconsistencies and conflicts, for ‘consciously and unconsciously Ruskin was a controversialist’ (Livingstone 1945: 5; Bradley 1984: 1). Praeterita has literary merit, but to understand the public Ruskin, it is better to turn, as Hilton suggests, to his controversial works. Many of his texts are ‘open’ and evolve from one piece of writing to the next so that intertextual connections and a sense of continuations, of attempts to close an unclosed story, pervade much of his writing. Reading Ruskin is a rhetorical challenge.

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From interpreting art to interpreting society Ruskin’s working life has conventionally been divided between the production of his highly successful works on art and architecture up to the age of forty, and thereafter, though he occasionally turned to minor problems in art criticism, with his works on social and economic criticism. But this is rather too simple a division. Much of his work in the second part of his life has been described as ‘occasional’ (Maidment 1982: 32). Opportunistic is another word fit for the context. Ruskin, once he had learned the lessons of his failed publications, adapted to his market whilst keeping a personal voice. There is much educational and literary material which cannot be classified as social criticism. Bradley goes so far as to describe his writing as ‘maniacally diverse’ (Bradley 1984: 2). Mental illness does not necessarily imply literary incapacity. It is, as Ruskin’s writing itself attests, a question of degree and type. Furthermore, divergent thinking, and the diverse interests such thought encourages, is a valid form of thought even if the output is necessarily diverse. The ‘anti-market’ Ruskin developed in his mature years a practical feel for the kind of readers available to him, devising in the process of experimentation the net book agreement. However, the arrangements he made for publishing the monthly editions of Fors Clavigera lessened his sales and reduced the number of potential reviews: the economist Alfred Marshall was one who complained of the problems Ruskin created by his decision to operate a system of postal purchases which supplied books at the same price as they were supplied to the booksellers (Whitacker 1996: letters 316, 315). Nonetheless, Fors Clavigera dominates and this very open-textured monthly output has as a principal purpose cultural and, hence, social criticism. It would, therefore, be inappropriate to see his life’s work in two separate parts. The critical motivation which inspired his writing on art and architecture informs his analyses of political economy. His notion of harmony and subordination in painting informs his notion of harmonious subordination in society. He remains committed to changing attitudes and values so the educative aspect of his concerns runs through all of his works. Indeed, they are possibly heightened in his writing on social criticism. In the first part, Ruskin teaches his readers to see, for example, the (later) art of Turner, and then all art, with new eyes. In the activities of the second part of his life, he wishes readers to see directly, without the distorting lenses of laissez-faire and natural law, the economic, behavioural and material ugliness of unregulated capitalism. In both halves, his target readers were the middle classes, Time and Tide and Fors not withstanding. They were the class from which he came and which, like his father, he disliked. Ruskin preferred his remodelled aristocrats and his notion

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of honest artisans, both rhetorically constructed, to those devoted to the ‘Goddess of getting on’. His sense of working against popular prejudices, swimming, as he puts it, like a fish with his head against the current, is just as valid for his writing in support of Turner’s later works as it is for his attacks upon the economics of Manchester. As he saw artistic output as a manifestation of the moral standing of a people, so he came to see all other economic output in the same light. Ruskin composed his first sermon, ‘People be good’, early in his childhood. A strong sense of personal morality, first developed within the confines of a narrow and pious Christian household, then modified and elaborated upon over a long period of time by experience, including a crisis of faith leading to his ‘unconversion’, informs his writing throughout. The argumentative process, which Hewison has called ‘the argument of the eye’, based upon observation, elaborated by a visual and emotive rhetoric and a vision of alternative worlds, is shared (Hewison 1976). Ruskin claims in the preface to Munera Pulveris that, as a result of his experience of aesthetics, he posesses a special advantage in the study of an ethical economics. He understands how it is that his concern for social economics grows naturally from his aesthetics and is unprepared for the recurrent criticism that, in writing upon political economy, he has reached beyond his legitimate sphere of knowledge. It is the case that his lectures on The Political Economy of Art grew out of his concerns about ensuring a sustainable supply of excellent artist-producers. A problem arises in this respect because innovative artists, as John Kenneth Galbraith was to point out nearly a century later, cannot readily find a market, ‘the first impression of artistic innovation’ being ‘almost invariably unfavourable’ (Galbraith 1974: 64). Galbraith is reflecting on the relationship between ‘art’ (widely defined) and ‘the market’ and the fundamental issue of the primacy of ‘quality’ over ‘price’. He points out that ‘the quality of the painting as distinct from the paint or what causes artists to colonize, multiply and prosper has never been thought a proper concern of [economics]’ (Galbraith 1974: 61). This was also Ruskin’s point, and one that was taken up, too, by the economicallyaware Geddes (Geddes 1889: 2). The link between aesthetics and economics is made specifically by Ruskin, elaborated by Geddes and Morris and reasserted by Galbraith! Galbraith does not mention Ruskin anywhere in the book, though, of course, the ideas in Ruskin’s lecture on The Political Economy of Art share a family resemblance with those later developed independently by Galbraith. The translation of its title into A Joy for Ever and its price in the market illustrates aptly a very quick route from aesthetics to economics. Keat’s ‘thing of beauty’ uses up resources, the skill of the artist-producer in particular, and those that supply the resources have to be adequately compensated. But Ruskin saw in the

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phenomena that Mill’s notion of desires stimulating production did not hold with respect to innovative art. Innovative art stimulates the desires, even if slowly. Ruskin felt that he had a basis in this insight from which to begin to challenge Mill’s notions of motivation and value. Ruskin himself specified another prompt for his turn from landscape to that of life. In Fors Clavigera, letter 45, he points to the direct effect of a study in Lucca, in his tour of 1845, of the funereal monument to ‘Ilaria di Caretto’. As a result of his observations, he moved ‘from the study of landscape to that of life, being then myself in the fullest strength of labour and joy of hope’ (Fors, C&W, 28: 146). This contemplation, Ruskin claims, turned him from landscape to Italian art and, by implication, to the contemplation of the human figure and ‘life’. The ‘lady of Caretto’ was , for Ruskin, an expression not only of ‘the prefect law of art’ but of ‘perfect law in life’ (Florence, C&W, 23: 228). ‘Life’ and ‘laws of life’ and their antitheses are key to Ruskin’s contemplation of the so-called ‘natural law’ of political economy and of ‘labour’. The condition of labour is a defining condition in his later political economy and the health of that labour, as painted upon its ‘cheeks’, binds human potential and the human form together in an aesthetics for economics. The roots of Ruskin’s economic criticism are to be found deep in his aesthetics. It is widely recognized in the literature that Ruskin makes a strong transitional move towards economic criticism in The Stones of Venice. A more precise charting of such an evolutionary process is, according to Conner, more difficult. Conner, whilst refraining from claiming a complete solution, provides what he calls ‘a pointer’ to the key line of development by focusing on Ruskin’s aesthetic notion ‘that each society could be analysed into detailed collective character-traits’ (Conner 1979: xiii). Ruskin’s thought here is an interesting corruption of Plato’s notion, set out in the Republic, that there is a correspondence between polity and individual character in ‘imperfect societies’. Thus Ruskin’s (reversed) concern with making an evaluation of ‘economic man’: what sort of society gave rise to such a man? Conner’s work has the advantage of being able to show, in a more focused way than has been provided in the paragraph above, a link through rhetorical process as well as content. He puts the links thus: In The Poetry of Architecture (1837–9) Ruskin had applied human qualities in architecture; in Seven Lamps (1849) he was concerned with the qualities required in the ‘builders’; later in The Stones of Venice (1853û5) the two were synthesized, so that architecture was derived from the personality of the builders through its human characteristics.

(Conner 1979: 79)

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The key chapter in the transition within The Stones of Venice is ‘The Nature of the Gothic’. In this chapter, Ruskin parallels significant, expressive elements in Gothic architecture with significant characteristics of the artisan-producers and the social and economic conditions within which they worked. Ruskin’s key question, when seem from the vantage point of his future works, is a simple one: ‘Was the carver happy while he was about it?’(Conner 1979: 89). And through such a deceptively simple question, Ruskin can begin to contemplate the nature of work, albeit initially artisanal work, under differing types of economic systems. It is deceptive, according to Conner, because there is no way of answering it within the framework of Ruskin’s method other than by rhetorical manipulation. But in attempting an answer he begins to discover the changeable nature of economic systems. This provided Ruskin with a basis from which to challenge the notion of ‘natural law’, which many in his day associated with the unyielding ‘truths’ of political economy. He also discovered and began to elaborate upon the negative effects of the division of labour as outlined by Adam Smith. Ruskin resisted the development of the concept of ‘labour’ as something divorced from ‘work’ or from ‘workers’. ‘On The Nature of the Gothic’ in which stress on the humanity of workers is significant, was reproduced as a pamphlet by the Kelmscott Press. It had been first produced in 1854 for the opening lecture of the Working Men’s College (30 October 1854). Its reproduction formed one other link between Ruskin’s writing and his desire and capacity to undertake experimental social action (Collingwood 1900: 150). Conner carefully places The Stones of Venice and its characteristic approaches to argument within the context of Ruskin’s earlier works on architecture. The intention of the work was to draw a moral between the fate of ‘Tyre, Venice and England’ (i.e. great maritime empires) so it is, from the outset, dedicated to look at the relationship between art and social and political conditions. The Stones of Venice developed Ruskin’s insight set out in ‘The Lamp of Obedience’ (The Seven Lamps of Architecture) that architecture ought to embody the polity, material development and religious experience of a society. Although Ruskin claims an advantage due to his experience of fine art, Conner shows that his turn to social and economic criticism grew, almost by rhetorical necessity, out of his studies on architecture and his concern for the people who produced it (Conner 1979: 133). But the insight that Ruskin reverses the usual process and so ‘considers works of art in order to interpret historical contexts’, has implications for his social analysis. Vulgar art, adulterated food and shoddy goods, features of mid-century economic life that concerned Ruskin, suggested, by reading backwards from the product, mental and moral demoralization as a counterpart to physical demoralization. However clear this line is, Ruskin, in life as opposed to ‘in text’, had prepared

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for this turn towards economic criticism. Fain puts Ruskin’s first reading of political economy as early as 1847, a date which could be supported by Ruskin’s claim to have turned towards ‘life’ in 1845 (Fain 1956). By 1852, Ruskin had been prepared to seek publication for his radical ideas on government and taxation in The Times, and would have done so had his father not suppressed the letters. The ideas therein are unlikely to have arisen directly from his works. This does not detract from Conner’s notion that the movement is made possible by the development of a characteristic set of rhetorical moves, for Ruskin bides his time. His works on social and economic criticism do not start to appear until after The Stones of Venice. Ruskin may simply have deferred to his father’s authority. Could it also be that Ruskin realized that he had not yet developed the required rhetorical basis from which to execute the attack? Within the general turn from aesthetic categories to social categories, Conner highlights the notion of ‘face’ as a feature upon which moral character is written (Conner 1979: 129). Ruskin claims to be able to go from facial representation in painting and in buildings to the character of the artist or artisanal producer just as he claims to go from a study of a building to the details of the moral and economic conditions within which those who worked upon it lived. Conner’s pointer is a very valuable one for it enables us to see more clearly the strong basis in rhetoric that links Unto This Last with the earlier works. It is in Unto This Last that Ruskin constructs a figure to analyse, a face to look into and to interpret with the same rhetorical skill and manipulation that he uses in his earlier texts. The figure is that of economic man, presented to his readers in the form of a denuded skeleton. When he examines the face of this figure he finds a skull, a death’s head (Hark, 1996–97, 25). His elaboration of the consequences of unregulated capitalism as death constitutes a main thread which is shot through this his most dramatic of texts. Myers, in contemplating Ruskin’s place in the textual history of the notion of economic man, puts it thus: ‘For Ruskin economic man is the inhuman destroyer of those things giving meaning and quality to life’ (Myers 1983: 26). A healthy life was evidence for Ruskin of true wealth. The concern over the true nature of wealth that rings throughout Ruskin’s writings was shared by Carlyle. He also asked: ‘to whom, then, is this wealth of England, wealth? Who is it that it blesses, makes happier, wiser, beautifuler, in any way better . . . We have more riches than that of any nation ever before; we have less good of them than any nation ever had before’ (Carlyle [1843] 1909: 6). Those who made such a figure, an unhelpful and unscientific cultural construction rather than a natural or truly scientific one, are themselves, according to Ruskin, taken in by it. Those who are taken in become themselves the product of ‘vulgar political economy’. And so they too are fooled by false value and by ‘illth’, the natural and oppressive opposite of wealth. His attacks are upon political

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economy but, as his first readers were quick to realize, upon the ethics of middleclass England, a class of whom, as we have seen, he disapproved for their moneygrubbing desire to ‘get on’. Once he has exploited, in Unto This Last, the negative images to the full, in a series of contrasts between ‘vital’ life and images of death, extensively analysed by Hewison, he reconstructs his dead skeleton, in the section headed ‘The Veins of Wealth’, in passages of huge emotional appeal and visual brilliance, as the robust flesh and blood of vital and healthy labour. Such workers are to live as the manifestation of wealth, under an eternal sense of value based upon natural conditions and properties and a just and carefully regulated economy. When read with the other images that Ruskin constructs, what emerges is a vision of economic welfare which combines the elements of Ruskin’s view of Platonic discourse: beauty (e.g. the possibility of a developed and healthy human body), harmony (e.g. by achieving the perfection of that body and society as a whole through a proper sense of wealth) and justice (e.g. required to provide the means whereby the possibility of the human body is realized). As Ruskin sees economic man as a representation of all that negates ‘true’ economy and hence ‘true’ life so it becomes a force of evil. Adam Smith, an originator of the notion that selfish economic behaviour promotes social harmony as an unintended outcome, is depicted in Fors Clavigera as a ‘devil’. In Fors Ruskin constructs another countervailing figure, St George, a proven champion capable of restoring well-being to a fractured people living in a landscape blighted by the ‘illth’ of capitalism and, hence, in the power of ‘the Lord of Decomposition’ (Sawyer 1979–80: 7; Fors, C&W, 27: 293). The romanticized saint, totem of The Guild of St George, is for Ruskin, ‘the leader of a sacred soldiership’ and a ‘band of delivering knights’, images which recall the enlightened paternalistic and militaristic leadership in Unto This Last (Spear 1984: 128; Fors, C&W, 27: 481, 538). Ruskin identified with the crusading virtues of the saint early in his childhood and makes frequent references to him in many of his works prior to Fors (Spear 1984: 128). In Fors, the St George’s myth and Ruskin’s own ‘autobiographical myth’ are intertwined, in terms such as his own failure to achieve St George’s work (Sawyer 1979–80, 6). But the image is a result of a prolonged search for figures, such as his female perfect economist drawn from classical and Old Testament sources, or his image of poverty carried by the lot of the seamstress or his sense of chivalrous behaviour, which emerges firstly from ‘Traffic’, needed to work against ‘economic man’. The figure of the saint sums up the values expected of members of the Guild, but is also suggests values for the wider community. Ruskin, who had pondered the Paris Commune, was aware of the possibility of class warfare (Spear 1984: 187). The saint stands for an active, pro-

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administrative, Platonic and Christian tradition, a tradition both of ‘gift’ (Ruskin would prefer ‘help rather than gift’ but the ‘gift/help’ relationship is one which laissez-faire challenges) and of stewardship. Ruskin’s symbols always serve more than one purpose so it also suggests ‘one-nation’ rather than the class conflict (i.e. disharmony) created by the market. Ruskin, in the end, mistrusts the conventional notion of ‘progress’. Society, given this view, as Stoddart argues, must always be engaged in an ethical or religious struggle between good and evil (Stoddart 1993: 224). People, then, are always offered a choice. ‘Economic man’ pitches the standard of human behaviour too low, and a greedy, moneygrubbing class readily conforms to the social expectations that the concept generates. An ethical political economy raises it and St George supplies a heroic icon to fix ethical economic behaviour in the minds of ordinary people. Ruskin, in his search for institutional arrangements which ensured moral action, challenged notions of economic dogma central to the Classical School. Reading Ruskin was always a demanding task. The ‘figurative’ aspect of his aesthetics can help with the interpretation of his political economy. How Ruskin developed his initial insights rhetorically, the economic significance of what he found as a result and some unexpected outcomes of his thinking, constitute the subject-matter of the essays which make up the rest of this book.

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2 WHY READ RUSKIN ON POLITICAL ECONOMY?

There is a vast fund of scholarship on the writings of John Ruskin. To raise the question of ‘why read Ruskin?’, even if it is focused on his writings on ‘political economy’, may seem redundant. It could be a rhetorical move that is justified more by convention than logic.1 It is only when the notion of Ruskin’s political economy as fragmented, mistaken and based upon a sentimentalist confusion of analysis with policy, is reviewed and challenged that any independent judgement can be made. Ruskin’s political economy tended to be read by contemporaries as ‘nonsense’ or by subsequent critics as in essence ‘no different from Mill’. The proposition developed in the essays which make up this volume is that Ruskin, in the end, does occupy an economic space which is different from that of Mill. The question could be simplified by splitting it into: ‘why did I read Ruskin’s political economy?’ and ‘why should you read him too?’ This emphasizes the persuasive intent. What are taken to be suitable answers will depend on a number of contexts: individual readings, as McCloskey reminds us, will be diverse. There is none that could be given to the first question that would be both accurate and interesting to those primarily interested in the history of economic thought. An interesting answer for the target reader would be constructed around what was found rather than on authorial motivations. And this is largely how this chapter has been composed. It provides an overview, written from the point of view of the essays which follow, of Ruskin’s political economy. As a matter of logic it should be placed at the end of the book as an exit point, but as a matter of rhetoric (and of economy) it is presented as an entry point. Answering the second question is also problematic. ‘Meaning’ is now accepted as being located in a relationship between a text and a reader rather than simply as a matter of authorial intent (Barthes 1968). If this notion of ‘meaning’ is accepted then, ideally, and still following McCloskey, we would accept that discussing Ruskin is a ‘social process’ which involves reading ‘with intent’ as a

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common activity (McCloskey 1994: 333, 322). We would both then read, following our own intentions, and then discuss why Ruskin’s political economy is or is not a provocative read. We could then ‘meet’ via the internet, though the conversation may lack structure. Ruskin’s works are less known to those interested in the intellectual history of economics than to those in literary history, so some additional preparation may be necessary. The initial question ought to be reworded. This time it would be in terms of what informed readers, interested in the history of economics, might find in Ruskin if they were to read Ruskin through the lenses supplied in this volume. After establishing his reputation in art criticism, Ruskin wrote, from 1858, as we have seen, a series of political economy texts. In these, Ruskin attempted to establish an alternative ethical basis to existing versions of political economy. In so doing, he challenged the intellectual authority of Mill. A major difficulty in understanding Ruskin’s social economics is created by his holistic approach, which he shared with other significant Victorian writers such as Arnold and, of course, Ruskin’s mentor, Carlyle. It is hard to understand any part of Ruskin’s thinking without relating it to the whole within a context suggested by a Platonic ideal of justice, harmony (and hence, beauty) and truth. This in turn creates problems. The Ruskin corpus is huge and was written over many years during which time he is bound to have changed his mind. It is accepted that looking at his work as a whole is a valid method of evaluating Ruskin’s ideas, though some critical theories would challenge whether his corpus can be treated as a text. Treating his corpus in this way puts Ruskin’s work at a great disadvantage. Mill, with whom he has to be compared, is usually seen as a clear-headed and systematic writer, intent upon achieving a consensus view of political economy. Mill’s entire corpus, also diverse, is rarely compared with Mill’s Principles in order to settle Mill’s meaning. This is so even if Mill’s intellectual commitment to the consensus achieved in his Principles is open to question. This volume focuses on Ruskin’s analyses of political economy and hence, in an attempt to redress the balance of work on Ruskin, restricts the discussion to those works most closely identified with political economy. Such a method could suffer from the disadvantage of reduction by strategic deletions, as Ruskin’s texts are recreated in a manner which conforms to expectations generated by the history of economics. Ruskin was deeply suspicious of constrained, systematic thinking: because of its partial nature; because in the wrong hands it can very easily lead to the wrong results; and because of its capacity to stifle, rather than promote, thinking. There are many pointers to his approach. Thus, Newton explains why the apple fell but says nothing of how it gets ‘up there’ in the first place (Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, C&W, 34: 18). An unthinking application of Aristotle’s

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aesthetic criteria, ‘Order, Symmetry, and the Definite’ without reference to nature, leads to accepting rubbish as art (The Two Paths, C&W, 16: 274). And neoclassical notions of symmetry in architecture removes the ‘heart’ and promotes the unthinking use of the head (Livingstone 1945: 4–5). And his conclusion, which has curious parallel’s with Keynes’ frustration with a later generation of orthodox economists, concerning system, could stand for the whole of his struggle against economic dogma: ‘this substitution of obedience to mathematical law for sympathy with observed life, is the first characteristic of the hopeless work of all ages’ (TP, C&W, 16: 274). But this is where he conflicts with the development of economics as a discipline as developed by Mill and his successors. Neoclassical economists had no desire to make economics part of a general social theory. Even if Marshall sometimes vacillated, Mill’s neoclassical successors continued to look for a set of principles for a specialist and autonomous body of systematic and potentially scientific knowledge. Ruskin accepted the need for abstract argument but not abstractions based upon inappropriate metaphors such as mechanism, natural laws and invisible forces. Ruskin believed that he had developed something worthy to be recognized as knowledge in his formulations of an ethically informed political economy. The essays published here try to put that thinking into an economic context by focusing on Ruskin’s treatment of economic harmony, agency, natural law, value, exploitation and the nature of economic institutions. His writing is, then, related to other such writing, in particular to that of Mill and also to Plato and Xenophon, who represent the starting point of what Lowry calls ‘the administrative tradition’ of economic thinking. The aim is to provide a series of perspectives on Ruskin’s political economy, the patterns and origins of his thinking, as revealed by a study of his rhetoric, of his sources and of his relationship to Mill’s ideas, in particular to Mill’s Principles. This ought to lead to a greater understanding of his influence on mainstream economic thinkers. Ruskin, political economy and the wider culture Ruskin scholarship has tended to be the reserve of those concerned with literary criticism or with the relationship between ideas and readership in Victorian society. Even in a recent work by Rothbard, who is intent on reducing the significance of the Classical School and who attacks Mill’s ‘disastrous and fallacious hypothesis of the “economic man” ’, (a favourite target of Ruskin’s) Ruskin is ignored (Rothbard 1995: 280). Are contemporary judgements or the judgements of the 1890s or any other judgements about his political economy relevant to the development of economic ideas, or, if he is of interest, is it rather in terms of

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‘continuations’ (see p. 24)? Apart from the interesting works by literary historians such as Sherburne, Heinzelman and Spear, which have an economics dimension, and articles by Lee and Cain, the political economy is less well explored than any of the other areas of Ruskin’s concerns. Historians of economic thought tend to put their emphasis on the sequential development of economic doctrines rather than upon the relationship between contemporary economics writing and its intended readers. Thus, whilst differences within (say) the Classical School, interpreted as running from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, are researched and acknowledged, a general tendency is more likely to be about the sense of compatibility of economic ideas with others at the time and since, rather than particular differences. This is a tendency only, rather than a requirement, and one that has been challenged by the ‘rhetorical turn’ in economics, initiated by McCloskey and others. It is difficult to define the ‘canon’ of economics writing for it has not been so closely defined as it has been in the past in, for example, literary studies. A critic such as Rothbard would contend that the recency of the ‘Great Men’ tradition means that it is still intellectually active (Rothbard 1995: vii). The contents of histories of economic thought are a useful starting point. Whilst Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and Mill are generally ‘in’, there would be less certainty of finding, until recently, substantial references to writers such as De Quincey, Marcet, Martineau or Ruskin. Carlyle sometimes gets a mention partly because of his correspondence with Mill and because he new-minted the expression ‘the dismal science’ to characterize Ricardian pessimism. These omissions may or may not be reasonable in terms of the ‘technical’ development of economics. They are certainly unreasonable in terms of the cultural significance, and contemporary interpretation of political economy. How economic ideas were extended to other social contexts or to sophisticated and unsophisticated readers is of significance for the interpretation of laissez-faire, of natural laws and of economic man. Formal economics for most of the nineteenth century was not as neatly contained within the boundaries of professional discussion as it has been in the latter part of the twentieth century.2 It was available to, and written by, specialists and non-specialists alike, and its discourse was seen as significant, in some respects at least, to notions of industry, government and enterprise and even to notions of order, reform and democracy that Williams has identified as key nineteenth-century concerns (Williams 1960, xv and xvii). The notion of ‘continuations’ is a literary idea suggesting the possibility of characters in a novel being re-cast and followed in a different but related narrative context. It can be applied, readily, to the relationship between economics texts written for different purposes and audiences. An awareness of continuations can prevent a ‘singlevoiced’ interpretation of key texts or anachronistic judgements concerning their

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‘meaning’, for the existence of continuations points to other possibilities (Brown 1994: 21; Henderson 1995: 15). Thus, Maria Edgeworth’s simple story The Cherry Orchard is a continuation, in the narrative context of a story for children and within a reflective, and socially located context of supervised reading, of Adam Smith’s notion of the division of labour (Henderson 1995: 25–8). Though it replicates in the working of straw rather than of metal, Smith’s pin factory, it is constructed as a social ethic and utopian ideal of co-operation and harmony rather than as a simple source of productivity gains. Edgeworth’s tale turns an ‘is’ of production into an ‘ought’, i.e. it becomes an ideal of social and (perhaps more sinisterly) individual reconstruction and harmony. The negative aspects of the division of labour which lead to the degradation of the intellect of the workman, set out in Adam Smith and highly developed in Ruskin’s work, is absent from Edgeworth’s tale. Ruskin’s concern with the negative consequences of the division of labour can be seen as a continuation of the discussion of the negative side of Smith’s division of labour. The ‘meaning’ of the division of labour is not identical in such texts because the narrative context differs (Henderson 1995: 28). Political economy, like geology and evolution, readily overflowed the boundaries of the discipline and informed the subject-matter of literature. George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss can be understood as a ‘great geological novel’ incorporating ideas from Lyell’s innovative approach to geology (Smith 1994: 121–51). It is relatively easy to find parallels with respect to economic ideas. Early in the century, Maria Edgeworth wrote a novel of social manners, The Absentee, based on contemporary notions of improving estate management, and hence it is, in a sense, a continuation of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus as well as of economic ideas of her time. Martineau’s astonishing success with her monthly economic stories (1830– 2) provide ample evidence of the potential market for economic ideas in a variety of forms as does the success of Mill’s Principles.3 Nor was this flow one way, for story-telling episodes from De Quincey’s Logic of Political Economy, for example, were incorporated by Mill in his Principles and, as Kemple has demonstrated, the writings of Balzac and Goethe are inscribed in Marx’s writing (Henderson 1995: 107; Kemple 1995). The notion of ‘laissez-faire’ is one economic idea which very quickly escaped into wider literature. Though it tends to be seen as the quintessential nineteenthcentury economics notion, it is thought to be relatively absent from contemporary formal economics writing. When the notion is located in Adam Smith or Mill it carries one set of ideas, including in Mill’s case a detailed analysis of ‘exceptions’, but its associations can be different when ‘laissez-faire’ (under various names) and the notion of ‘natural laws’, with which the idea is also associated, leak into wider discussion, or when satirized in Ruskin. Interrelated texts and readership

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need to be examined together if the range of associations of the term is to be correctly assessed. Mill may have equivocated on laissez-faire, but in places of business such as Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, and in journalistic reviews, exemplified especially by reviews of Ruskin’s essays on political economy, laissezfaire was an unconditional truth. And it was this truth, enshrined in ‘vulgar political economy’, a phrase Ruskin borrowed from Mill, that Ruskin challenged. Chapters 6 and 7 present a detailed analysis of the similarities and differences in Mill’s economics writing when compared with those of Ruskin. Ruskin’s writings, both in content and in the sheer range of his prose style, can exemplify the intellectual attributes of the wider culture. His reputation as an art historian and critic, established prior to his decision to work on political economy, and the cultural milieu, did not prevent him from being told, first by his father and then by reviewers, to stick to art and refrain from political economy. Indeed, Ruskin initiates his quarrel with Mill specifically on a passage in which Mill excludes aesthetics from economics. The passage, located in the ‘Preliminary Remarks’ to Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, offended Ruskin because it contradicted Ruskin’s own experience. He had arrived at the need to reconsider political economy through an observation, and subsequent contemplation, of a physical and behavioural ugliness produced by an unbridled and unconsidered materialism. This powerful flow and interaction of ideas, their reoccurrences in different discussions and imaginative settings, make the interpretation of the significance and ‘meaning’ of ideas in nineteenth-century writing so rich in possibilities. The fact that literary figures such as De Quincey and Coleridge wrote on economics topics and Wordsworth incorporated notions of economy into his poetry, or that economics was seen as a subject that could be conveyed in dramatic narrative or satirized in plays, all raise interesting questions about political economy as knowledge. The development of Marx’s writing on political economy, recently explored as melodrama by Kemple, suggests that a wider study of the interpenetration of literary genres and nineteenth-century political economy would be of enormous interest (Kemple 1995). Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau, who were extensively read in the 1830s, insisted upon the direct applicability of economic ideas. The characters in Martineau’s stories are modelled on existing notions of economic agency: they were made for political economy. Ruskin, though he struggled to find a market for his political economy, was eventually to make a contribution to the rethinking of the nature of social and economic justice which took place towards the end of the century. His search was for the theory and practice of a humane economy in which ‘men’ are the true end. Ruskin’s Unto This Last was cited most often by new Labour Members of Parliament in 1906 as the book which had influenced

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them most (Cook 1912b: 14). In many fields, early and mid-century texts had a long shelf life. All of these writers can be seen, then, as offering in some sense ‘continuations’, sometimes in different genres and for differentiated audiences, of the economic stories told in ‘Principles’ texts incorporated into the canon. If Marcet, Martineau and De Quincey continued the discussion of Adam Smith through a mixture of story and dialogue, then Ruskin is both a continuation of, and a challenge to, Adam Smith and Mill. Ruskin, economists and economic knowledge It is recognized, of course, that Ruskin influenced a number of major economic thinkers. This influence provides a direct and more conventional link to economic thought: Edgeworth was influenced, perhaps in matters of ‘style’ and expression as well as in ethical considerations, and Marshall, perhaps, with respect to his notion of a biological economics. Marshall’s theories on this, however, have a strong Darwinian flavour which is totally lacking in Ruskin.4 Marshall’s desire to keep one foot in the institutionalized economy and one in theory, as a means of achieving ‘proper’ economics, may also have owed something to Ruskin as did his concern with the promotion of a cultural reconstruction of economic man (see chapter 9).5 Some significant, but less ‘canonical’ figures are to be included, such as William Smart, translator of Austrian economics writings and the first to hold the Adam Smith Chair (1886) at the University of Glasgow. Throughout his life, Smart exhibited an interest in social economics that was informed by Ruskinian thinking (see chapter 8). In addition, there is Leslie and Ingram, who championed the historical approach to economics, with a Ruskinian flavour in the late 1870s. Indeed, one contemporary judged Ingram’s criticisms, made at the Economics Section of the British Association, to be ‘exceeding anything of that kind ever attempted by Mr Ruskin’ (Geddes 1883: 8). Geddes, who contributed to biology and town-planning, extended the influence of both Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris, both directly, and through his friendship with Lewis Mumford, into the new socio-economic contexts of urban planning (Meller, 1990). Smart’s life and work is the subject-matter of Chapter 8, in which he is taken as a case study of the interpenetration of Ruskinian ideas and economic thought and action. To this list is to be added at least two significant economic ‘heretics’, John Hobson, who was, of course, rehabilitated by Keynes, and Thorsten Veblen. As Hobson was influenced by Ruskin, so Keynes, in as much as he read Hobson, was indirectly also influenced by him. It is as well to remember that economics struggled to free itself from a mind-set associated with laissez-faire over several decades, progress in formal understanding not withstanding.6 If Mill gave only

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limited support to laissez-faire, he and the other political economists, did little, according to Webb, to limit the ‘extravagances of the popularisers’ (Webb 1926: 435). Where as Keynes, in his pamphlet The End of Laissez-Faire, which makes points not dissimilar to the tenor of Ruskin, tended to absolve the nineteenthcentury political economists, Webb, as might be expected, argues that they contributed to the popular misunderstanding (Webb 1926: 436). This was, of course, Ruskin’s view. Ruskin’s ideas, preferred modes of expression and his self-presentation, have tended to keep him outside the range of writings that the economics profession call their own. Ruskin is both acknowledged, though briefly, and criticized by Veblen, though I have not found, nor have I made, a detailed study of the influence. Any influence is expressed more in a parallel set of interests, e.g. Ruskin’s ‘soul’ and Veblen’s ‘spiritual values’ and the instinct to ‘workmanship’ rather than in any direct borrowing of ideas (See, for example, Veblen [1914] 1964: 27). The parallels in experience are numerous: both caricatured and satirized the prevailing economics of their day; both were in their day regarded as being ‘unfair’ to established theorists (in Veblen’s case this was to Clark, Fisher and Marshall); both were taken by critics to be better at criticism than at constructive ideas; and both were appreciated, and evaluated, by John Hobson (Hobson 1938). Veblen’s notion of ‘pecuniary gain’ as a ‘differential gain’ and business as ‘a negotiation of such differential gains’ with the ‘unbusinesslike generality of persons’, whilst expressed in language which is not at all like Ruskin’s, shares, nonetheless, characteristics towards which Ruskin pointed in his notion of the economy of ‘ “merces” or of “pay” ’ (Veblen, [1914] 1964: 191; UTL, C&W, 17: 45). And his view that classical economics was based upon ‘the assumptions of a hundred years ago’ that ‘the phase of commercialised economic life then prevailing was the immutable normal order of things’ was an end point rather than ‘anything like a genetic account of economic life,’ echoes Ruskin’s own historical and biological understanding (Veblen, [1914] 1964: 207). Veblen’s criticisms of neoclassical economics has been compared, though not in textual detail, to Ruskin’s attack on classical theory with reference to: the need for regulation and welfare considerations; money as a weapon of ‘attenuated economic coercion’; and the conflict between ‘pecuniary’ evaluation and the rounded human being who makes the evaluation (see Tilman, 1992: 104–5; Fain 1954: 112–13). If nothing else, all of this suggests that Ruskin did outline ideas that were similar in essence to what was to become institutional economics. There is, then, a longish list of possible influences on economists, conventional and unconventional, to be traced. Three have been chosen for present purposes. William Smart has already been mentioned. Work by two ‘mainstream’ neoclassical economists, John Bates Clark and Alfred Marshall, will

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be examined in Chapter 9, and some surprising Ruskinian influences spelled out. Unlike Marcet and Martineau, Ruskin denied the validity of contemporary economics thinking, which he described, by implication and directly, as a ‘lie’, the product of accidental historical circumstances rather than of science and ‘natural’ law: ‘The study which lately in England has been called Political Economy is in reality nothing more than the investigation of some accidental phenomena of modern commercial operations.’ (MP, C&W, 17: 149). There was nothing ‘natural’ about economic laws and the rigid interpretation of them. His was a direct attack on an attitude of mind and a policy prescription which he identified in many different ways as, for example, the principle of ‘Let-Alone’ or ‘laissez faire’ (and even ‘laissez passer’), or of ‘mind your own business’, or versions of ‘devil take the hindmost’, of non-interference and so on. In this he was not alone: Arnold refers to the laissez-faire idea in the phrase ‘doing all one likes’. One of his finest exemplifications of the principle at work is found in a footnote to Munera Pulveris where he identifies the ‘average earnings of Betty Taylor’ (taken from The Times of 4 February 1863) as ‘the sum of 1s. 5½d. for a week’s work’. Ruskin adds after the words ‘laissez faire’: ‘This kind of slavery finds no Abolitionists that I hear of’ (MP, C&W, 17: 246–7). His arguments against such notions were based on ethical and religious principles built upon ‘What thy hand findeth to do’, notions of ‘help’ and, in particular, the moral requirement, founded upon self-knowledge and knowledge of the condition of others, ‘to mend themselves and the existing state of things, as far as they either are marred and mendable’ (ModP, C&W, 5: 71). This latter insight is developed prior to his explorations of political economy. Ruskin was convinced that a political economy constructed on a selfish hypothesis had not lead to the harmony predicted by Smith, but to a fragmented society and splintered and damaged people. In this, as Spear has pointed out, he is working within the context of the negative consequences of the division of labour as specified by Smith (Spear 1984: 156). However, by refusing the notion of the invisible hand, he goes beyond Smith. Ruskin’s economics carries with it attempts by Plato and Xenophon to find a rational and visible basis for administrative action. Ruskin, prior to 1858 when his turn towards social analyses is most apparent, had made a detailed study of harmony and subordination in landscape painting, and this, together with his appreciation of administrative and regulatory action in the economic sphere encountered in his reading of Plato, and later, Xenophon, helped him develop arguments against unregulated and disruptive market forces. Ruskin believed that only a just society can be harmonious. An early and personal version of Ruskin’s notion of harmony is given in the following: ‘A pure and holy state of anything, therefore, is that in which all its parts are helpful

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and consistent.’ For a state, this will be established by ‘government and cooperation’ (‘government’ being widely defined to include what we would call institutional development) rather than in ‘anarchy and competition’ (ModP, C&W, 7: 207). Ruskin attempted a dramatic reconstruction of economics, described as a ‘true political economy’. He intended this true economy to provide an ethical basis for the subject which would be capable of supporting economic justice and hence the achievement of social harmony. His understanding of economics has often been put in doubt even by those whom he influenced, though he himself thought otherwise. A response to Acland’s concerns over the wisdom of Ruskin’s developing views on political economy, carries a hint of Socratic advice on the evaluation of knowledge claims as presented in books. He states: I have reasoned out a good many principles of general philosophy and political economy by myself and I have always found myself in concurrence with Bacon and Adam Smith as soon as I have settled said principles to my own satisfaction; and as I believe these two people to have been no fools, I see no reason for concluding that I am myself one.7

(Letters, C&W, 36: 237) He based his knowledge claims on his understanding of the material basis of architectural development (insight which is now commonplace but which was then innovative); observations in artisanal workshops; observation of the wider society, both in Britain and on the Continent; harmony in painting and architecture and aesthetics; a reading of classical sources and, though he initially denied it, the reading of economics books.8 Ruskin objected to systematic thought and to the partial and fragmented knowledge which systems implied. Thought and feelings were also melded together in the mind. This makes it difficult for some economists to develop a relationship with his writings, for both his style, and epistemology, are alien. Ruskin claims to have no system and yet works upon one of the most systematic of the developing social sciences. Ruskin held that Mill, because he did not have an extensive knowledge of the ‘fine Arts’, had ‘no clue to the principles of essential value’ and so had to take a volatile and misguided ‘public opinion as the ground for his science’ (MP, C&W, 17: 132). The significance of these claims can be better appreciated when Ruskin’s text is read through Plato’s Republic and Laws, the subject-matter of Chapter 5. The division between Ruskin and contemporary political economists such as Mill, can serve as an example of Bagehot’s suggestion that: ‘those who are conversant with its abstractions are usually without a true contact as to its facts; those who are in contact with its facts have usually little sympathy with and little

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cognizance of its abstractions’ (Bagehot 1885: 10). Ruskin firmly believed that his knowledge of art, art workshops and craft-based industries had intellectual worth. The distinction made in the quote is not, however, wholly adequate to categorize either Mill or Ruskin whose differences in thought are ultimately philosophical. Ruskin, from an early age, trained his powers of observation and description. In a passage in his autobiography concerning a visit to Rome, made when he was still a young man, Ruskin talks of looking at the various architectural remains and capitals directly: ‘. . . that I saw things with whatever faculty was in me, exactly for what they were’ (Praeterita, [1885–9], 1978, p. 246). He draws the following unsentimental conclusion: What the Forum or Capitol had been, I did not in the least care; the pillars of the Forum I saw were on a small scale, and their capitals rudely carved, and the houses above them nothing like so interestingly as the side of any close in the ‘Auld toun’ of Edinburgh.

(Praeterita, 1949, p. 247) This is from a time when his peers are being encouraged to evoke Rome’s Imperial past through the contemplation, preferably by moonlight, of its rusticated ruins. Observation, for Ruskin, was logically prior to any act of the imagination. He attempted, similarly and in time, without benefit of notions of ‘let-alone’, such a direct observation of mid-Victorian society. Ruskin’s approach to the exercise of imagination was that it should be based on observation. In short, his method was founded upon a sense of Aristotle and, more strongly, of Bacon, whom he sometimes treated, as Plato’s philosophical equal. His scientific thinking was founded upon an induction and on an inability to accept a prior act of the imagination as a means for the construction of scientific knowledge (Smith 1994: 152). He opposed the development of a specialist scientific vocabulary in much the same way as he opposed the development of a professional economics vocabulary, and he disliked science because he saw science as reducing ‘the human to the merely material’ (Levine 1987: 23). It would seem that Ruskin’s views on ‘science’ and on economics as ‘science’ are consistent. But even if he were dated, he is operating within an economics tradition which was shared with William Whewell and Richard Jones. Rothbard sees both of these men as ‘ancestors of American institutionalism and of the German Historical School’, though in their Baconian approach essentially restricted to a destructive critique of existing thinking (Rothbard 1995: 280). Ruskin’s method, based upon the strictest observation, in the sense suggested by his Roman experience, though not upon detailed fact-gathering, is consistent

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with theirs as is his anticipation of German Historicism. Marshall talked of the ‘Carlyle + Ruskin + German-historical-school-young-lions’ (Whitacker, 1996, 2: 386). However, there is a tradition in Ruskin scholarship, exemplified by Hobson, Ingram, Fain and others, which finds, in addition to the destructive critique, a substantial constructive element. Mill, who was generally nervous about the role of the imagination, and who avoids, as Sanderson has shown, creative metaphor in his essay On Liberty, and, I would argue, in his Principles, (see Chapter 7), nonetheless eventually comes to accept, if somewhat fearfully according to Medawar, the significance of the prior exercise of the imagination (Sanderson 1968; Medawar 1984: 124). The imaginative drive in Ruskin and Mill was located in different systems of scientific thought and realized in different styles of writing. A detailed examination of their rhetoric is made in Chapter 7. Ruskin’s success as an educator and a rhetorician is based upon his ability to identify, manipulate and react to concrete examples draw from observation of the substantive economy. The first two chapters of Unto This Last are shown, in Chapter 3, to be constructed upon a series of widening and imaginative examples built around the progressive extension, to different productive settings, of a notion of household, derived, in part at least from the managerial writings of Xenophon. In such a context it would be reasonable to expect writer and reader to activate their own understanding of how households work. Even here, with respect to Ruskin’s capacity to observe and exemplify, there is a tendency for critics to dismiss Ruskin’s personal insights, liberally scattered through his writings, as evidence for him being over-focused on himself and hence, psychologically unhealthy (Leroy 1948: 535). A characteristic approach to exemplification, found in Unto This Last, is to generalize from a particular experience. Thus he shows how his own experience of employing domestic servants gainsays the ‘natural’ law of the market. And in this he is substantially correct, at least within the context of contemporary understanding of the notion of demand, the role of the consumer and what is implied by ‘natural law’. True, his examples can appear ludicrously out of keeping. An intended audience of working men might be perplexed, Leroy argues, by his use, in Fors Clavigera, of the contents of his breakfast tray, served up in an expensive hotel, as an illustration of contemporary decline (Leroy 1948: 540). But as LeRoy shows, he intends the breakfast to serve as a metaphor for the decline in service and individuality created by industrial society. The use of concrete examples, located in his own experience, provides a useful basis from which readers can be drawn into the consideration of unusual ideas. Caution is to be exercised, according to Spear and others, before the conclusion can be drawn that this presence directly in the text is evidence of distortions due to deteriorating mental health. Stoddart makes a robust argument for seeing Fors Clavigera as an individual, authoritarian and rhetorical defence

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of ‘authority’ against the babble of negative libertarianism produced as an unintended consequence of liberal philosophy (Stoddart 1993: 4). If Fors Clavigera really is concerned with rescuing authority and order from a libertarian disorder, then it is politically at one with Ruskin’s criticisms of the disharmonious consequences of liberal political economy. William Smart, Ruskinian turned economist, when reviewing the significance of Ruskin’s thinking, argued that Ruskin did not have the patience to devote himself to a rigorous study of economics.9 Smart, echoing Ruskin, felt that in him, an economist was lost (Smart 1916). Faced with the seeming incoherence of the essays which formed the basis for Unto This Last, and their potentially unstable relationship with the intended reader, some, but not all, of his contemporaries jumped very quickly to the conclusion that when he wrote on economics, he wrote hysterical, ‘feminine’ nonsense. According to a notice in the Saturday Review, Mill and Ricardo are held to write with a ‘vigorous logic and manly simplicity of style’ whereas Ruskin, in contrast, ‘can only write in a scream’ (Jones 1972: 85). Unto This Last eventually found an audience, though it took nearly twenty years, and continues to do so, whereas Munera Pulveris, Ruskin’s bizarre attempt to mimic the Principles text, largely failed so to do. Ruskin’s rhetoric is for some a source of delight and for others a profound barrier to understanding. Questions of style, an aspect of rhetoric, recently articulated as an epistemological issue by writers such as McCloskey, were an essential part of the evaluation of the literary economics of the early nineteenth century (Henderson 1995: 131–2). Style is not neutral with respect to knowledge claims now, nor was it when Ruskin wrote. Reason and rhetoric It is not appropriate to approach Ruskin as if he were attempting to produce a Principles text capable of achieving and promoting a consensus about the nature of economic analysis. He is, in a sense, intent on destroying a consensus that Mill worked so hard to establish and that many of his contemporaries seem to have accepted. Even if political economy texts do not necessarily claim what Ruskin argues that they claim (though his notion of ‘vulgar’ political economy is ambiguous with respect to practitioners), his critics were very precise about the force of ‘natural law’ and the implications that such laws had for those concerned with the possibility of rational social organization and administration. Ruskin, no doubt over-sensitive to the idea of ‘life’ as a manifestation of ‘text’ (either sacred or secular), as Spears suggests, felt that by setting human standards too low, behaviour imitated ‘science’ (Spear 1984: 6; CWO, C&W, 18: 474).10 He blamed

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the confusion on what he saw as cold, inexact and mistaken source texts. In his subsequent emotional reaction, he is taken to stand outside the tradition of economics as a dispassionate social science. Harriet Martineau constructed economics as, though not with the same intention as Ruskin, the picking over of ‘truths’ in a ‘cold, dry form . . . bare of illustration and made as abstract and unattractive as possible’ (Henderson 1995: 71). Ruskin undoubtedly felt alienated, as did Marx, by this quality of economics writing. Ruskin felt too horrified by poverty to simply stand back and confine himself to further cold exercises. As a result, using the full range of rhetorical devices available to him, including irony, satire, hyperbole, aphorism, parable and myth, he created a range of texts which he hoped would wrestle his audience away from an unthinking and unfeeling application of ‘natural law’ to social conditions. The contrast with Mill’s Principles, taken at the time as the definitive statement of economic ideas and of the rational style in which it should be written, can not be greater. As an illustration of the excitable nature of his prose, it is useful to consider his references to Adam Smith, particularly in Fors Clavigera, and also to his one-sided quarrel with Mill (the subject matter of Chapter 6). Ruskin portrays Smith as a ‘blasphemer’ and the blackest of ‘Devils’. This stands in sharp contrast to the general, but not universal esteem, in which Smith was held in the nineteenth century. Smith was at fault, according to Ruskin, for claiming that covetousness, a sin proscribed in the Ten Commandments, was ‘natural’ (Fors, C&W, 28: 516, 519, and 764).11 Such extreme images, which go beyond anything found in Unto This Last, suggested to many, including his admirers, that he misunderstood the nature and purpose of economics writing of his day. Ruskin’s construction of Smith as the Devil is easy to explain. The source is to be found in the popular phrase ‘the devil take the hindmost’. A version of this he uses in Fors Clavigera to depict the morality of laissez-faire and the ways in which the concept blocked social initiatives: ‘Everyman for himself, and the devil for the rest!’ (Fors, C&W, 29: 282). His selection of the idea of greed being ‘natural’ is linked directly to what he was told about his works by reviewers. Reviewers explained to him that his ideas on an extensive guardianship role for government, put forward in The Political Economy of Art, were wholly inappropriate and contrary to natural law (Kacher 1974: 7). Hence, in his contrast between so-called natural and moral law, the manner of his attack on Smith and his attitude towards Mill. Kacher, in a detailed study of the critical reaction to Ruskin’s published lectures, shows that as a result of criticism Ruskin shifted the emphasis, in order to continue to secure an audience for at least some of his ideas, in the text of the essays that were to make up Unto This Last (Kacher 1974: 71). Therein , as a result, he placed more responsibility on the consumer and producers as guardians,

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and the radical ideas on government are hardly mentioned, save in the Preface which was added when the essays were published in book form. In Munera Pulveris he rectifies this by, for example, the personification of the virtues of ‘Prudence’, ‘Justice’, ‘Fortitude’ and ‘Temperance’ as the ‘greatest of all economists’ who, by the exercise of their appropriate concerns, are the ‘means of protecting and prolonging life’ and hence the ‘governing powers’ (i.e. the guardian virtues in the spirit of Plato) of the economy (MP, C&W, 17: 285). It is possible to read these painterly images as suggestive of notions of macro-economic management along Keynesian lines. In this manner, Ruskin promotes a paternalistic and interventionist concept of government that would be willing to interfere in the liberal economy as proposed by Smith and, as he supposed, by Mill. Ruskin’s devilish images of Smith and his comments on Mill are derived, then, from a commonplace expression which sums up one of the unintended implications of the prevailing economic philosophy. The violent images are, as Hark suggests of Ruskin’s portrayal of Mill in Unto This Last, satirical (Hark 1986–7: 21). As such, they are designed, as a matter of rhetorical choice, to shock people out of a moral complacency which Ruskin sees as being promoted by economical writing. Mill, as the most distinguished contemporary writer, and Smith, as his most distinguished predecessor, become synecdoches for the whole profession. And this is not, in Mill’s case, unreasonable given Foxwell’s judgement, later in the century, that after Mill’s Principles appeared, ‘English economists were, for a whole generation, men of one book’ (Foxwell 1888: 87).12 Ruskin’s satire is, however, in deadly earnest. When needs be, Ruskin can, and does, justify his fulmination against laissez-faire with reasoned examples, however rhetorically heightened, of the inappropriate principle being applied, for example to the question of famine in India (Fors) or relief after the siege of Paris (Unto This Last). Ruskin preferred, in both instances, the visible hand of reasoned administration. Ruskin’s one-sided quarrel with Mill’s work is of a similar nature to his disagreement with Smith. A selfishly constructed model of economic man is unscientific, inappropriate and inapplicable to the economic problems of contemporary society. Ruskin felt that when Mill came to apply his principles, he effectively reversed them. The sense of morality found in Mill’s Principles contradicted his theoretical science.13 Ruskin insisted that he never doubted Mill’s morality, only his ‘science’.14 Laissez-faire, the outcome of false science, according to Ruskin, encouraged suppressed and even open violence or, at best, a coldness in social relations and a paralysis of social concern or of ‘human intellect’ (Letters, C&W, 36: 416). Again, Ruskin’s reaction is rooted in his experience of trying to secure support for his vision of a paternalistically organized, interventionist, social

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welfare state. This is first set forth in The Political Economy of Art and in his letters intended for The Times that his father suppressed. When Harriet Martineau declared Mill to be ‘over-rated’, her judgement is provided in moderate language. It contrasts favourably with Ruskin’s public judgement of Mill as ‘cretinous’. In a famous passage in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin constructs Mill as a ‘type of flat-fish – one eye-less side always in the mud’ (Fors, C&W, 27: 180). Francis Watt, writing in 1882, argues, in an otherwise highly critical and conventional examination of Ruskin’s political economy, that by constantly undermining dogmas of classical liberalism, in other words by challenging the ‘Great Men’ tradition, Ruskin made it possible for others to be more secure in arguing a rational case for trade regulation (Watt 1882: 206). Ruskin’s private judgements found in the marginalia of Ruskin’s second edition copy of Mill’s Principles are, on the whole, favourable and are further explored in Chapter 6. Though he criticized Mill, it is clear from the marginalia that Ruskin’s reading of Mill stimulated the development of many of his own ideas. Unto This Last and Mill’s Principles are linked together in obvious and subtle ways, though Ruskin treats Mill as Socrates treats shallow thinkers in the opening moves of the Republic (Fain 1951). And, unlike his public judgements on other highly regarded thinkers such as Aristotle, Ruskin is consistent about Mill. In 1886 he crossed both Smith and Mill off a list of books regarded by Sir John Lubbock as the Best Hundred Books substituting, in the section on philosophy, Bacon’s New Atlantis (Arrows, C&W, 34: 582). He declared to Smart and his readers, in 1883, that Mill and other political economists, including Bastiat, never understood the ‘despicable science’ that they professed.15 The violence of his judgements are often attributed to the mental instability of his middle to later years. But the wider cultural context needs to be kept in mind. His treatment of Mill in Unto This Last is, if viewed as a piece of satire, moderate when compared to the satirical attacks on Godwin or Harriet Martineau that appeared in Fraser’s Magazine earlier in the century or indeed to the bleaching satire to which Unto This Last was itself subjected by many of its reviewers. Ruskin’s work, then, stands in sharp rhetorical contrast to Mill’s Principles and this in itself may pose problems concerning Ruskin’s ‘meaning’. His discursive writings on political economy are constructed for different purposes and inscribed by philosophical predispositions and rhetorical strategies fundamentally different from those of Mill. Spear, for example, argues that Mill is a nomimalist and Ruskin an essentialist (Spear 1984: 142–3). Such a division, if valid, would put Ruskin in the same philosophical company as Marx. (The issue is explored more fully in Chapter 7). It is easy to see, given this division, why Ruskin would object to Mill’s construction of economic agency and why he would resort so readily to a personalized ethics and domestic metaphors to argue against Mill’s mechanistic

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construction. It would be hard now to see Mill’s Principles, whatever its status within the history of economic thinking, as a ‘reservoir of ideas and impressions’ capable of stimulating the modern reader. Mill set the professional standards of clarity and objectivity for published work for a generation and to which Ruskin’s attempts in Unto This Last were unfavourably compared. Ruskin’s writing on political economy is an example of a complex body of thinking which requires a rhetorical turn in economics methodology and in the analysis of historical texts, before its economic significance can be fully understood. By the use of a variety of rhetorical devices such as satire, irony, hyperbole, aphorism, parable, myth and biblical quotation, Ruskin attempted to wrestle his audience away from an unthinking and unfeeling application of laissez-faire. The variability of his arguments and the perplexities of the texts suggest no single fully developed system. Such a combination of attributes makes for an interesting read for those who care to make the effort. Although readers may have to grasp at his meaning, the pleasant surprise is that there is still meaning to be had even for the modern world. He longed to write a constructive economics, consistently developed within the genre of a principles text, dedicated to presenting a ‘true’ economics. He never managed, though Munera Pulveris, produced as a collection of extended definitions in ironic parody of the principles text, was an attempt to reach towards this goal. As a result of this failure, which he himself laments, subsequent critics have treated his attempts at theoretical work as ‘fragmentary’ and largely destructive, possessing brilliant but random shafts of light which leave in darkness so much more than they appear capable of illuminating. Hobson and then Fain have challenged this, seeing evidence of constructive ideas (see p. 38). His discursive letters, which he substituted for his inability to shape a whole system, and contained in Time and Tide and Fors Clavigera, worry away at practical issues. These include the nature of the ideal society (polity) and what would now be called economic policy. Whereas, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, ‘economics’ gradually replaced the term ‘political economy’, Ruskin remains identified with an embedded economy, realized through social institutions, such as the family, and political circumstances. It could be argued that in seeing laissez-faire as the key policy prescription of conventional political economy, Ruskin failed to explore the distinction, made by Mill, between economic science and the art of political economy. In this context, Ruskin is accused of substituting sentimentality for science, an idea which he firmly rejected in the preface to Munera Pulveris (MP, C&W, 17: 137). As his writing influenced socio-economic and policy discussion, through a whole range of thinkers, into the early twentieth century, his ‘utopianism’ and ‘sentimentality’ turn out to be an advantage.

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So why read Ruskin on political economy? By the end of the century, Marshall could admit that the earlier generation of economists were too rigid in their belief in the ‘truth’ of economic doctrine, a judgement with which Ruskin would have concurred (Marshall 1896). Liberalism, based on selfishness, had in Ruskin’s eyes constructed a world of disharmony, disorder, injustice and moral degradation. State interference would, for example, in ‘nine cases out of ten’ imply ‘guidance much more than gift, and, therefore, interference with liberty’ (TP, C&W, 16: xxv). But economic oppression was not the only form of oppression. Ruskin had, in all his works, a remarkable sympathy for poor people (in the abstract) which at its best cuts through much moral cant. In the Two Paths, for example, he starts with the understanding that not all men are ‘able-bodied, nor intelligent, nor industrious, and you cannot expect them to be’ (TP, C&W, 16: 231). From there he goes on to develop the notion that help rather than punishment is required when such people fall into a trap: ‘the true instruments of reformation are employment and reward – not punishment’ (Employment, C&W, 17: 542). His analysis of putting the poor to work, privately circulated under the heading ‘Employment for the Destitute Poor and Criminal Classes’, is based upon his notion, however overworked the language, of abundant labour and of labour-intensive and nature-saving technologies. One form of oppression of the poor is that ‘of expecting too much of them’ (TP, C&W, 16: 401). For all his mediaeval terms for leadership, Ruskin is pre-thinking the welfare state, the notion of social work and today’s employment and trainingschemes as well as issues in modern development economics concerning employment and appropriate technology in the face of labour surpluses. Hobson, even if he reconstructed Ruskin in his own image, worked hard to show the ‘scientific’ (logical) value of the work in the context of his own time (Matthew 1990: 17; Hobson [1898] 1904: 106–7). He recreated Ruskin’s images of gambling capitalists and their consumption patterns, and the misery of the poor, huddled and oppressed in dark and unsightly back streets, as an analysis of social benefits and social costs. Rentiers and capitalists consumed that which they did not produce and the poor produced, at great cost to their health, that which they did not consume. Ruskin, according to Hobson, focuses attention on the many imperfections and negative externalities in the market structures of midVictorian Britain. Smart, a follower turned economist, whose pamphlet on Ruskin and Plato (see Chapter 8) influenced Hobson’s views on Ruskin, summed up the general change in mood towards which Ruskin had worked: ‘a century of laissez faire had made laissez faire impossible’ (Matthew 1990, 15; Smart 1916).16 Ruskin’s advocacy of the administrative tradition was vindicated by the social legislation which was initiated at the turn of the century. His works, celebrated in two

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centenary events, were then seen to have this ‘reservoir’ of ideas relevant to the reform of capitalist society along lines determined by wider notions of social welfare. And Ruskin’s works can continue to act as a reservoir of possible meanings. His notion of ethically informed consumers, regulating the romantic expenditures of the heart by knowledge and understanding of the type of environment they are commanding for producers has been incorporated into the trading activities of non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam or the growth of companies engaged in (say) ethical tourism. Such bodies act, both directly and indirectly as ‘guardians of the poor’, in a manner not dissimilar to the obligations laid upon members of the Guild of St George, and unwittingly incorporate Ruskin’s implicit belief in society’s capacity, when liberated from a blind belief in market forces, to find, by thought and experimentation, new institutional contexts for the expression of social concern. His worries about the future for an industrial economy which must be ultimately located in nature, and the associated notions of intrinsic value, realized in healthy food or unpolluted streams, fresh water supplies or in unexploited forests and undeveloped hillsides, constitute the stuff of the environmental movement. The ultimate purpose of political economy is ‘life, instead of the immediate one – money’ (MP, C&W, 17: 149). An ethically informed economics would value and conserve the natural environment and work in co-operation with nature to ‘recreate’ human kind and to produce things ‘which serve either to comfort the body, or exercise rightly the affections and form the intelligence’ (MP, C&W, 17: 150). Such an economics needed to look beyond the shadow of value, represented by price under laissez-faire, to its everlasting (Platonic) substance, located in biology and aesthetics. His views on luxury expenditures and his scepticism, expressed, characteristically, as a satire on the consumption of the rich, of what would now be called ‘the trickle down effect’, are still worth reflecting upon in a world economy in which 20 per cent of the world’s population consumes 80 per cent of the available resources (Letters, C&W, 17: 553–5). Ruskin puts informed consumption first and accepts that those wishing to do something abut poverty eradication need to do more than carry on spending and guzzling as before. Galbraith has referred to a modern-day ‘culture of contentment’ that enables people to continue consuming whilst nodding in the direction of alleviating profound poverty in the developing world (Galbraith 1992). Ruskin identified such a culture in his day and realized the need for change both personally and nationally. In Fors Claveriga he abandons constraints and also turns to action in an effort to free himself from all sense of direct responsibility for the ‘material distress’ that he knew existed and the thought of which spoiled his leisure hours (Fors, C&W, 28: 485, 426). Ruskin’s writings constitute a pool of economically

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and ethically relevant ideas for the consideration of poverty and material injustice whether or not they add up to an overall system of economic analysis. In the search for antecedents in the development of economics, there is always the danger of making anachronistic judgements. Is there anything, beyond Hobson, which suggests that something more systematic is at least a possibility? Ruskin does not essentially quarrel with Mill’s morality, save with respect to the nature of liberty and the role of government ‘interference’, so the search is for a simple method of summing up the differences between Mill and Ruskin in terms of political economy. The approach taken here suggests that there is. If Mill is an economist concerned primarily with growth, then Ruskin would have to be described as an economist concerned primarily with development. Notice that this is a conditional and that it allows the possibility of both Ruskin and Mill being portrayed in other ways. It is presented as one means whereby the complex relationship between Ruskin and Mill can be thrown into sharp relief in a manner which makes sense in the context of the subsequent history of economic thought. If Mill thought that ‘every departure from laissez-faire, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil’ (Mill, Principles, p. 950), Ruskin effectively started from the opposite understanding. From this point of view, Ruskin’s quarrel with Mill, is provided with a consistent, and essentially modern, economic basis. Ruskin not only anticipated the historicist reaction in British economics in the late 1870s and 1880s but, in addition, the structuralist economics of the 1950s and 1960s. And this he did, in Unto This Last in particular, in rich, imaginative and vibrant prose which can still offer up, from its reservoir of meanings, suggestive ideas. The historicist anticipation is well documented but what of the claims of structuralism? Ruskin, though he had read Plato’s Republic, was not a socialist. He described himself as an old-school ‘Tory’ who believed in the social obligation of the rich to act as guardians of the poor. He also described himself as a ‘Communist of the old school’ (Fors, C&W, 27: 116).17 Even with such ambiguities, he is much easier to place in relation to his commitment to his writings on political economy than is Mill in relation to his. Like Martineau, Ruskin longed for an aristocratic government built upon ethical principles, motivated by the national good and worthy of the respect of labouring people. His Platonism puts him firmly in the administrative tradition. But his views on capitalism were that it tended, by means of monopoly conditions in the product market and monopsonistic conditions in the labour market (he did not use the latter term), to exploit the poor, inhibit their progress through the creation of poverty-traps, destroy the independent artisan and lock an economy into a pattern of production and consumption which would not achieve its full production potential. Even if he was no socialist, there are aspects of Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris, which can be constructed as an analysis of economic well-being in the

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context of monopolization and development. He believed that poverty required urgent action for poor peoples’ lives were short and unpleasant. He would choose the present rather than the future as far as the poor were concerned. In short, he had many of the elements of the kind of structural economics which appeared in economics discussion from the 1950s and which constituted the major development paradigm for nearly thirty years. Ruskin did not have a single complete statement of such a system, it is rather a matter of possibilites and suggestions. In contradistinction to today’s structuralists, he maintained his interest in free trade. Nonetheless, the preferences and ideas, and the associated limitation of individual ‘liberty’, in the interests of social welfare as a whole, are there as testimony to the continued vibrancy of his thinking.

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Introduction John Ruskin’s approach to economic and social analysis is frequently described as both fragmentary and difficult to understand. This was noted very early in studies of Ruskin and the view has persisted. Janes, an example of an economist who took Ruskin seriously, writing in the 1930s, states that the various economic ideas are ‘not found in a complete or logical whole in any one book’. He never managed to write, despite several attempts, a final, overall account of his economic ideas (Janes 1933: 261). And in the 1980s, Wihl, for example, writes that in making sense of Ruskin, commentators latch on to one metaphor or another and try to make sense of his labyrinthine ideas within the frame that the chosen metaphor supplies (Wihl 1985: xi). ‘Fragmentation’ strictly implies that some previous unity has been shattered though it can be extended to a restoration of unity through a contemplation of his corpus as a whole.1 The possibility exists that each ‘fragment’ is a valid whole in its own right. The metaphor which will be explored here, in order to demonstrate that Unto This Last can be read as a ‘complete or logical whole’ is that of the ideal household or, more correctly, of the domestic as a means of conceptualizing economic agency and social and economic relations more widely. Oakley, who makes no reference to Ruskin, has recently shown that the formal presentation of economic agency in classical economic literature confronts four methodological issues: free agents draw upon reason, knowledge and sentiment in making decisions; economic agents operate within a personal biography in ‘some individually particular situation’ which constrains behaviour; agents are self-aware and subjective and hence contingent; and that agents normally act within institutional frameworks since it is in their interests so to do (Oakley 1994: 3). A simple rhetorical analysis of Unto This Last will make it clear that Ruskin’s interrogation of ‘economic man’ raises just such questions. The problem of Ruskin’s meaning is a complex one. Ruskin quickly came to be seen, especially with respect to his economics writing, as of great interest for

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the style of his works rather than for their analytical content.2 He complained that he was read for his style but that his meaning was completely overlooked. But some, like Hobson and Sherburne, have argued that his ideas carry logical implications (Hobson 1938: 38–43; Sherburne 1972: 138). His work is incomplete in the sense that he regretted his inability to develop a ‘true’ political economy in the form of a ‘Principles’ text. Unto This Last, finished in a rush, lacks internal balance. It is not necessarily incoherent, though it was read as such by the first generation of readers who encountered it in the pages of Cornhill Magazine. Incomplete and incoherent are two separate ideas. To achieve a successful reading of Ruskin’s economics writing, such as Unto This Last, as economics, we need, paradoxically, to abandon the expectations generated by contemporary ‘Principles’ texts, and even by Ruskin himself through his direct references to J. S. Mill.3 We need to be prepared to view Ruskin either through popular notions of agency constructed within a tradition of secondary literature essentially derived from, or continuations of, such works, or to read him as directly, as far as we can, and in his own terms (Henderson 1995: 112; Heinzelman 1980: x). But this is difficult to accomplish, especially if he is read by those with distinct notions in mind of what constitutes economically informed writing. A reading of Ruskin calls for a reading informed by the rhetorical turn in economics. Though Ruskin writes reasoned prose, he does not write dispassionately. To read Ruskin, and to creatively respond to the writing, means abandoning expectations of what he himself (later) called ‘Millesque’, a style which he found alienating and cold. Mill whose writing is measured, clear, factual and normally unemotional, set the standard for economics writing which followed him. It also set the standard of scientific writing by which Ruskin was judged, one critic finding Mill’s Principles ‘transparent’ and ‘calm’ but Ruskin, in contrast, ‘in a passion as well as in the clouds’ (see Fraser’s Magazine, 1860, p. 654). To read Ruskin is to engage, especially in the case of Unto This Last, in a potentially and, in an historical context, actually disruptive, but not inconsistent, attack on existing conceptualizations of economic agency. Economic man and political economy Economic agency focuses on the motivation of human agents engaged in various acts of production, distribution and consumption. As political economy gradually developed and refined its techniques of economic argument, the notion of agency, embodied, for example, in the early days of classical thinking, in recognizable social categories (landlord, capitalist producer, wage labourer, a three-fold division criticized by Mill) gradually took on a more abstract, and by necessity, simpler notion. Smith saw, for example, social and economic harmony as the surprising

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outcome, under competition, of the self-seeking behaviour of individuals. By looking after their own selfish interests, individuals, paradoxically, ensured the harmonization of interests in wider markets and hence in society as a whole. Smith and others, such as Maria Edgeworth and those she influenced, worked with self-interest in the context of other social relations. Later writers, such as Nassau Senior, in an effort to produce a fully formulated formal economics, reduced economic agency to the hedonistic principle, shorn of social context. This hedonistic principle, despite the major challenge that Ruskin provided, became, as a result of transformations made possible much later by the application of mathematical reasoning, the fundamental notion of agency adopted by neoclassical economics. Ruskin’s challenge to it was to be only temporarily successful with respect to the development of what has come to be called mainstream economics. Economic thinking, however, never remained isolated within the confines of merely academic discourse, nor was in ever intended that it should. Political economy, either directly through a reading of the original ideas by those with social influence, such as Brougham or Ellis, or indirectly through a reading of explicitly educational texts, such as those written, thirty years or so years prior to Unto This Last, by Maria Edgeworth, Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau, quickly became established as part of the curriculum for middle-class and workingclass education (Henderson 1995: 21). Brougham had introduced economics into the political vocabulary a generation earlier (Sockwell 1994). By the middle of the century, the certainty of economic ideas became part of the essential process of constructing and evaluating social and political events such as reform, the supply of education to the poor, strikes and wage labour, or the means of defining the motivation of the labouring poor. The women writers paid special attention to characterizing and domesticating economic agency through literary exemplification. They also concentrated on women’s role as economic agents and as a source of both economic and educational ideas concerning such agency. Harriet Martineau, in particular, developed a literary appreciation of agency in different (third-party) domestic and social contexts, hoping, in addition to realizing abstract ideas in socially recognizable contexts, to illustrate the economic and moral capacity of poorer people and to produce a governing class worthy of their loyalty (Henderson 1995: 70–1). Martineau, in common with others at the time, however, worked within the notion of ‘economic truths’ and, with some significant caveats concerning education and research and development, the notion of laissez-faire. Ruskin, whilst also concerned with illustrating the (potential) moral capacity and dignity of the labouring poor and with producing a governing class worthy of the respect of the workers, refuses to accept the prevailing notion of economic agency. In the

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tradition of Carlyle, he rejected the accompanying notion of economic laws as ‘truths’ or as ‘natural’. Rather than placing Ruskin in terms of Mill, as it were, it is also interesting to locate him closer to his intended readership, the educated middle-class and the existing pattern of their thinking and social prejudices. Using a variety of literary and other techniques, some shared with, for example, the women writers, Ruskin, particularly, but not uniquely, in Unto This Last, confronts selfishly (and thoughtlessly and mechanistically) constructed notions of economic agency, assumed to be held by the intended readers, with their potential for injustice, disharmony and conflict. He does this in a challenging and disruptive discourse which directly domesticates economic phenomenon in terms of his own experience and that of his readership. He constructs and reconstructs the readership as active economic agents essentially within a elaborated domestic metaphor. It is the task of this chapter to explore Ruskin’s brilliant rhetoric on the assumption that he really was trying to deliver a significant economic message to his readership. It is to be hoped that such a reading, which is, of course, not the only possible reading, will demonstrate the underlying method by which his notion of economic experience is constructed and manipulated. It will also demonstrate a potential for establishing a coherence for his ideas. Unto This Last and economic agency Unto This Last is composed of four articles, first published as a series of essays, which are written in a dazzling prose. It is a work of huge literary merit and one that has been underestimated in terms of the economic ideas towards which Ruskin was grasping. To enter into its richness of meaning requires a literary analysis which is both nuanced and economically aware. This is difficult to accomplish. The approach taken is to consider economic agency and the domestic metaphor in each of the essays which make up the work in turn. It is accepted that the mixture of explication de texte and rhetorical analyses and comment only captures some of the available meanings. ‘The roots of honour’ Ruskin’s target is ‘economic man’ and the notion that ‘an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespective of the influence of social affection.’ In making a critique of economic motivation, Ruskin demonstrates, by taking the instance of a analysis of a body in motion, his understanding of scientific process. This appeal to science is a typical move in Ruskin who, though a scientific conservative, was well versed in aspects of the science of his day (Smith 1994: 152). Such a body, ‘influenced by constant and inconstant forces’ calls for a two-

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stage analysis, first of the ‘constant’ then of the ‘inconstant’ force. But this method is rejected when it comes to the analysis of human motivation; the ‘soul’, i.e. moral capacity and social affection, changes the ‘essence of the creature under examination’. Ruskin furthers his argument by concentrating not on the logic of political economy as expounded by classical writers but on the lack of relevance of the initial premise. This is an essential, but much misunderstood, aspect of his method. In approaching either the analysis of nature or of society, Ruskin tended to use a Baconian approach. He believed in the significance of observation as the only valid basis for analysis. The imagination was secondary to observation and was essentially stimulated by it through the emotional and other responses made to that which was the subject of investigation. In attempting to get others to see the significance of what he had observed, Ruskin exercised the imagination, though still constrained by the observable, to the fullest (Smith 1994: 172). In this respect his first readers judged that he had overstated his case. One reviewer described him as a ‘shreaking governess’, operating out of his field. Like Martineau, Ruskin was ‘unsexed’ by his writing. Ruskin’s writing was considered ‘feminine’. This may have been due to ‘tone’, as suggested above. It is also a matter of content. Ruskin stressed life in all its potential abundance, challenging the male model of ‘natural’ science by insisting on the value-laden, social and historical, and hence accidental, aspects of economic life. It was, perhaps, also a matter of Ruskin’s search for a social inclusion, carried albeit by domesticity, based upon sharing the benefits of wealth justly. Ruskin wished for a long, direct look uncluttered by presupposition. In the early stages of the analysis in Unto This Last, Ruskin side-steps the issue of a critical reading of existing formal economics texts and a close analysis of the logic of economic theory, a move manifest in his admitted, and much criticized, lack of a close reading of Mill. In a sense he wished to keep his vision clear. Because he rejects the premise, he disputes the applicability of economic notions to contemporary society. Ruskin uses the notion of science and the idea of ‘disturbing factors’ to press home the analysis: in other words he uses Mill’s epistemology as set out in ‘On the definition of political economy’. Ruskin is conducting a methodological debate in literary rather than scientific language. Hence Ruskin announces that he is as uninterested in the conclusion of contemporary economic thinking as he should be ‘in a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons’. Such a science may have true reasoning but be ‘deficient only in applicability’. For Ruskin, political economy is just such a science: Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it

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founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death’s head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of ‘soul’ among the corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 26) Although this passage and its well-known opening aphorism dazzle, Ruskin’s method is not simply to stun with light. He goes on to develop a consistent argument through a series of carefully selected examples, presented in a hierarchy of complexity. Thus, having stated that the insights of political economy are inapplicable, he provides an example well within the experience of his intended readership: ‘the late strikes of our workmen’.4 Ruskin reflects upon the notion of antagonistic influences and the general presumption of hostility. He then provides his first concrete example drawn from the domestic sphere. The problem identified is that of a mother (one of the very few illustrations of women’s agency in the work as a whole)5 allocating the last scraps of food in a hungry household. The interests are antagonistic, but whatever actual allocation emerges, the allocation will be settled without ‘hostility’. The ‘affections’ influence the acceptability of the outcome. The example is to be taken seriously for it confronts ‘economic man’ with two analytical problems, as already identified by Oakley: that of the emotions and that of an institutional context, the family. Ruskin does not mention the term ‘institution’ but his subsequent examples, presented as a hierarchy of different ‘human situations’, to use Oakley’s terminology, within which ‘motivational power’ works, are readily identifiable institutional ones (Oakley 1994: 3). His rhetorical concentration on ‘soul’ can overshadow the specification of contexts which make it either operative or inoperative. Ruskin turns away from the domestic sphere and towards the wider labour market thought of, not unreasonably, as ‘masters and labourer’. Here, he argues that the possible ‘reciprocal interests’ are so varied that any attempts to arrive at ‘rules of action from the balance of expediency is in vain’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 28). Given the problem of indeterminacy, Ruskin suggests that the only way out is to appeal to ‘justice’. As this is a shocking suggestion, he once again returns to the home in order to illustrate his ideas with an appropriate example. The wider ‘master and operative’ relationship is illustrated with respect to the employment of ‘domestic servants’, an illustration which his readers would have had no difficulty in conceptualizing. The intended audience is thus implicitly confronted with its own agency. Ruskin’s examples of economic agency are usually concrete and embodied in recognizable social settings. That he uses his own domestic setting

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as a source of illustration could be taken as an example of his personalism, but, in any discussion concerning economic agency, the agent as object can become the agent as subject: introspection as a source of knowledge cannot be easily ruled out. In looking at , for example, Smith’s knowledge-base with respect to human motivation, Oakley characterizes the approach to agency in terms of ‘observation’, ‘experiment’ and ‘experience’(Oakley 1995: 113). In Unto This Last, Ruskin is drawing upon observation and experience. Ruskin sets up the relationship as conceived by the political economists in which the behaviour of the master is limited only by the hardships created by others in the vicinity. This is, according to Ruskin, the economists’ road to obtaining the ‘greatest average work’. Having set up the economic story, Ruskin picks it apart. This result would certainly obtain if ‘the servant were an engine of which the motive power was steam, magnetism, gravitation, or any agent of calculable force’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 29).6 A fully-developed mechanistic metaphor, also despised as a model of human agency by Carlyle, is thus stated and simultaneously rejected. ‘Men’ are motivated by ‘soul’. Pay will not produce the required output, but the ‘affections’ will. This challenge to the market is based upon psychological insight rather than notions of utility and it is to this which robust critics of the market return in some form or another. Proper social relationships are significant, just as they were to eighteenth-century theorists of society. Ruskin’s agents are self-aware and emotional and capable of shaping ‘meaning’ in given situations. Again, his agents reflect the methodological problem, as identified by Oakley, for the concept of economic man in classical discussion (Oakley 1994: 3). Ruskin is careful to point out that he is still considering ‘the affections’ as ‘motive power’ rather than as actions which are in themselves worthwhile. The example continues within the framework established by the notion of ‘persistent’ and ‘anomalous’ forces. The domestic example, while it has application to a considerable labour force, is limited. Ruskin next focuses on the relationship between a ‘commander’ and ‘his men’. This is a stereotyped exemplary illustration. It is unlikely that Ruskin directly observed such behaviour but the stereo-typing is a feature that would make it accessible to his audience. His original thinking is likely to have been stimulated by his reading of Xenophon who sees parallels between military and commercial activity. Romantic or not, the use that he makes of the example is potentially devastating. He sets up a compelling, indeed, shocking argument about motivational power. Soldiers are employed not to fight but to die. This is itself explicit evidence about the possibility of unselfish behaviour.7 Whilst he despises war, Ruskin accepts that such men as are willing to die in destructive work are held in high esteem, whereas merchants, despite the constructive nature of their work, are generally held to be cheats.

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To extend his analysis, however, Ruskin first focuses directly on the principles which govern remuneration and then on the certainty of employment. Whilst the emotional aspects of household and armed forces may be similar, it is pay and conditions upon which he focuses. In both areas there is a degree of certainty of employment and wages are institutionally fixed rather than subject to instantaneous market fluctuations. Ruskin moves from the warmer climate of the household or regiment towards a ‘harder and colder state of moral elements’ to be found in the relationship between ‘the manufacturer and his workmen’. The possessive ‘his’ is also significant. Ruskin reflects on the motivational consequences with characteristic irony: A body of men associated for the purpose of robbery (as a Highland clan in ancient times) shall be animated by perfect affection, and every member of it ready to lay down his life for the life of the chief. But a band of men associated for the purposes of legal production and accumulation is usually animated, it appears, by no such emotions and none of them are any wise willing to give up his life for the life of his chief.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 32) The text as structured shows that the choices of examples were the result of very careful thought. One point is that in many instances in economic life, supply and demand is in fact modified by institutional arrangements, e.g. for the payment of servants, soldiers, parsons, cab drivers, doctors, prime ministers and so on: For a servant or a soldier is engaged at a definite rate of wages for a definite period; but a workman at a rate of wages variable according to the demand for labour, and with the risk of being at any time thrown out of this situation by chances of trade. Now, as under these contingencies no action of affections can take place, but only an explosive action of disaffections . . .

(UTL, C&W, 17: 33) The backward reference is to the strikes with which he introduced the notion of the inapplicability of economic ideas derived from selfishness. It is in his next move that his quality of his thinking, and its scientific implications, become evident. If existing institutional features of the labour market make employment in manufacturing a lottery, can the regulated employment as exemplified by domestic service or the armed forces serve as a model for the manufacturing sector? Ruskin accepts that in the long term the rate of wages will be determined by supply and demand conditions but is looking for a better set of

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short-term arrangements. With respect to workers’ interests he suggests that a trade-off between short-term violent exertion and high but uncertain pay for lower pay but regular effort and employment, may be acceptable. Ruskin knows that there are contextual difficulties but the most significant is that of the problem of variability of trade. He suggests that the love of gambling on the part of the masters and ‘ignorance and sensuality’ on the part of the workers as significant, but reformable, parts of the problem. As he has no immediate economic theory for coping with variability, Ruskin initiates his analysis of ‘justice’. Ruskin begins his analysis of ethical issues by setting up an alternative framework for thinking about the merchant. Selfish behaviour is assumed by economists and by society at large. But the merchant is the nation’s provider and in so doing becomes: the master and governor of large masses of men in a more direct, though less confessed way, than a military officer or pastor, so that in him falls, in great part, the responsibility of the kind of life they lead and it becomes his duty . . . to make the various employments involved in the production or transference of it, most beneficial to the men employed. (UTL, C&W, 17: 41) The underlying metaphor here is Carlyle’s ‘captain of industry’ but also Xenophon’s analogy between military and commercial leadership. Ruskin’s argument is that any economic crisis must be approached on a shared basis as it would be within the institutional context of a family, or of a ship or as in a regiment at war. Commercial morality requires contracts to be honoured, justice in setting trading standards and equity with respect to employment conditions. Equity is paternalistically achieved by an employer treating his men as he would treat his own son. By exemplifying the case first with a young man entering the service of a ‘master’ and then with a son serving on a frigate under his father’s command, Ruskin transforms the wider world into a domestic setting. There is an echo of More’s Utopia, also influenced by Greek sources, for he too thought of ‘the whole island’ as if it were ‘one family or household’ (Still 1997: 46). The problem of a mother allocating the last scraps of food can now be generalized: so the manufacturer, in a commercial crises or distress, is bound to take the suffering of it with his men, and even take more of it for himself than he allows his men to feel; as a father would in famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 42)

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This belief in the need for a system of ethics neither based on an impossible law nor cantilevered on the notion of economic selfishness is fundamental to Ruskin’s economic thinking. ‘The veins of wealth’ The purpose is to further the contrast between destructive principles of laissezfaire and the ‘practical; working of true polity’. Ruskin initiates a dialogue by restating the (stereotyped and vulgarized) objections of the political economist to his argument thus far: experience shows that political economy as a science of ‘getting rich’ is ‘practically effective’.8 Capitalists know from experience what they are about. Ruskin responds: But they neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what other games may be played with the same cards, nor what loses and gains, far away among the dark streets are essentially, though invisibly, dependent upon theirs in lighted rooms. They have learned a few, and only a few, of the laws of mercantile economy; but not those of political economy.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 43) The method here is literary, though the points have analytical implications. The text, rather than encouraging neutral or ‘objective’ (or, to take a perspective of the text itself, ‘colourless’) discussion, suggests an emotional involvement and reaction. Capitalism is located in the casino. The implication of ‘what other games could be played with the cards’ is that there is a potential choice available (in context, carried forward from ‘The Roots of Honour’, a different morality and an alternative set of economic institutions). The choices cannot be exercised and lessons learned until there is reflection upon the condition of society. ‘Vulgar’ political economy for Ruskin is located in accidents of history rather than in ‘natural laws’. The ‘loses and gains’ far away in ‘dark streets’, i.e. the condition of the poor, carries the point that capitalists do not know what they are (actually) about and hence neither do those who theorize about the system itself.9 There are large and unrecognized social costs generated by the particular game of chance which is being played. The images of agency of the capitalist is one of corruption and greed. Ruskin goes on to distinguish between ‘Political’ and ‘Mercantile’ economy. The passage dealing with political economy is reproduced in full below. It consists of a definition, followed by a series of exemplifications, of a relatively domestic variety of the type used by Martineau (but derived, by Ruskin, largely from

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Xenophon)10 and a further extension/justification of the definition. Political economy (the economy of a State, or of citizens) consists simply in the production, preservation, and distribution, at the fittest time and place, of useful and pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time; the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in sound wood; the builder who lays good bricks in well-tempered mortar; the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour and guards against all waste in her kitchen; and the singer who rightly disciplines, and never over strains her voice, are all political economists in the true and final sense: adding continually to the riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 44) From a perspective created by existing formal political economy texts, this would seem very strange (as Ruskin predicted at the end of the previous essay). It challenges conventional economic thinking, in content as well as in style, in a number of ways. The definition is focused on collective rather than individual welfare. It contains an implicit challenge to the notion of productive and unproductive labour, and although the division of labour is gender-based, it fully values the work of both the housewife and the singer. It insists on the moral capacities involved in work, a theme developed from Ruskin’s work on the nature of gothic architecture. 11 Ruskin’s observation of real life (which is only superficially very far removed from his prosaic idealizations presented here) is that there are both good and bad workers, producing good and bad work and that only good work will do.12 There is a huge amount of potential meaning packed into this series of very simple and wholesome economic activities which contrast so strongly with the motivation of capitalists. Martineau, in her stories, developed a reputation for economy of expression. Ruskin also demonstrates here a high level of skill in the sheer simplicity and roundness of his figures. His idealized examples still carry, partly through the directness of the activities, constructed in the present tense, and partly through the repeated structural elements of each section (i.e. the agent in subject initial position; the activity verbs in the present tense; the repetition of ‘in’), their ‘lived’ quality. Thus ‘the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in the sound wood’ suggests agency, and economy more widely, as a lived, located and true experience. Ruskin’s agents are economically and ethically fixed in what Oakley would term ‘some individually particular situation’ (Oakley 1994: 3). The all-encompassing nature of that experience is carried by the housewife who, whilst engaged in production, is not subject to demand and supply at all

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but who works, as does the farmer, because that is what wholesome work requires and this is what it is to be human and active in the world. Action is thus concrete and moral, an expression of the human capacity for order (‘administering intelligence’ as he puts it later), rather than as the outward manifestation of mechanistic or invisible forces. Agency, here, is equated with ‘work’ and with either ‘domestic’ or small-scale, artisan production. Only good output counts, and this is not guaranteed by the antagonisms of the market but by morality. Individual choices to act add to the riches and, by implication, to the harmony of the nation. Plato and Xenophon made an economic and ethical analysis of relatively simple economic societies. Whilst it is the case that such societies experienced a range of economic circumstances including participation in specialization and foreign trade, the degree of division of labour or the extent of market fluctuations (other than created by agricultural crisis or war) were both limited. In both Plato and Xenophon, the type of economic examples drawn from such a society are limited. Thus Plato in the Republic provides examples of the farmer, the builder, the shipbuilder, the riding master and the music master. Ruskin’s perfectly crafted sentences illustrated above are essentially his interpretation of an identical range of examples, though the type of society that is being analysed must be considered fundamentally different in its economic characteristics from that of ancient Greece. Martineau, in undertaking her portrayal of agency, located her examples in many types of production situations relevant to the contemporary world. In this passage, Ruskin locates his economy in a simple ideal. In short, Ruskin locates the activities of ‘good workers’ within the framework created by the Greek notion of techné, as set out in Plato’s Republic. Techné is a complex notion and as with other Greek economic terms, there is no direct English equivalent. It can be taken to signify the rules and practical actions governing the appropriate (i.e. good or right) application of a craft or skill. From elsewhere in the text it is clear that Ruskin understood the complex nature of production and the forces which govern it. The choice of simple examples is an attempt to find a location, outside the market and untainted by greed, from which individuals can operate. Basing the moral aspects within the definition of work itself provides Ruskin with an alternative economic morality to that engendered by the market. The modern equivalent would be the notion of ‘professionalism’. This domestic and domesticated political economy is contrasted with a mercantile economy, motivated by ‘pay’ and which ‘signifies the accumulation, in the hands of individuals, of legal and moral claim upon, or power over, the labour of others’ within the context of an inequality unjustly contrived (UTL, p. 45). Ruskin sets out his views on inequality, in a passage which reveals, in its acceptance of useful inequalities, his lack of socialist thinking:

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For the eternal and inevitable law in this particular matter is, that the beneficialness of the inequality depends, first, on the methods by which it was accomplished; and secondly, on the purposes to which it is applied. Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment; and unjustly directed, injure it yet more during their existence.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 47) Ruskin then focuses on the sources of national well-being using the case of two ‘cast-away sailors’ as an imaginary but telling case study. Starting from a basis of equality, Ruskin shows how inequality can develop, in this case through the illness of one and the support derived from the other on the basis of deferred payment. If the healthy castaway chooses, on the recovery of the other, he can stop working and live of the accumulated indebtedness of the other. In such a case, the ‘establishment of mercantile wealth that consists of a claim upon labour, signifies a political diminution of the real wealth that consists in substantial possessions’. As many of his initial readers would have been members of a rentier class, the reader is faced, yet again, with directly disturbing questions. Building upon this example, Ruskin reaches the conclusion that no directions can be given for the accumulation of wealth ‘irrespective of the consideration of its moral sources’. Ruskin illustrates the futility of making any ‘general and technical law of purchase’ for determining ‘national practice’ by taking the phrase ‘buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest’ (a phrase he claims to have derived from his translation of Xenophon, but which he may have derived from Mill) and asking a historical question concerning the condition of cheapness: ‘but what made your market cheap? Charcoal may be cheap among your roof timbers after a fire’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 53). Ruskin appreciated here, and elsewhere in his wider writing, the historical basis of market events as opposed to a mechanistic or systematic basis. Faced with the vagaries of changing (mis)fortune, ‘you’ can only be concerned with ‘just’ action which will bring about ‘a state of things which will not issue in pillage and death’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 54). The implication is that a society based upon unregulated supply and demand is an unjust society and an unjust society is a potentially violent one. By substituting direct responsibility (‘you’) for third-person examples, economic agency is now explicitly located with a given reader who, in a favourite move of Ruskin, is also identified with society at large and hence participating in unsound economic practices. Money, i.e. documentary claims, implies power over labour, but people may also be motivated by ‘the affections’. If, for whatever reasons, these go, money can cease to be enough and:

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So, also, the power of our wealth seems limited as respects the comfort of the servant, no less that their quietude. The persons in the kitchen appear to be illdressed, squalid, half-starved. One cannot help imagining the riches of the establishment must be of a very theoretical and documentary character.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 55) This sustained domestic image, which has the potential of referring to a particular household (e.g. ‘our’ wealth or the reader’s own) or, contextually, to the wave of strikes referred to earlier and hence to the nation as a whole (‘our’ collective wealth and its associated poverty), calls into question not the levels of wealth but the uses to which such wealth is put.13 The intended readership is still associated with unjust practice. For Ruskin, as for Carlyle, wealth must translate into happy and healthy and co-operative human beings. In other words the stress on the accumulation of physical capital must translate into a just and beneficial pattern of consumption. Ruskin, in a highly charged passage that makes full use of ‘the veins of wealth’ in terms of gold and of muscle, extends the notion of wealth, suggesting that ‘power over men’ may give way to a recognition that ‘the persons themselves are the wealth’, specially in a system constructed to leaving them ‘full-breathed, bright eyed and happy-hearted’. The contrast between the death’s head associated with the unregulated market and the economic skeleton now dressed in the full life of active humanity, is striking. ‘Qui judicatis terram’ In this complex and much misunderstood chapter, Ruskin is concerned with furthering the analysis of economic justice which he has already shown to be central to the notion of national wealth. It is rich in biblical references which are, again, a source of dissonance between the expectation of a secular economic discussion and Ruskin’s religious approach. The possibilities for just trade are derived mainly from the words and actions of the trader, King Solomon. Ruskin’s main concern about the poor, exhibited perhaps more directly elsewhere in his work, is that ‘we look with so much indifference upon dishonesty and cruelty in the pursuit of wealth’ (TP, C&W, 16: 396). The biblical references underscore the guilt and sin associated, especially in the Old Testament, with the oppression of the poor. Ruskin’s main concern, here, is with the price of labour and the way in which the price is determined. Using the image of a flow of water to discuss the flow of wealth, Ruskin attacks the notion that supply and demand cannot be regulated:

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The course neither of clouds nor rivers can be forbidden by human will. But the disposition and administration of them can be altered by human forethought. Whether the stream shall be a curse or a blessing, depends upon man’s labour and administering intelligence.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 60) Here the natural course of the river is contrasted with the motivational capacity to intervene. Economic agents, by implication, activate ‘administering intelligence’ and thus are capable of devising ways of regulating the natural flow of rivers and hence, by analogical inference, they are also capable of regulating economic life. A main theme is that justice and regulatory action, rather than a passive acceptance of demand and supply, misconstrued as ‘natural law’, must form the basis for a just economic life. Ruskin’s notion of the labourer is complex, but basically his vision is that the ‘property’ of the poor is effectively their labour. Health and education (what would now be called human capital) are essential to poor people engaged in wage labour. For wages to be just, ‘time’ must be exchanged for ‘time’. Furthermore, capitalist wage-labour hirers must not be able to secure unjust power over labour as a result of monopsony (Ruskin does not know the term but this is what he is talking about). In effect, Ruskin is attempting an analysis of the economic and social consequences of market imperfections. Such an imperfect market structure robs the poor of their just wealth.14 Notions of ‘justice’ are essential to avoid the concentration of hiring power and the limits to the spread of wealth that this imposes. Ruskin does not explicitly say what constitutes justice but, as is the case with Plato, he links justice with action. It is social by nature and agent specific and ought to be found in the terms on which the rich and poor meet. It is in this chapter, and particularly in the lack of compatibility between biblical suggestion and accepted economic practices, that the relationship between the text and the intended reader is most strained. ‘Ad valorem’ Having defined the ‘just payment of labour’ as a sum which would obtain the equivalent labour at some future date, Ruskin now explores how this circumstance is to be brought about. Ruskin seeks to clarify, by definition, his notion of ‘Value, Wealth, Price and Produce’. Ruskin starts by challenging Mill’s distinction, common to the Classical School, between unproductive and productive labour. The distinction is not placed within a theory of growth and the quotes from Mill are highly selective. Ruskin is baffled as to the distinction between the physical output of the

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silversmith and that of the iron manufacture, both of whom are capable of producing ‘forks’. The only valid distinction that is to be made, according to Ruskin, is a moral distinction between constructive and destructive implements: ‘we may grant that forks are good produce; and scythes and ploughshares serviceable articles. But how of bayonets?’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 79). The emotional intensity of the passage increases as bombs replace bayonets and readers are asked to contemplate the ‘enjoyment’ of such articles in an act of consumption. In thinking about national wealth, consideration ought to be given to the composition of output or, to put it in another way, the nature of consumption. Ruskin takes from Mill the generalization that ‘labour on luxuries’ will not support as many people as that applied to the production of ‘useful articles’.15 Mill’s example is erroneous for, on the basis of ‘any support to life and strength’, both iron and silver pass muster. The basis for Ruskin’s theory of value has been laid. Taking Mill’s notion that wealth ‘consists of useful and agreeable objects’, Ruskin explores the meaning of ‘useful’. This has two aspects, the nature of the thing itself and human ability to make use of it: ‘Thus every material utility depends on relative human capacity.’ A horse is worth only a broken back to someone who cannot ride it (an example taken indirectly from Xenophon). This points to the need for consumer and other forms of education, though this is not explicitly stated. Next he explores the nature of agreeableness and concludes that ‘the agreeableness of a thing depends upon its relatively human disposition’. Therefore, political economy, being a science of wealth, must be a science of ‘human capacities and dispositions’. Using Mill’s own statement to gainsay Mill’s own conclusions, Ruskin shows the moral element of consumption. The exercise, again using selective quotation and ridicule, which some have seen as ‘unfair’, is then repeated for Ricardo’s notion of value. Dismissing them both, Ruskin searches for ‘a true definition’. Using his knowledge of etymology, Ruskin points out that ‘valuable’ means to ‘avail towards life’. Ruskin’s initial definition of wealth is that: ‘a truely valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength’. This notion is already implicit in Ruskin’s comments on the ‘dull eyed, narrow-chested’ life of the labouring poor.16 There is a strong biological and environmental basis in his notion of value, a basis which he again makes specific later in the passage by referring to the economic benefits of ‘air, light and cleanliness’ (UTL, p. 85). It is this biological basis which makes it possible for Ruskin to argue that value is intrinsic: The value of a thing, therefore is independent of opinion, and of quantity. Think what you will of it, gain how much you may of it, the value of a thing is neither

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greater nor less. For ever it avails, or avails not; no estimate can raise, no disdain repress, the power which it holds from the Maker of things and of men.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 85)

The ‘you’ is not accidental. Ruskin is preparing the ground for a stronger incorporation of the reader as (domesticized) economic agent that he has hitherto achieved in the work. ‘True’ value can be established by looking directly at the object in the light of biological and aesthetic understanding, no matter what is happening to historical value as determined by the accidents of demand and supply. With respect to wealth, Ruskin starts from the possession of ‘useful articles which we can use’. Again the ‘we’ is edging towards a stronger identification of the reader with agency. Usefulness depends on both the article and the person in a very strong pattern of complementarity. For something to be useful it must be ‘not only of an availing nature but in availing hands’. Ruskin’s full definition of wealth then becomes ‘the possession of the valuable by the valiant’ (Ruskin used caps throughout) (UTL, C&W, 17: 88). Wealth is to be manipulated only by those who understand what they are about, know what alternative games can by played and who have the moral capacity to play them. Later, Ruskin will domesticate this idea by identify similar capacities in the consumer. There is a strong hint of the parable of the talents. Wealth can be used justly or unjustly contrived. ‘Manly character’ is needed to deal appropriately with wealth. Paradoxically, the two work against each other. Ruskin then sets out the conundrum, that: in a community regulated only by the laws of demand and supply, but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy nave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just and godly person.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 90) Notice the association of supply and demand with the potential for violence. This list of human dispositions also carries the whole range of possible human motivations. The methodological point that human agency and associated subjectivities are complex is effectively made. But there is more to it than this,

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especially if we see Ruskin as engaged in an intertextual discussion, matching one image or representation of economic life with another. Concern with text as constructing or representing an economy links Ruskin’s analysis to his aesthetics. The model of economic man carries with it a suggestion, essentially ideological, of both the equality of economic agents and of their universality (Still 1997: 11). In this passage, Ruskin implicitly throws doubt on the notion of equality and universality and hence on the significance of Mill’s economic science. The passage also raises questions about the self-identification of the reader. His readers were ‘rich’. They could hardly be expected to feel very comfortable about the content and structure of the lists. We should not underestimate, however, mid-Victorian middle-class society’s capacity to defend itself psychologically from that which it chose to ignore. The rich list ends with a cumulative series of negative images and the poor list ends in saintliness. Ruskin demonstrates, implicitly, in the status of the ‘just’ person, that Plato’s Thrasymachus was right about the meeting between the unjust and the just. Ruskin next deals with exchange value. Before calling upon a Ricardian image of trade-minded savages, trading unseen in some faraway land, ignorant of relative scarcities in Europe, Ruskin depicts the outcome of unequal exchange thus: Unhappily for the progress of the science of Political Economy, the plus quantities, or – if I may be allowed to coin an awkward plural – the pluses, make a very positive and venerable appearance in the world . . . whereas the minuses have, on the other hand, a tendency to retire into back streets, and other places of shade, – or even to get themselves wholly and finally put out of sight in graves . . .

(UTL, C&W, 17: 91) Once again the dramatic language carries a significant implication. The market ignores all sorts of social costs. To avoid unequal exchange Ruskin argues for equality of knowledge concerning each stage of the transaction. Ruskin then depicts, with a considerable degree of insight readily applicable to modern-day consumerism and with a flourish reminiscent of De Quincey, the motivation for consumption: ‘Three-fourths of the demands existing in the world are romantic; founded on visions, idealisms, hopes and affections; and the regulation of the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the imagination of the heart.’ Ruskin’s analysis of consumption is richly textured. Visions, hopes and affections return the discussion to the question of motivational power. With the price of everything ultimately calculated with respect to labour, Ruskin develops his notion of production. This is necessarily complex. He has already rejected Mill’s classification of labour into productive and unproductive. Initially, Ruskin sees labour as ‘constructive’ (‘agriculture’), ‘nugatory’ (‘gem

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cutting’) and ‘destructive’ (‘war’) though he settles for a two-part categorization, positive and negative. Positive is life-enhancing, negative life-destroying. Prosperity in a nation depends ‘on the quantity of labour which it spends in obtaining and employing means of life’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 98). This is not so farfetched in the context of the concept of ‘corn’ as payment (Spear 1984: 149). Capital as capital is redundant – having no justification in itself – unless it translates into life-availing production. His conclusion is that ‘consumption is the crown of production and the wealth of a nation is only estimated by what it consumes’. He seems to be putting forward a biological sense of consumption but the specific example (food) is simply a means towards a wider generalization: ‘the final object of political economy, therefore, is to get good method of consumption, and great quantity of consumption: in other words to use everything, and use it nobly; whether it be substance, service or service perfecting substance’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 102). To illustrate his point, Ruskin criticizes Mill’s view that the demand for velvet is not a demand for labour in the sense that a demand for gardners is. He insists that all demand reduces to a demand for labour, a point which will soon achieve its full significance later in the text. The key role is that of the consumer and not, as Mill would have it, in the first part of his Principles, that of the producer. Ruskin wishes to show that the composition of output is of social concern and resorts to the distinction between the production and consumption of a peach and the distributive aspects of the consumption of a bombshell! Consumption should be devoted to nourishing a healthy and growing population. Ruskin turns on the motivations assumed in, and consequent upon, Malthusian population theory. He presents his robust argument, prompted by a passage in Mill’s Principles, against the progressive demoralisation of the population in terms of the action of ‘your own son’. Even the population issue is domesticated by Ruskin in the following terms: ‘Who gave your son these dispositions?’ – I should enquire. Has he had them by inheritance or by education? By one or the other they must come; and as in him so also in the poor. Either these poor are of a race essentially different from ours, and unredeemable (which, however often implied, I have heard none yet openly say), or else by such care as we have ourselves received, we may make them continent and sober as ourselves – wise and dispassionate as we are – models of arduous of imitation.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 106) The motivations of the poor are, given the right patterns of educational consumption, no different from that of the original readership. The ironies and

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reversals involved in bringing the issue home are stinging. Ruskin brings the essay to a close by following-through the issue of consumption: all true economy, he declares is ‘Law of the House’. This is a complex idea but the elements have been developed in what has gone before. Domestic arrangements for the payment of workers can be spread to other commercial and industrial sectors, thus avoiding uncertainties associated with dramatic fluctuations. Capitalists can share the wealth and the problems with their workforce and in turn reap the benefits of increased social affection. Consumers can take great care of the domestic resources, for the wealth that passes through the household, in the form of demand, can have a profound impact on other people. Proceed with care: In all buying, consider, first, what condition of existence you cause in the producers of what you buy; secondly, whether the sum you have paid is just to the producer, and in due portion, lodged in his hands; thirdly, to how much clear use for food, knowledge, or joy, this that you have bought can be put; and fourthly, to whom and in what way it can be most speedily and serviceably distributed.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 113) Ruskin exhorts readers to look directly (as he has done) at the existing state of society (‘raise the veil boldly’) and, at the very least, change it by rejecting personal luxury (which generates little employment) and by spending wisely and justly according to the image of economy presented in the essays as a whole. This act of closure places the moral responsibility within the availing hands of his readership. They are treated as powerful consumers who, by expressing and reflecting upon their demand rather than mechanistically and selfishly consuming, are capable, since the demand for commodities is a demand for labour, of moderating conditions throughout the nation. By working through consumer action, the applicability of his ideas directly to social problems is stressed. Government is hardly mentioned in Unto This Last, yet Ruskin, prior to writing the essays, held very strong views on the nature and possibility of government agency. Kacher, who made a detailed study of the responses to Ruskin’s writings on political economy, argues that Ruskin constantly amended his content in the light of criticisms. In The Political Economy of Art, he had made, already, a strong case for government intervention. In Unto This Last, as a result of criticism of his radicalism, he switches, according to Kacher, attention away from government (Kacher 1974: 7). That he makes, in the process of writing about economic agency, such a strong case for the primacy of consumption is remarkable. In contra-distinction to agency as depicted (say) in Martineau and in popular political economy in general, a consistent attack is mounted against the abstract

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and ahistorical nature of economic laws. Ruskin calls, then, neither for fundamental political reform nor for socialist revolution but for ethical economic action at the level of the individual household, in the knowledge that both capitalists and consumers ultimately derive from households. Self-knowledge, information on working conditions and carefully thought-out consumption would change working conditions, help stabilize demand and lead to better production, better systems of production and a just composition of output. In an ironic, and perhaps somewhat disappointing paradox, considering the fervour with which the analysis has been conducted, Ruskin accepts the power of the market once ‘availing’ notions have been adopted by participating consumers. Ruskin, agency and method Unto This Last, when read in the context of a cultural domestication of economics, has coherence of theme at the level of each of its essays and at the level of the work as a whole. Even if the thread is sometimes difficult to follow, as in the chapter on justice, it is a sustained methodological attack on a one-dimensional, hypothetical-deductive notion of economic man. Ruskin challenges existing (economically derived) socially constructed notions of agency. By making an analysis of institutional and family contexts, he makes ‘soul’ and ‘the affections’ significant enough to justify his attack on Mill’s premises. Ruskin’s approach is methodologically sentimentalist in the sense that it was used in the eighteenth century. Ruskin felt that Hobbes’ vision of unfettered greed had been realized in the open and suppressed violence of free-market capitalism. His search was for human capacity to restore the balance. He found these, as Adam Smith had done in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in human ethical and emotional capacities. Economic agency is located within the context of ‘lived experience’ and of domesticity. Exemplary and telling images are used time and again as a basis for reflection on appropriate social action. And lived experience is textually located in first- , second- and third-person examples, some sentimental in the literary sense, some uncomfortable to his readership. His human agents work to overcome the social distance created by an impersonal market. Agency and readership are brought together and reflected upon through an identification of the supreme importance of consumption in determining production patterns and conditions. In short, Ruskin exposes the notion of ‘economic man’ to a series of challenges, conveyed in literary form, which are in line with the analytical problems that Oakley has shown, recently, to be methodologically significant. Ruskin may have overestimated Mill’s, though not popular readership’s, commitment to ‘economic man’. By exiting with the moral responsibility and economic ethics appropriate to

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‘living’ consumers in a society with the potential, but not, without reflection upon and an understanding of a ‘true’ and ‘availing’ sense of value, the moral capacity, for abundance, Ruskin underscores the point about human choice, rather than abstract laws, determining the development of society. Value is located close to the consumer rather than technically in the production process. The power for change is located, literally, in the hands of the readership. Such a readership is potentially reconstructed by the text, as availing, noble, informed, responsible, self-aware economic agents, who, rather than act as the unthinking product of abstract and impersonal forces, are capable of exercising, by regulating ‘the imagination and the heart’, the same moral influence in the wider society as exercised within the domestic sphere. The problem with its initial reception may have been that the reconstruction comes late in the text and the explicit challenge to existing views rhetorically much stronger than the eventual outcome. The relationship with the intended readership was, in this sense, unbalanced. However, far from being ‘fragmentary’, the economic meaning, when viewed through the domestic metaphor, is coherent, sustained and developed with a profound sense of direction and purpose.

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Although the classical economists argued, by analogy, that political economy was to the nation as domestic economy was to the household, Ruskin’s use of the notion is fundamentally different from this. The analogy as used by the Classical School is one of relation, and the use made of it, in both McCulloch and Martineau, is heuristic: political economy stands in relation to the economic problems of the nation as domestic economy does to those of household. Readers are introduced to a new notion ‘political economy’ through an understanding of the familiar notion of ‘domestic economy’. Rather than exploring an analogy of relations, Ruskin, in contrast, is using a metaphor, viz.: ‘household economy is national economy’. Ruskin’s notion of domestic economy as a metaphor for national economy challenges the ethical, institutional and historical bases for a direct application of economic laws, popularly understood at the time as ‘natural laws’ to the conceptualization of social problems. Ruskin attempted to elaborated a ‘true’ economics based upon, amongst other things, classical, i.e. Greek and Roman, thinking. His use of such sources is rhetorically complex. Thus, his attempt at a formal, definitional and developed political economy, Munera Pulveris, is identified by a phrase from the Odes of Horace, understood to imply ‘gifts of the dust’. The text makes many references to the writings of Horace, Cicero and others. His use of Greek myth and classical sources has been studied in detail for example and the conclusion reached that it is intended as an antidote to ‘false’ science (Birch 1988: 57). In addition, Birch argues that his use of Greek sources is a rhetorical move designed to persuade his audience that his arguments are rational and significant, rather than emotional. In this chapter the task is, primarily, that of establishing textual and conceptual links between Greek economic and social thinking and Ruskin’s views on political economy. Two sources are, in this context, of special significance: Plato, particularly Laws and the Republic, and Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. A complete set, in Greek, of the works of both were part of Ruskin’s library. Laws and Oeconomicus are heavily marked up, and annotated as a result of Ruskin’s exercises in translation, carried out over a long period of time after 1861. It is, of course, sometimes difficult to

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distinguish, in the details, the influence of Plato from that of Xenophon and other classical sources, for Ruskin’s prose is complex. It is also difficult to distinguish the influence of general culture from direct reading. In the Republic, Plato models a utopia, and there is in Ruskin a similar urge toward the creation of a perfect society. In Laws he sets out a total legislative programme for a well-regulated and harmonious society. It could be argued that Ruskin, like Plato, is addressing the problems of society as a whole rather than addressing economic issues. Nonetheless, he approaches such concerns through a critique of political economy. Plato has, historically at least, received the greater attention, particularly with respect to the structure of society (e.g. Smart’s work on Ruskin as a disciple of Plato). Xenophon is a significant influence and Oeconomicus, rather than Plato’s Laws, will be the main focus of this chapter. Plato is dealt with separately in the chapter which follows. Ruskin himself is explicit about Xenophon’s influence: ‘the philosophy I teach is Plato’s . . . the economy, Xenophon’s’. And ‘My political economy is all in Xenophon’ (Arrows, C&W, 34: 547; Queen, C&W, 37: 381). In 1886 he writes to J. S. Blackie saying, ‘my own political economy is literally only the expansion and explanation of Xenophon’s’ (Letters, C&W, 37: 550). These are Ruskin’s late judgements on his writings. It seems appropriate to make an evaluation of his claim. It must be said, however, that Ruskin places his serious study of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Plato’s Republic after the initial writing of Unto This Last. Ruskin is specific about his reading of ‘Xenophon’s Economist’ and of ‘Plato’s Republic’ in his letters of November and December 1861 to Carlyle and his father (Letters, C&W, 36: 391, 401). However, there are both direct and indirect references to Memorabilia and Oeconomicus in earlier works so it can be presumed that Ruskin was familiar with Oeconomicus even if he had not translated it. He held a complete collection of the works of Xenophon. The chapter on Unto This Last argued, in passing, that Ruskin incorporated into the writings, notions derived from Xenophon. It can be shown, for example, that a phrase he uses later as a new discovery allegedly from Xenophon’s writing, ‘buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest’, is in the revised text of Unto This Last.1 Furthermore, whenever Ruskin illustrates complementarity between the flautist and the flute or a horse and a skilled rider, essential to his notion of value, he is calling upon images from Xenophon. And in the preface, written after a deeper study, he writes that the central aim of his papers ‘is to give, as I believe for the first time in plain English, – it has often been incidentally given in good Greek by Plato and Xenophon, and in good Latin by Cicero and Horace’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 18). Whilst there have been detailed studies of Ruskin and Plato, there has not been, as far as I know, a sustained, text-based study of Ruskin and Xenophon. Such a study can be useful to an understanding of the developing nature of Ruskin’s

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economic thinking. This chapter, then, will make an examination of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, re-evaluating its status as a treatise on economic agency. Once this has been achieved, attention will switch to establishing links with Ruskin’s views and with his published writing. Unlike the previous chapter which looked only at Unto This Last, its influence or potential influence on The Political Economy of Art, on Munera Pulveris, as well as on Unto This Last will be considered. What sort of work is Oeconomicus? Conventionally, though this is one which has been increasingly challenged, the origins of modern economic thought tend to be identified with the eighteenth century and the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. However, economic ideas prior to Smith, in as much as they have a systematic or theoretical element, are included in the investigation of the subject’s history. How much of a theoretical or systematic element is required for a piece of writing to qualify as part of the history of economics? The problem, according to Schumpeter, is significant because everyday or ‘commonsense’ thinking about or observation of economics can take the casual observer quite far: what is significant for genuine economic thinking is some theoretical or systematic element, especially that of the notion of an ‘economy’ as something distinctive that can be conceptualized and reflected upon (Schumpeter 1954: 9). Comments, say, on the nature of the just price as found in the Hebrew and Christian bibles or unsystematic remarks scattered in classical texts, do not necessarily constitute a body of theoretical knowledge or even hint at the possibility of such.2 Ruskin’s works on political economy are not usually considered as part of the canon. If few classical writers are admitted into the economic canon, then Ruskin, who drew upon classical sources directly, is drawing upon a literature whose status as ‘economics’, or even as ‘proto-economics’, has been in dispute. The question of the status of his sources is of some importance with respect to the status of the economic content of his own work. The status of Xenophon in other academic discussions poses some problems. The philosopher (and pacifist) Bertrand Russell is brutally blunt about Xenophon whom he describes as ‘a military man, not very liberally endowed with brains’ and, later, by implication, as ‘stupid’. He hints that his view is not simply a personal one but shared by others (Russell 1946: 101). Even if text and meaning is the subject of negotiation between the text and the reader and even if Ruskin be a creative and imaginative reader capable of finding significance in what is essentially dull, the fact that he constructs his notion of political economy, however partially, from the casual observations of a ‘stupid’ and ‘conventional’ writer would mean that his own writing could be subject to the same flaws.3

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Xenophon successfully organized the retreat, detailed in the Anabasis, of the 10,000 from Asia Minor. This is not evidence of stupidity but of considerable practical capacity in the organization of troops and their impedimenta.4 Of course, Russell’s judgement is not based on Xenophon’s practical achievements but on his writing, i.e. on text, or more precisely on subject-matter, rather than biography. Xenophon is sometimes accused of constructing an avuncular and conventional Socrates, though it is now accepted that Memorabilia has philosophical content (Waterfield 1990: 2). According to experiential learning theory, for lived experience to be turned into knowledge there has to be some articulation of it and reflection upon it. To some, at any rate, it would appear that Xenophon did in fact find a basis for such a transformation in the development of his writing. His system of retreat, recorded in Anabasis, is still held to be a source of ideas on the management of troop withdrawal under enemy fire (Wood 1963–4: 39). With respect to the manner and subject-matter of his writings, judgements are varied: his style, often criticized, was admired by that master-stylist, Cicero, and he was read by Milton (Pomeroy 1994: x; Wood 1963–4: 37). Indeed, Cicero made a Latin translation of Oeconomicus, only fragments of which survive. Xenophon’s works, particularly Anabasis and Oeconomicus, were read and admired at various stages in the history of the study of the classical world. Some nineteenth-century writers, including Ruskin, enjoyed Xenophon’s prose, and, according to Finley, in the nineteenth century, Oeconomicus had an unjustifiable reputation as an economics text (Finley 1951: 252). Ruskin held that although it contained ‘no model of grace in style’ yet it was ‘the most exemplary manner of writing’ for most people (Xenophon C&W, 31: 29). Recent writers take a positive view. Pomeroy argues that much of the earlier criticisms of Xenophon’s style is prejudicial, framed by the notion of Xenophon ‘as a simple soldier’. Her judgement is that Xenophon is an innovative and versatile writer with a sound command of narrative structure (Pomeroy 1994, 15, 17). Wood, arguing that Xenophon deserves to be more widely read, finds him ‘able to write superbly’ and illustrates, using a passage from Memorabilia, a range of innovative metaphors used by Xenophon to link generalship creatively with the ‘fine arts’ rather than, as convention would have it, with hunting (Wood 1963–4: 34, 49).5 Recent scholars, then, are prepared to see more in Xenophon’s style and content than did Russell. If ‘meaning’ is the result of the interaction between reader and text, then perhaps the appropriate division is between those who are interested in the topics pursued by Xenophon and those who are not. Though Marx saw some usefulness in some of Xenophon’s ideas, and in Greek economic thinking more widely, Oeconomicus is rarely entered in the official histories of economics as a serious economics work. This is evidenced in the way in which the work is referred to, even by classicists: Oeconomicus is a Latin translation (the Greek is Oikonomikos) which is either accepted in its Latin form or turned into ‘the

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Estate Manager’ or in earlier versions ‘good husbandry’ and only rarely is the title translated, without a gloss, as ‘the economist’.6 Xenophon’s Socrates himself refers to ‘the principles of estate management’ as the content of the discussion. The problem is that the modern term ‘economics’ derives from the Greek term for a household estate but carries the associated implications of abstraction, theory construction, scarcity, opportunity cost and rationality, and, perhaps most significant of all, the notion of ‘the economy’ itself as something distinct from other spheres of life. Such associations are not relevant to the original term, nor were they associated, necessarily, with the term in the early nineteenth century. Thus Walter Scott could write of his mother: ‘she was a strict economist’ without necessarily giving rise to any association with political economy. However, Ruskin derived this reference from a biography of Scott (see Appendix, C&W, 17: 562), and did make just such an association. Ruskin refers to Xenophon’s ‘Economist’ in the text of Munera Pulveris (1871), and Wedderburn and Collingwood’s translation, with which Ruskin was closely associated, of 1876, when ‘political economist’ was a well established term in everyday use, carries the title The Economist of Xenophon. It is significant that Ruskin, who had a strong preference for the original meaning of words, wrote the preface to this translation. Many translators, and those who cite Xenophon, are unwilling to set up the expectation that Oeconomicus is a work on economics as it is now understood, perhaps because of Finley’s views (see below) of the status of Greek economic thinking.7 The use of the Latin term leaves the issue open. Were there any works in the Greek world that hint at knowledge which is recognizable as similar to modern economic thinking? Schumpeter favours Aristotle and argues that, whereas most classical sources are not systematic, Aristotle’s economic ideas have enough systematic elements to constitute economic knowledge when viewed through the lens supplied by canonical writing. Ruskin, of course, had read Aristotle and made contradictory comments about the value of his writings. There is little evidence that any of Aristotle’s economic ideas found direct textual expression in his political economy. Oeconomicus is specifically excluded by Schumpeter. The classical scholar M. I. Finley, perhaps purer than the pure, contests Schumpeter’s view and argues that not even in Aristotle is there a notion of an economic system which is distinct from what people do in their lives. Whilst there is a concern to investigate the ethics of price, seen by Schumpeter as ‘one of the strongest motives’ anyone can have for analysing ‘market mechanisms’, ‘the economy’ as such was never identified, according to Finley, as a phenomenon requiring independent analysis or deserving independent status. There was no (modern) economic theory because there was no notion of an economy independent of households (Finley 1951: 155–6).

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It was, of course, a perception such as this that first attracted Ruskin to a study of Greek ideas on the nature of economic life, for he could not see the value of economic thought, or any other thought for that matter, which isolated economic behaviour from what it was to be human. In a sense, although there were, in the ancient world, traders, including long-distance traders in grain, and some awareness of markets and market-oriented behaviour (a fact of special importance to graindeficit Athens) the greater part of economic life was conducted in private, including rural, households. For Ruskin, who recognized the location of the economy within nature and social life, here was a situation in which the notion of household as economy was not merely metaphorical. Ruskin’s basic perception, clearly articulated in Unto This Last, is that any detachment of ‘economic man’ from ‘life’ leads to dangerous and distorted ideas. According to Finley, literature on the relations within the household, the model being Xenophon, did not contribute to the development of economic thought in the eighteenth century. In addition, in a review of Chantraine’s Xenophon Economique, Finley specifically rejects Oeconomicus as any kind of economics text (Finley 1951: 252). Xenophon’s Oeconomicus is thus, once again, reduced to a practical guide to the management of household affairs rather than a work of any theoretical interest. Finley’s view of Oeconomicus is a common one amongst classical scholars and it is based not simply on Schumpeter but also on difficulties in translating Greek ‘economic terminology’ (Finley 1951: 252). Schumpeter’s view is essentially canonical: only those works which in some sense ‘predict’ the development of modern economics stand any real chance of inclusion, even if he is also looking for a ‘superstructure’ of related ideas. Whilst the significance of the established canon has not been challenged in the history of economic thought as radically as (say) in the history of English literature, there has been, under the influence of feminist thinking and the rhetorical turn in economics, some movement to restore the study of overlooked texts to the history of economics. New perspectives give rise to the possibility of richer meanings to be found in otherwise marginalized texts. At the same time, there also has been a growing realization that economics could not have been formulated ‘out of the blue’ towards the end of the eighteenth century. It is now recognized that Smith’s ideas were constructed upon a long tradition of economic reasoning, rooted in political management as well as in the growth of mercantile economies, which included Greek thought (Scott 1940; Lowry 1987). If we read with Schumpeterian expectations of the canon in mind, then many possibilities available in a text such as Oeconomicus are likely to be ignored. Fortunately, the canon in economic thought has not be constructed on such a closed basis as it has been in the past in other disciplines and researches concerning the content and status of thinking prior to the eighteenth century were never

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effectively prohibited by Schumpeter or any other substantial history text. Indeed, the status of Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a seminal, innovative text has itself been challenged. In trying to reassess Ruskin, it seems appropriate also to reassess Xenophon. Lowry, in challenging Schumpeter, argues that hedonistic ideas of human motivation, notions of utility and a subjective basis for value are in evidence in Greek writings on aspects of economy. He agrees that a specialized and separated concept of economy does not exist (order through rational action is the basis for economic and hence social harmony in Plato and in Xenophon) but rejects the notion that Greek thought did not influence the development of Smithian ideas. Lowry stresses Smith’s knowledge of Greek texts and argues that these influenced the details of Smith’s writing. Lowry’s argument is cultural as well as specifically conceptual. Lowry suggests that Smith had read Xenophon and cites the similarities of examples used by Smith and Xenophon when dealing with the division of labour (Lowry 1987: 71–2). This is certainly an interesting idea. However, in rhetorical terms, Smith’s examples, more generally, also tend to be drawn from a range of experiences shared with his readers. In the economy of the late eighteenth century the examples would be those of the butcher, baker and chandler as well as the cabinet-maker, the door-maker and the house-builder. The parallels may have as much to do with, ‘shared experience’ or ‘shared rhetorical strategy’ as with Xenophon as a direct source. Equal care has to be taken with Ruskin’s use of such situations. Ruskin had read Smith (in some detail, at least with respect to ideas on value, according to Fain) and Ruskin also uses simple economic activities, easily recognized by readers and also influenced by Greek examples, as a basis for exemplification. Other evidence, such as Smith’s list of ‘order, economy and attention’ as significant elements in managerial action, also suggests Xenophon as a possible source and these are the orders within which Ruskin also operates (Smith [1776] 1976: II, 119). Why should nuanced description of economic activities, produced as a result of a rational Socratic investigative process, which identifies (say) gender and household specialization and which reflects upon ‘getting and spending’ and the nature of justice with respect to price, not qualify as some form of economic reasoning albeit of pre-capitalist society? The question stands as to whether or not such reasoning influenced future writers. If the Socratic investigative process gave rise to interesting questions with respect to ways and means of earning a living, then there will be implicit in the text some ideas or observations associated with economic reasoning. Such reasoning could not give rise to the formal analytical structure of modern economics, based upon what Spengler has described as ‘the study of economic behaviour within a system of relations’ or, otherwise, economic ‘connectedness’ (Spengler 1980: 4). The material and institutional development of the ancient world differs from that of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth

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centuries. ‘Connectedness’ was social, as it was for Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and as it was for Ruskin’s concept of economic and social life. Nonetheless, the possibility of parallels has to be considered. The concept of opportunity cost, itself often presented as a ‘commonsense’ notion though not always known to ‘commonsense’, is implied, strongly, by Xenophon’s concern with timeliness, a concern emphasized by Lowry. If ‘commonsense’ is culturally or experientially or educationally determined then we would have to be careful in making evaluations of what is, and what is not, ‘commonsense’ as Keynes, for example, realized in those passages in the General Theory which suggest that ‘ordinary’ men could see what ‘classical economists’ could not. Cannan, writing in the Economic Journal in the 1930s, illustrates the appropriateness of an appreciation of the simplest things in economics, and argues for their repetition as a way of assisting ‘common sense to grasp the bare elements of economic science’ (Cannan 1933: 367–8). Text and audience, in this sense, are to be considered together. ‘Opportunity cost’ is sometimes presented as such a commonsense notion, but few enough seem to understand readily the implication of cost as alternative output lost. Rather, is not the ‘commonsense’ notion of cost that which is written on an invoice or paid in a market? Schumpeter, and those who agree with him, take ‘commonsense’ at its face value, whereas Spengler and Lowry exhibit a nuanced approach. Xenophon seems to appreciate, in his depiction of the ordered ship and the spatially ordered household, the costs implied by misused time and makes the link with lost output. Lowry goes as far as claiming that, in a passage dealing with the application of the combination of oxen and men to ploughing from his work Ways and Means, Xenophon offers an understanding comparable to the key notion of the ‘marginal element in productive combination’ (Lowry 1987: 63). Lowry’s interpretation, which falls within the tasks listed by Spengler for an economic examination of ancient texts, cannot be taken to imply that the allocative problem was solved in a manner that was anything other than empirical or dictated, as efficient, by tradition (Spengler 1980: 6). Nonetheless, the statement made by Xenophon can be taken as the product of accurate observation and sound description relevant to the growth of a degree of economics understanding. If we take the present body of economic argument to be the basis for making a judgement, nuanced observation can be seen as a form of ‘substantive’ economics, a notion which became part of the discussion in the 1960s concerning the relationship between economic theory and economic process in pre-capitalist societies. Economic understanding can be seen as a self-awareness of an embedded notion of economic life (say, as institutionalized in oikos) within which scarcity is recognized and material needs are satisfied and prioritized as a result of engaging with nature. Such a view, essentially Aristotelian but furthered in the 1960s by Karl Polanyi, would allow the inclusion of writers other than Aristotle.

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Certainly, some modern readers, unrestrained by notions of conventional economics, have seen much more in Xenophon than commonplace observation on running an estate. One set of ideas, relevant to a study of Xenophon and Ruskin, are currently thought to be of particular significance: Xenophon can be credited with a theory of military management or leadership (based upon his practical experience) and with the development of a parallel theory of economic management. Both are, to some extent at least, in evidence in Oeconomicus and it is these two things together which provide the work with its modern-day significance. One of the things that Ruskin, the amateur in classical scholarship, may have seen in Oeconomicus was a theory of the nature of economic management or of economic agency. Economic management in Xenophon Xenophon’s theory of management or of economic agency within the context of oikos, taken to be a household estate organized along Athenian lines, is worked out in the context of the military and then applied to the management of the estate.8 A basic notion is that an asset is only really an asset if complimentary skills are developed amongst those who own or use them. Xenophon’s focus is then not the material basis of production, though this is not ignored, but the skill and commitment of a workforce which is essentially located in nature. The oikos is a social unit which accompanies the social development of the city-state. In legal and institutional terms, the oikos involved the development of private property, enforceable contracts and domestic and international trade in foodstuffs (Singer 1958: 48–9). In setting out a legislative programme for the conduct of economic life, Plato in the Laws has the oikos in mind, particularly with respect to the question of inheritance. I have called it an economic theory of management, although this is an unorthodox view, because it is, as will be shown, concerned with the problem of achieving commonality of purpose within the potentially conflicting interests found in the oikos. Two elements, explored by Singer, are essential to the justification of the emerging theory as economic: the notion of a unit of human (economic) activity and the rational norms which govern that activity (Singer 1958: 46). The practical problem in Oeconomicus is that of understanding why some estates prosper whilst others decline. The theoretical problem that is posed is that of finding a set of principles that when applied are capable of ensuring that potentially antagonistic elements within the oikos are governed in such a way that a surplus over and above running costs is deliberately contrived. Xenophon shares, with Aristotle, the idea that production is co-operative but sees that the economic actors involved are essentially unequal. Xenophon’s proposed resolution is not equality but unity of purpose based upon a reasoned and informed subordination. This is an aspect

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which intrigues Ruskin who sees in Xenophon’s example of Cyrus ‘a faultless order of State powers’ exercised within a state which was ‘one human body, not a branched, coralline, semi-mortified mass’ (Xenophon, C&W, 31: 28). The account presented here draws, with some independent development, on Wood’s work on ‘Xenophon’s Theory of Leadership’ and on Lowry’s work on Xenophon. Wood draws his material from the range of Xenophon’s writings, though, here, specific application will be to the Oeconomicus only, in which Xenophon draws a direct relationship between the leadership skills of the general and of the estatemanager. Wood argues that, for Xenophon, the general’s problem is to secure obedience. Xenophon stresses that leadership needs to be consistent if securing the co-operation is to be achieved. The trick is to gain co-operation of subordinates by a just system of punishment and reward. This is necessary but not sufficient, for what must be secured is loyalty, i.e. the capacity for subordinates to obey because it is in their own self-interest so to do. Seeing people as, in Lowry’s term, the ‘variable factor’ in production, Xenophon can generalize from military to civilian production. A concern with the deliberate construction of an environment within the estate in which the potentially antagonistic self-interest of the various parties (those in voluntary and in involuntary association) leads to mutually beneficial cooperation is an essential element in Oeconomicus. Personal attributes and appropriate techniques work together to ensure that followers follow. A leader who can, amidst all the problems of warfare, provide stable and predictable behaviour for subordinates as well as efficient an environment as possible within which to work, will gain compliance. Xenophon focuses on the impact that actions have on subordinates. Thus, according to Wood, he constructs a psychologically informed theory of leadership. Wood concludes that Xenophon ultimately envisages civil rule as enlightened and associative, something that Ruskin is also likely to have seen in the Oeconomicus (Wood 1963–4: 61). Wood deals primarily with a theory of leadership, but in making an application specifically to Oeconomicus I wish to argue that it is a more general, and essentially modern, economic theory of management. How, then, is this economic theory of management manifest in the Oeconomicus? The themes of planning and order (which Wood sees as illustrating Xenophon’s rationality) are quickly introduced as a principle of estate management. Planning is illustrated by the need to ensure just the right type of buildings adapted to function and order by those who either abuse and misplace their assets or who always have them to hand. Xenophon places great stress on timeliness and Lowry sees in this a practical appreciation of the notions of efficiency, cost-saving and hence of opportunity cost (Lowry 1987: 72). The problem of motivation and control is introduced by an apt illustration:

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Socrates. What if I also show you something about slaves: in some households they are nearly all chained, but run away again and again, while in others they are unchained and want to stay and work?

(Pomeroy 1995: 117) This is a general statement of the practical problem that has to be solved. The problem is also stated in other ways and leads to theory of management based upon self-interest and a set of incentives in which both economic motives and selfesteem are addressed in equal measure. The theme of co-operation is also quickly introduced by Socrates in a passage which, through the parallels established between military and agricultural activity, contributes to Ruskin’s sense of co-operation and notion of ‘Soldiers of the Ploughshare’: For attacking the enemy requires co-operation and the cultivation of the earth requires co-operation. Therefore the man who is going to be a successful farmer must make his labourers eager and disposed to be obedient. And the man who leads his men against the enemy must contrive to produce the same result by giving gifts to those who behave as brave men should and punishing those who disobey commands. On many occasions the farmer must encourage his workers no less than the general encourages his soldiers. Slaves need some good thing to look forward to no less, in fact, even more than free men so that they may be willing to stay.

(Pomeroy 1995: 129–31) These are the elements introduced by Socrates, constructed as a seeker of knowledge and further developed by Ischomachus who is respectfully presented as the expert. Basic to the co-operation essential to organizing production within the mixed economy of the estate is the relationship between husband and wife. Their cooperation is the first step in securing harmony amongst the potentially disharmonious elements in the household. Mutual understanding is to be based upon education and discussion. Although the relationship is initially patriarchal, the husband embodying power, ownership and wisdom, if it is successful in focusing economic life, it can give way to equality of contribution. Both partners are advised to behave responsibly and rationally. Directing, conserving, disbursing and appropriately distributing that which is in store on a planned basis – ‘plan ahead and guard whatever must remain in reserve, so that the provisions stored up in a year are not spent in a month’ – is a significant role, essential to the rational organization of life within the enterprise, carried out by the woman (Pomeroy 1995: 145. Given concerns about unjustifiable and even fraudulent use of stores, this

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allocative role is of equal importance to that of obtaining the harvest in the first place. The educational aspects, however patronizing they appear initially, are evidence of Xenophon’s understanding, derived from his military ideas, of the significance of everyone fully appreciating what is expected of them. The household differs from the army, however, in the sense that the wife can take command and even reverse the power relations if she proves to have superior management skills, though criteria upon which a judgement is made are left implicit. Xenophon is stressing what would today be called ‘human resource management’. Once the management team are working together on the basis of a common understanding of the nature of order as a result of an inventory exercise paralleling the experience of storing aboard ship, the next task is to integrate the rest of the household into the system so that they are all pursuing a common objective. Having carefully identified the activities associated with the trusted position of housekeeper (essentially a job specification), Xenophon’s Ischomachus sets forth the personal characteristics of the housekeeper, the behavioural aspects having been jointly worked out between husband and wife (‘we’) (Pomeroy 1995: 11–13). The list, which is paralleled by the idea of a ‘person specification’ in modern human resource management, includes self-control in eating, sleeping and sexual relations. Part of modern recruitment techniques for significant positions is to observe the candidate in the social context, including eating in company. Once identified, the housekeeper is careful trained and nurtured: ‘We trained her to be eager to improve the estate by taking her into our confidence and by giving her a share in our success.’ Whilst education had a very significant role in (say) the relations between father and son in Greek life, Xenophon is going beyond this and hence illustrating its economic significance to the whole estate. A similar reasoned process is used to appoint a foreman to supervise outdoor work, who, in addition to certain moral attributes, must show some keenness to make a ‘profit’. Even if this term does not necessarily translate easily into the economist’s notion of ‘profit’, the point is that the Greek text carries the notion, in the context of discussing the housekeeper as well as the foreman, of a set of incentives, both social and economic, leading to managing the estate in order to secure a surplus in excess of the break-even point. Xenophon does not indicate how costs are to be calculated or how accounts are to be kept, so in this sense it is not a strong economic theory of management. Nonetheless, the aim is deliberately securing a surplus on which the assets can expand and the estate prosper. The emphasis is on, in today’s terms, the ‘soft’ side of management including the education and training function. It is the concern with deliberate methods of securing a surplus or ‘profit’, essential to Ischomachus’s social standing, together with the notion of finding an internal mechanism for harmonizing self-interest by means of a system of material and other rewards linked

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directly to effort supplied, which makes this an economic theory of management. Cost management is included. Timeliness is seen as a significant part of agricultural life and the cost of time is economized by careful storage and retrieval of physical assets and the cost of capital by careful planning and use. Recurrent costs on the farm would be accounted for by labour, draught power and inputs such as manure and seed. Labour is likely to have been the most significant cost and hence, in the absence of fine details about costs, the one deserving the most economizing attention. In addition, pilfering is to be eliminated by encouraging honesty. Honesty and justice and self-control are central to this system as, indeed, they are both to the Platonic Socrates and to Ruskin’s notion of commercial morality. Xenophon’s Ischomachus is careful to show that authority is delegated but the ultimate responsibility is carried by the owners of the estate: ‘it [is] incumbent upon the person who derives the greatest benefit from their preservation and the greatest harm from their destruction to show the most concern for them’ (Pomeroy 1995: 159). An owner may posses the theoretical knowledge but this is not much use until it is realized in practice. Having established the right set of relationships, they have to be maintained by consistent ‘concern’. This is just one example of Xenophon’s concern ‘with the education of succeeding generations of the upper classes’ (Lowry 1987: 59). This was a concern which was also central to Ruskin’s projects. One way for the owner to show this concern is to walk around the farm offering advice and inspecting what is being done and how: ‘the master’s eye produces beautiful and good work’. Whilst Xenophon may be calling upon a proverb or even demotic observation at this point, a move which would add to the persuasive power of his writing, the idea is consistent with the others that are being developed. It is not too fanciful to see in this the modern notion of ‘management by walking about’. Points of contact between Xenophon’s theory and modern practice are many: clarifying the objective and agreeing them at the top level, sharing the objectives through education and negotiation with the middle-level managers and rewarding performance at all levels, leads to the securing of collective objectives and an increased sense of ‘ownership’. Ultimately, management of the assets is the responsibility of the senior management team! It is such points of contact which, if we take Schumpeter’s concern about ‘common sense’, suggest that Xenophon is working with a theoretical model of human motivation which has elements that are recognizable as ‘economic’ in his sense. Slaves are the most difficult to integrate into the estate’s objective function. Ischomachus stresses punishment and praise as the means of securing the cooperation of slaves. Both must work together for ‘even slaves must have something to look forward to’. Rewards are to be varied according to degree of effort and contribution, a payment-by-results based upon the knowledge of performance as

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observed by the foreman under the just and attentive eye of the owner. Theft, or misappropriation, which could remove the surplus from the benefit of the owner, is to be kept under control by punishment and rewards acting together. Those who prove to be honest are ‘treated like freemen’. Even slaves, then, will behave properly when, manipulated by reward and punishment, it is in their self-interest so to do. Even though the distribution is based upon rewards for inputs provided and results achieved, the process is based upon ‘justice’, for the evaluation needs to be made not according to a refined set of records but to observation. Ruskin, Xenophon and agency There is, then, a sophisticated theory of management in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. What did Ruskin find? Ruskin may have been taken with Oeconomicus for narrative reasons: Xenophon places, much as Ruskin also did, stories within stories (Pomeroy 1995: 17). Ruskin claims, in the preface to Collingwood and Wedderburn’s translation of Oeconomicus, to have found three things: ‘a faultless definition of wealth’, ‘the most perfect ideal of kingly character and kingly government’ (an idea related to his notion of personal ethics and responsibility which carries the sense of stewardship and the larger theme of government) and ‘the ideal of domestic life’ (Xenophon, C&W, 31: 27–8). He also claims, elsewhere, that ‘My political economy is all in Xenophon . . .’ (Queen, C&W, 37: 381). Ruskin’s three-fold set does contain much that can be identified in his writings on political economy. But it would be wrong to suggest that Mill, Smith, Plato, the Christian bible and images derived from secular and religious art were not also sources of concepts and images. His construction of images draws upon many different sources; nonetheless, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus peeps through. This section will deal with domestic and kingly images. Discussion of a theory of wealth is postponed to the next section. Ruskin’s sense of the domestic as a significant metaphor for the social has already been introduced. He felt that ethical sense, a moral force which balanced human greed, operated most strongly in the immediacy of family life and sought to reproduce this in the context of farm, factory and nation as a whole. Ruskin, whose need to think in terms of the human figure was identified in Chapter 1, resorts both to Xenophon and Proverbs for his own image of ‘the perfect economist’, a female modelled as much upon Ischomachus’s wife as it is on Proverbs 31: 15, 22 and 25. (A Joy For Ever, C&W, 16: 21). In the following excerpts, Ruskin unites his biblical, classical and aesthetical knowledge to depict his notion of economy: Economy no more means saving money than it means spending money. It means the administration of a house; its stewardship; spending or saving, whether money or time, or anything else, to the best possible advantage. In the simplest and clearest

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definition of it, economy, whether public or private, means, the wisest management of labour; and it means this mainly in three senses: namely, first, applying your labour rationally; secondly preserving its produce carefully; lastly distributing its produce seasonably.

(JFE, C&W, 16: 19) The allocation process is rational, directed and oriented towards ensuring a just balance between work and rewards in consumption. It is Xenophon by another name. His perfect economist is ‘mistress of a household’, who exhibits: a studied expression of the balanced division of her care between the two great objects of utility and splendour: in her right hand, food and flax, for life and clothing; in her left hand, the purple of the needlework, for honour and beauty. All perfect housewifery or national economy is known by these two divisions; wherever either is wanting, the economy is imperfect.

(JFE, C&W, 16: 20) Ruskin’s primary image involves a balance between the production of necessities and luxuries, a balance he did not feel had been achieved given the economic consequences of an unequal distribution of wealth. His conception of stewardship is a perfect amalgamation of Christian and Greek sources. And his image of ‘domestic life’ is undoubtedly that of a set of domestic arrangements which reflect male educational leadership within the context of a sexual division of labour. Ruskin, as did Xenophon, locates strictly economizing behaviour (thriftiness) with women. Xenophon’s understanding is that ‘Property generally comes into the house through the exertions of the husband, but it is mostly dispensed through the housekeeping of the wife’ (Pomeroy 1995: 121). Ruskin’s images of the perfect housewife match Xenophon’s depiction of husband and wife in the context of learning about estate management, filtered, of course, through biblical knowledge and art history. The main point is that such domestic metaphors create an economic space within which social distance, which overcomes the power of social affection and morality, is eliminated. Ruskin worked with a sexual division of labour, but because of his notion of partnership and balance he avoided any economic undervaluation of roles. ‘Indoor work’, whilst frowned upon for men, largely because it did not help sustain the body in a condition to undertake military service, is both the proper domain for women and economically valuable to the household. Xenophon is suspicious of indoor trades as inherently unhealthy. Ruskin is very concerned about the observable ‘weak-chested’ life of the malnourished labourer working as a drudge

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in unhealthy and intellectually and morally deadening circumstances dictated by the division of labour. Given the sexual division of labour, Xenophon sees cooperation between husband and wife, rather than as an unthinking subordination, as essential to the prosperity of the household. The idea of ‘kingly character and kingly government’ is drawn from Xenophon’s account of Cyrus’s rational and ordered approach to the administration and development of his empire. Xenophon paints, however briefly, a very strong sense of Cyrus’s approach and thus assists Ruskin to enhance an already formed image of government economic agency based upon reason and order rather than a market free-for-all. Xenophon, according to Pomeroy, melds Cyrus the Great and the younger Cyrus together to provide one enduring model of kingly government (Pomeroy 1995: 248–51). Ruskin, earlier in his writing and drawing upon biblical sources, had already constructed ‘Cyrus of Persia’ as the ideal of ‘Heathen Knighthood’ with respect to government and education (Florence, C&W, 23: 58). The image is enhanced by Xenophon’s use of Cyrus to illustrate national economic management. Xenophon’s Cyrus applied to a whole empire the same principles which Ischomachus applied to his oikos: a sense of order and subordination, manifest in a physical appearance and neatness of a parkland (which contrasted so strongly with Ruskin’s image of mid-century capitalism as a cinder-heap), justice, wisdom and stewardship. A demonstration effect, evidenced by the textual Cyrus’s attention to his parkland, is reinforced by a central administrative control based upon asset and production surveys, reporting and supplying appropriate levels of tribute. Ruskin is predisposed to assimilate such an image: it is easily converted to a painterly one and it is also easily linked to his idea that garden and farm can also serve as useful metaphors for the organization of national economy (JFE, C&W, 16: 22). That Greek economy was intimately located in nature attracted Ruskin. He saw, as late twentieth-century thinkers have been forced to see, that industrial economy was ultimately located in nature. Whilst there is no profound reflection upon conditions which give rise to economic growth by administrative means, the economy is one in which estates rise and fall, and there is, nonetheless, in the section on Cyrus, a stated concern for population growth and density, agricultural productivity and state capacity as measures of economic progress. There is no direct evidence in Xenophon of the role of technical change in the promotion of economic growth, fundamental to the type of economy which Ruskin was observing. The stress was on orderly, timely and thrifty behaviour, what Lowry calls ‘a sort of microeconomics of moral conduct’ (Lowry 1987: 40). Ruskin was fearful, also, of both the open and suppressed violence of laissezfaire and was constantly looking for wholesome metaphors which were suggestive of the need for rational governmental action and, at the same time, capable of

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convincing his readers that such action was legitimate. Ruskin sees in Xenophon’s insistence that what is true for the micro-economy of households, is true for the state as a whole, a justification for his domestic metaphor. These are, in effect, Smith’s three aspects of economic administration, ‘order, economy and attention’, probably also derived from Xenophon, realized at all levels of human action. Although the image is ‘kingly’, Ruskin is not implying the need for monarchy. Rather, as with the frescoes in Sienna, he is setting out a set of principles to inform the idea of government responsibility in economic and social life. His interpretation of the Sienna frescoes suggest a macro-economics of moral conduct. Government has a duty to push economic life ahead when the future is gloomy. A kingly approach is about ‘knowing and directing functions’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 63) which ‘rules not mis-rules, and orders, not dis-orders, the things submitted to it’ (MP, C&W, 17: 239). In Time and Tide Ruskin elaborates his leadership categories: kings, dukes and bishops. The medieval images are simply to stress that estate management is a ‘royal art’ in the sense assumed by Xenophon (see Lowry 1987: 73). Ruskin was essentially modern. The intention is to underscore the nature of responsibility. His bishops account for and report on their charges’ welfare much as modern-day social workers. His notion of kingship and stewardship is also built upon ideas found in Plato (see Chapter 5). Here, the two writers contribute in tandem to Ruskin’s concept of stewardship in industrial society which he locates in paternalism, a means of overcoming the social indifference brought about by social and economic distance. It is not surprising that Ruskin should have responded to Xenophon’s portrayal of the responsibilities of ownership, whether it be of an empire or a family farm. His notion of the proper mainsprings of society is the social affections. Xenophon’s move from military leadership to domestic economy, though textually reversed in Unto This Last, and the use of a system of incentives concerned with securing the good of the operatives within the household, widely defined, has strong parallels with securing the general good amongst the disharmonious elements of the oikos. The notion of a properly run household and a properly run regiment having a common psychology based upon incentives is fundamentally that of Xenophon even if the textual manifestations are different. Cash payments alone, worked out under exploitative conditions, would not bring soldiers to their proper work, which is not to fight, but to die. In Greek sources such as Xenophon, Ruskin found an embedded economy, i.e. one fixed in nature as well as social life, which helped him in his search for a basis from which to challenge abstract, scientific economy which he associated with the writings of J.S. Mill. Ruskin could operate with abstract ideas but he arrived at such ideas by an Aristotelian or Baconian process of observation and induction. He was, and remained, deeply suspicious of the idea of forces in operation which could not be seen (Smith 1994: 174). Xenophon’s writing helped Ruskin locate the

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economy in a specific set of decisions and relations which focused the human aspect of economic life within the context of wrestling resources from nature. Ruskin’s evolving notion of co-operation and his notion of service. His ‘Soldiers of the Ploughshare’ and ‘Soldiers of the Sword’ carry both a biblical image and the sense of Xenophon’s insights into the one set of heroic images. Together with Carlyle’s ‘captains of industry’, they combine to form a vision of patterns of duty and responsibility which go beyond the exploitation and disharmony implied by unethical (i.e. socially unregulated) capitalism. The sources are mixed, but the themes compatible with Xenophon are clear enough. The manipulation of the affections by justice and concern could produce an enduring harmony with respect to all necessary provisioning activities. Just as disharmonious elements could be rationally combined in productive enterprises so could they be combined within the state. Ruskin included in his notion of economic agency the possibility of rational administration and management, as exemplified, at various levels, in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Ruskin’s move, in Unto This Last, from the warm climate of the household and regiment to the ‘harder and colder state of moral elements’ in manufacturing, extends the visible hand of reasoned management. First, supply and demand can be modified, given the right institutional arrangements (e.g. such as those found in the church or in the army). But labourers are hired and fired ‘by chances of trade’. Ruskin, in a modernization of Xenophon via a dash of Scott’s Rob Roy, declares that ‘under these contingencies no action of affections can take place, but only an explosive action of disaffections’ (for the Scott connection, see Poston 1979: 260–1). Ruskin has no precise answer to the problem of the variability of trade but sees the need for a degree of institutional development in the labour market such that a trade-off is secured between violent short-term exertions for high and uncertain pay and regular exertions for regular pay. Ruskin, though he could not find a precise solution, nonetheless located the problem within the context of existing institutions in the labour market. Elsewhere in his writings he shows situations in which society quickly comes up with a satisfactory set of institutional arrangements for coping with problems (e.g. rules of behaviour for those who survive a shipwreck) and he tries to encourage the insight that such institutional arrangements are needed in the labour market. His second solution, strongly influenced by Xenophon, is ‘paternalism’. The merchant becomes in the course of his business the master and governor of large masses of men in a more direct, though less confessed way, than a military officer or pastor, so that in him falls, in great part, the responsibility of the kind of life they lead and it becomes his duty . . . to make the various employments involved in the production or transference of it, most beneficial to the men employed.

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(UTL, C&W, 17: 41) It would be wrong to suggest that Ruskin in his main writings on political economy parallels the whole structure extracted by Wood from Xenophon’s writings and developed here. Ruskin did not articulate a performance management system which is implicit in Xenophon, nor did he accept Xenophon’s idea of punishment. But he did stress the voluntary, i.e. agent specific, nature of co-operation. And he did capture the notion that work can be transformed from effort into something emotionally satisfying given the right kind of relationship between the product, the method of production, the reward structure and the social relations within firms. This is a challenge to Mill’s notion of ‘work aversion’, one of the bases on which Mill argued for a separate science of economics. He observed, and set a high value on, society’s normal capacity (i.e. when not inhibited by ‘natural’ laws) to produce institutional arrangements for regulating uncertainty, even if he could not produce a precise answer to the problems of changing the nature of the labour market. With respect to his notion of economic motivation within firms, Ruskin’s adaptations, if we can remove the paternalist clothing, are essentially modern and in advance of the general thinking and practices of the day. Ruskin, Xenophon: values, wealth and value Having set out the parallels between Ruskin’s writings and Xenophon’s theory of economic administration, it is time to review the parallels between theories of wealth and value. It is difficult to distinguish between theory and description for the work opens with a discussion on the nature of ‘assets’ and this carries with it concern for the nature of value, at least value-in-use. Most of the items within the household were used within the household and hence the notion of value-in-exchange was, in context, of little importance. Whilst the narrative is different from how such a topic is covered in Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, there is no doubt that consideration of the nature of assets as ‘useful things’ is part of the Classical School’s agenda. Ruskin certainly makes liberal use of Xenophon in ridiculing Mill’s notion of ‘useful’. Value-in-use is essential, according to Classical economics, for an object to be valuable but it is not the basis for measuring value, which is to be found in value-in-exchange (Black 1987: 776). This value-in-exchange is based upon labour rather than upon utility. ‘Usefulness’ is not, however, taken by either Xenophon or Ruskin to be located in the object but in complementarities between the object and its owner: a horse or a flute is not wealth to those incapable of using either. Possession does not imply useful, the notion of useful is located in individual attributes and qualities. Whilst the discussion leads to what has been described as an ‘exquisite’ Socratic paradox in which the poorer Socrates is better off than the

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richer Critobulus because of the demands that wealth brings, the argument has implications. Physical assets must be matched by technical skills embodied in human labour and manipulated by a set of managerial skills developed by the owner of the assets. In modern economics such skills are referred to as ‘human capital’ and are now, as in Xenophon’s text, normally the product of a deliberate process of education. Where labour was the biggest single recurrent input into production, then improving labour skill by investing time (as is suggested to Ischomachus’ wife) constitutes good economic advice. Xenophon sees the complimentarities between assets and skills and so goes beyond a materialistic notion of wealth, though it has to be kept in mind that this is a direct response to the factor availabilites within the economic world that he is reconstructing. Ruskin writes of an economy in which the dead factor ‘capital’ absorbed all other considerations to itself, including the notion of value and the physical well-being of those whose labour is combined with it. Though he makes no direct reference to Marx’s economics writings, Ruskin’s capitalism, carried in his much-used images of death and life, shares something with Marx’s notion, explored by Kemple, of capitalism as a symbolic economy of sacrifice (Kemple 1995: 85–123).9 Ruskin, in re-writing Xenophon’s examples, expands on the nonmaterialistic, skill-centred concept of wealth. He does this most dramatically in ‘The Veins of Wealth’ where, by clothing the dead skeleton of economic man with firm flesh and healthy blood, he plays joyfully with the idea that people and their attributes are the true source and measure of national wealth. Xenophon’s influence, and in this case that of Plato as well, is seen in his conceptualization of a ‘true’ political economy in the following passage. Notice the timely principle and sense of the ‘storehouse’, which carry hints of Xenophon, implicit in his definition: Political economy (the economy of a State, or of citizens) consists simply in the production, preservation and distribution, at the fittest time and place, of useful and pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay a the right time, the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in the sound wood; the builder who lays good bricks in well-tempered mortar; the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour and guards against al waste in her kitchen; and the singer who rightly disciplines, and never over strains her voice, are all political economists in the true and final sense: adding continually to the riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 44) This is Ruskin’s vision of aspects of a ‘true’ economy: action here is concrete and moral, located in techné and in the lived experience, already set out in Chapter 3, of

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what it is to be a farmer, housewife and singer. The ‘economy of the state, or of citizens’ suggests the micro-economics of ethics and the subject-matter simply reflects the concerns of Cyrus and of Ischomachus. The listed examples come as much from both Plato, who made an analysis of techné, and Xenophon than from Ruskin’s imagination. Whereas Xenophon located his examples in something close to the actual economy of his day, Ruskin locates his in a simplified ideal of the independent artisan whom he saw as being squeezed out of existence by monopolistic capitalists. Basing his ethics within the material basis of crafts and, in the case of the singer, a profession, Ruskin harmonizes economics and professionalism and so provides an alternative economic morality to that derived from laissez-faire. By extending the domain of professionalism, i.e. by re-drawing the location of economic activity through stressing the ethical purpose of the merchant in ways similar to his construction of the soldier, Ruskin extends the domain of institutional and self-regulation. Actual men undertaking deliberate and informed actions, within the context of a mixture of economic and non-economic motives, rather than abstract ‘market forces’ are what counts for success. Xenophon’s values, his aesthetic and practical appeal to the idea of order and his stress on ‘wisdom, justice, self-control and piety’, have been seen as ‘Victorian’ (Waterfield 1990: 66). They matched those of Ruskin who was ever-anxious to restore a moral capacity to the discussion of economic agency in his own time. Economics or what? Xenophon’s writing is of economic interest. Modern economics requires both a theory of market, and a theory of intra-institutional, resource allocation, as suggested by Coase (1988).10 Xenophon’s problem, as Ruskin’s was to become, is that of understanding the subjectivities of economic actors and their desire to achieve a predictable environment. Ruskin, in his search for an institutional basis for rational action, works along lines that are similar to Xenophon, examining in particular the role of the affections and the institutional context of economic activity. In essence, Ruskin rejected two Smithian metaphors, as filtered through his reading of Mill, that of the mechanistic notion of human motivation and the metaphor of the invisible hand. For Ruskin, social contact, economic motivation and the visible hand of management all had to work together to produce harmonious and sustainable viability. In stating, as he does in A Joy for Ever, that ‘all economy, whether of states, households, or individuals, may be defined to be the art of managing labour’, Ruskin shows the deep nature of Xenophon’s influence (JFE, C&W, 16: 18) Ruskin observes and writes about an unsettled, mid-Victorian capitalism, a world substantially different from that of Xenophon. Xenophon makes very little of exchange and marketing, though Ischomachus is actually discussing with Socrates

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near the market-place, which is to be taken as a symbol of his significance and success at producing a surplus which can be exchanged for social status, and a great deal of storing and using the surplus to enhance the household. There is, as Singer indicates, a degree of neighbourliness between ‘economy’ and ‘chrematistics’ (making money) which suggests an interpenetration of subsistence and commercial activity (Singer 1958: 31). The world of production that is constructed in Xenophon’s text if not ‘economics’ is, at least, ‘economically interesting’ or what Spengler calls ‘economically-oriented writing’ (Spengler 1980: 7). What can be derived from this world is a set of reasoned principles for achieving, within organizations, a harmony, based on an understanding of economic motivation, which cannot be achieved by anything other than managerial action.

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5 PLATO AND RUSKIN Searching for Economic Justice

There are many different ways of approaching Ruskin’s works on political economy. The most obvious and direct is simply to read them, trusting in a general ability to read and to hope that it will be possible to arrive at some understanding of what is presented in the text. Such an approach is an essential first step towards making sense of Ruskin. However, Ruskin is a difficult read. His references to biblical or classical texts, his many ironies, the associative nature of his writing and his unsteady relationship with readers, can cause problems. Ruskin himself predicted as much, suggesting that his meanings were, no matter how hard he had tried as a writer to capture them in words, somehow just beyond reach. The reader, therefore, in Ruskin’s own view, had to work, and has had to work, to grasp at his meaning. In this, Ruskin may be reflecting Plato’s views, set out in Phaedrus (274a–277b), of the unsatisfactory nature of the written word which, when abused, ‘always needs its parent to come to its rescue’. And Ruskin was frequently in that position with respect to his writings on political economy. Some of his contemporaries gave up the notion that Ruskin’s writing held any significant economic meaning at all. His works were recommended for their ‘style’ but not for their ‘sense’. Thus the reviewer in the Critic sees the work as ‘pleasant’ though nonsensical reading (Critic, 28 June 1862, p. 629). As, indeed, did later commentators such as Virginia Woolf who ‘could only admire Ruskin’s style if she divorced it from his meaning’ (Spear 1984: xii). Any failures with respect to other possible meanings were with Ruskin and not with themselves. Whilst there is currently an understanding that the meaning of a text is primarily created in a negotiating process involving a reader and a text, this should not be taken to mean that a reader’s horizon is fixed. It can be developed by other readings, which in turn modify the interpretation of any particular text, or by more exploratory readings, which accept (say) Ruskin’s lack of foreclosure as something to be recommended in writing about difficult subjects. And so it is with readings of Ruskin on political economy. An understanding of his relationship with Greek sources may yield insights into the complexity of

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Ruskin’s writings but will not settle, once and for all, what his texts mean. There is no single meaning to be obtained from Ruskin any more than there is a single meaning available from a study of religious, or many other texts. Modern analytical readers are developing, nonetheless, an interpretation of Ruskin on, for example, city life, which accepts that ‘the rhetorical energy of these writings is underpinned by a closer and more informed analysis of the history of urban development than has generally been recognized’ (Wheeler 1996: 6). It is likely to be possible, therefore, to construct a coherent reading of Ruskin’s work on political economy which reveals significantly more economic content than is usually accepted as the case. An understanding of Ruskin’s sources does not, and cannot, resolve ambiguities, uncertainties and problems of logic and association found in Ruskin’s works. But understanding Ruskin’s sources can reveal the deep layers of Ruskin’s social thinking and give the lie to the prevalent view amongst his contemporaries that Ruskin wrote nonsense. Ruskin’s use of classical authors has already been introduced in the chapter on Xenophon and Ruskin. Reference was made to Plato in that chapter but no detailed evidence presented of the links between Ruskin’s work on political economy and Plato’s ideas. Indeed, few of his first readers noticed, in anything other than a superficial sense, the way in which classical ideas are developed and integrated into his political economy. Some did. R. E. Kacher reports that the Press, in reviewing The Political Economy of Art, depicts Ruskin as a Platonist who sees the world ‘not as a huge, unwieldy orb which we must make the best of, but as a sort of humming-top which can be brought into harmony with the eternal fitness of things by a sufficient amount of flagellation’, and that, somewhat inaccurately, ‘even Plato would not have expected the government to carry the burden of social reform: Plato’s aim was the reformation of individual character’ (Kacher 1974: 6–8). Even modern-day appreciations of Ruskin’s political economy, such as that made by Clark, whilst acknowledging the influence of Xenophon and Plato, nonetheless underestimate the Platonic influence on Unto This Last (Clark 1964: 269). Spear mentions Plato twice only and Birch dismisses the idea that Ruskin gave much attention to the Republic (Spear 1984: 274; Birch 1988: 55–6) It is curious that his first readers generally overlooked the Platonic influence, for Victorian society, familiar with classical texts, usually valued such thinking highly. Such models, though, are generally only in indirect evidence in the economic texts of the day, save perhaps in the form of Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy, or even of De Quincey’s Dialogues, of a generation or so earlier. In these works, a version of the Socratic dialogue is applied to economics education. The construction of political economy as ‘useful knowledge’, with but a brief intellectual history, i.e. no older than Adam Smith, may have obscured the role of

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Greek texts in Ruskin’s work.1 This chapter will explore parallels between Plato’s ideas and those of Ruskin. Various ways could be used to do this. Ruskin could be read as a means of reading Plato or Plato can be read as a means of framing an interpretation of Ruskin. Both writers produced rhetorically complex texts and some simplification will be required. The method will be to present a summarization of Plato’s writings, drawing primarily upon the Republic and Laws for insight into the possibility of a rational organization of socio-economic life. Such insights will then be used to illustrate parallelisms in Ruskin’s analyses of an industrial and consumer-based society fundamentally different from that envisaged by Plato.2 As the Republic is both a destructive and constructive work of philosophy, by reading Ruskin through Plato it ought to be possible to detect the constructive aspects of Ruskin’s economics. Ideas about Plato’s philosophy will be drawn from commentaries by Annas and Lee and from papers by Lowry, Smart and Inge, and others, as well as from a direct reading of the Republic and Laws as published in Penguin Classics. Textual evidence, suggestive of links between Ruskin and Plato, will be drawn mainly from The Political Economy of Art, Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris, rather than from his later works which are normally cited as examples of his constructive ideas.3 Suggestive parallels Ruskin’s delight in Plato is known amongst those who have subsequently developed an interest in Ruskin’s writings on political economy. R. G. Collinwood puts it thus: ‘Plato alone he read and re-read, loved and revered, to the end of his life’ (Collingwood [1922] 1971: 4). Secondary texts specifically on Plato and Ruskin are comparatively rare items in the huge list of works on Ruskin’s social thought. Ruskin himself, as early as 1843 and hence long before any sustained interest in political economy (c. 1847), makes his researches on Plato specific: ‘I think myself very wrong if I do not read a little bit of Plato very carefully every day’. In a sentence which calls to mind De Quincey’s trading of the mental confusion induced by opium addiction for a cerebral salvation offered by Ricardo, Ruskin claims ‘I must do my Plato; I am never well without it’ (Inge 1934: 53; see also Collingwood, [1922] 1971: 4). Ruskin’s ‘doing’ of Plato perhaps implies more than simply his unpublished exercise in translating the Laws. By ‘his’ Plato, Ruskin may be taken to imply both the Republic and Laws.4 Collingwood argues that Ruskin read Plato for ‘his style, his temperament, and his social and political ideas, but not for his metaphysics’ (Collingwood [1922] 1971: 5). This is a judgement with which it is possible to disagree. Inge (sometime Dean of St Paul’s) argues that Ruskin ‘owed more to Plato

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than to Carlyle or anyone else’ (Inge 1934: 53). This is a bold judgement, for if we take just one simple idea from Unto This Last, such as that of the responsibilities of a ship’s captain towards his crew, as a metaphor for the wider management of economic life, there are many possible sources: Carlyle and the captains of industry; Xenophon and his theory of military leadership and managerial organization; Plato and his double notion of captaincy, i.e. the captain as the most suitable to lead and the head as the captain of the body. Ruskin also develops a devastating critique of ‘economic man’ based upon his notion that ‘soul’ and ‘social affection’ are to be taken as significant aspects of ‘motivational power’. Ruskin, given his early training in Christianity, writes from a cultural context which recognizes ‘the individual value of every soul’ (SV, C&W, 10: 189). Plato’s notion of justice is developed within the context of the ‘equilibrium of the soul’ and his notion of soul is associated with the idea of ‘self-generated motion’ (Laws, trans. Saunders, 10: 426). This moral capacity to motivate action is central to Ruskin’s idea of human motivation and hence to any valid economic action, and it is one that, together with the notion of ‘true’ and ‘false’ motivations, actions or ideas, finds many manifestations elsewhere in Ruskin’s work. For example, it is to be seen in his distinction between ‘true life’ which ‘never forfeits its own authority’ and ‘false life’ which ‘is overlaid by the weight of things external to it’ (SL, C&W, 8: 192–3). It is possible to see in Ruskin’s portrayal, in Unto This Last, of fulfilled, independent artisans, antecedents of twentieth-century philosophical concerns, though Ruskin did not develop a formal philosophy. In a sense they live a true life for they have cast off the ‘fictitious counterpart’ and never yield up their ‘own authority as a judging principle’ (SL C&W, 8: 191). Their ‘good work’ is the outcome of their sense of craftsmanship rather than of the external dictates of the market. However, it would be hard to say how much Ruskin’s version of ‘soul’ is informed by Plato and how much by the bible.5 By embedding so much biblical quotation in his Platonist approach to political economy, Ruskin is signalling the moral complexity and even earnestness of his argument. With Ruskin, the associations and influences are likely to prove to be rhetorically complex. Ultimately, Ruskin’s writings on political economy may owe more to Ruskin than to anyone else.6 Inge, in making his judgement, is implicitly following that of William Smart who, in 1883, published a lengthy and interesting pamphlet on Ruskin as ‘a disciple of Plato’. This seems to have been the first attempt to delineate the classical origins of the systematic elements in Ruskin’s writings. Smart backs his general parallels with textual evidence only very loosely drawn from Ruskin’s art criticism and history and from Fors Clavigera. Neither author presents details of the text of Unto This Last or Munera Pulveris to make specific illustration of how Ruskin draws in detail upon Plato’s writings. Even Smart, who states ‘I do not mean that

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isolated thoughts only are to be found similar in both. I mean that Ruskin has adopted, in toto, some of the great Platonic conceptions as they stand in the Republic and Laws, and has worked them out under new conditions of modern life and society’ (Smart 1883: 9). Smart also says, ‘To what extent this following of Plato is conscious and intentional, and to what extent it came to him through general culture, it would not be easy to say’ (Smart 1883: 8). Thus Ruskin’s various versions of the captaincy metaphor suggests Greek sources through both general culture and direct reading. Analysis and judgement is required, for Ruskin’s texts are complex. He certainly borrowed many ideas from other sources but the way in which he expropriates the arguments of classical authors is uniquely his own and made so by his understanding of the economic conditions of mid-Victorian society. There are some interesting parallels between the response to, and the implied intentions of, Ruskin’s and Plato’s writings. Plato’s Republic is a work to which, as Annas acknowledges, many different responses are appropriate. Plato’s writings, which were discovered later than those of Aristotle, entered indirectly into Western thought earlier, via Augustine and the tradition of neo-Platonism. His writings have been subjected, since they were first translated, to critical, though appreciative, analyses. Greek ideas in general and Plato’s ideas in particular informed, on a direct basis, much Western thinking even into the early twentieth century. The ideas set forth in the Republic have been variously described, according to Annas, as: ‘fascist’, ‘communistic’, ‘conservative’, radical, ‘hopelessly utopian’ and practically realizable (Annas 1981: 1). In a curious way, Ruskin has been called a very similar, though not identical, set of names. Ruskin’s writings in political economy have been considered, in addition, as ‘nonsense’ and ‘feminine’, charges not normally levied against Plato. Ruskin shares what Tarnas has called Plato’s ‘religious romanticism’, an attitude to knowledge in which ‘the ultimate reality is not only ethical and rational in nature, but also aesthetic’ (Tarnas 1991: 41). Both Plato and Ruskin are, in the sense that many different meanings can be distilled from them, the creators of rich texts. A parallel also exists with respect to rhetorical intention. Plato is, according to Annas, amongst others, ‘a sophisticated literary artist who is aware of the effect he is producing. The Republic is meant to startle and shock. Plato was not out to conciliate his contemporaries’ (Annas 1981: 2). Furthermore, Plato can be seen as intending to reverse everyday notions of justice and so to set out a case for a fundamental remodelling of society. Much the same could be said for Ruskin’s writings on political economy with Unto This Last being the prime example. Ruskin may have been the lesser artist in the sense that he provoked such a reaction that publication of the series of articles which later made up Unto This Last was suspended after vigorous protest from readers. Such a fate did not happen to

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Plato’s writings, though Socrates, the leading figure of Plato’s dialogues, who may or may not have thought and said what Plato says he thought and said, was condemned to death. Bernard Shaw, whose writings were to be highly influenced by Ruskin’s social concerns, insisted, however, in a superb hyperbole that Ruskin ‘certainly would have been hanged if they had grasped what he was driving at, and believed that he believed it’. Ruskin’s message to his readers, according to Shaw, was ‘ You are a parcel of thieves’ (Shaw 1921: 8).7 Ruskin may have been capable of better judging the mood of an audience in a lecture hall, and of amending his rhetoric in order to keep them listening, than he was at persuading hostile readers to keep reading. Even with respect to the relationship between thought and action, Ruskin’s life follows a similar path to Plato’s. Plato attempted to promote, directly, by visits to Syracuse, the application of the utopian ideas contained in the Republic to the government of an actual city-state just as Ruskin promoted socio-economic reform directly through a variety of measures including the establishment of his Guild of St George and his support, via Octavia Hill, for housing reform. As Smart suggests, just as the utopian construct of the Republic brings forth Plato’s practical maxims in the Laws, so too does Ruskin’s Unto This Last bring forth his pragmatic advice found in Fors Clavigera. This is not to suggest that Ruskin modelled his life on that of Plato. Perhaps it is, rather, a question of a common pattern for those essentially engaged in a process of stimulating reform and who feel that books are a significant, but inadequate, means of so doing. Gandhi, who ‘selectively appropriated’ from Ruskin’s Unto This Last and who incorporated Ruskin’s views into a Gujarati version published as Sarvodya (1908), may have also realized a similar set of understandings. Social and political reform required lived-out action as well as thought (Studdert-Kennedy 1998). From Plato to Ruskin The text of Plato’s Republic is complex. His principal concern is the development of the notion of justice within a context provided by the ideal, and economically unsophisticated, city-state. Unlike Ruskin, he is not contemplating the problems of a dynamic, industrializing society. Rather, he is asking questions about the possibility of a just ordering of static, agriculturally-based but nonetheless developed society in which individuals can only live successfully by co-operating with others. Plato challenges the existing basis for a discussion of the nature of justice. He shows that it can only be understood and achieved within an analysis of the ideal state. His task is that of setting out a rational basis for the administration of such a state, based upon rational leadership and the notion of justice. Plato’s analysis of justice in society is based upon the idea of the tripartite

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harmony of the soul. The ‘just man’ achieves the rule of the rational over the ‘spirited’ and ‘appetitive’ elements. The link with Ruskin’s notion of ‘soul’ and his attack on the appetitive nature of greedy economic man, is clear. Ruskin displays the Platonic influence when he uses another tripartite division with respect both to energy and motivation and to the hierarchy of ‘Manufacture’ , ‘Art’ and ‘Fine Art’. Only fine art involves a perfect human harmony of ‘the head, the hand and the heart of man’ (TP, C&W, 16: 294). Plato’s subject-matter is the whole state, its social, political and economic structure and the educational and artistic frameworks required to focus the state on securing justice. Ruskin, in Munera Pulveris, shows a direct link with Plato when he gives his definition of a true political economy: As domestic economy regulates the acts and habits of a household, Political Economy regulates those of a society or State, with reference to the means of its maintenance. Political economy is neither an art nor a science; but a system of conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts, and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture.

(MP, C&W, 17: 147) Care must be taken in the interpretation of Ruskin’s definition for it is, in the first paragraph at least, close to definitions found in McCulloch or Martineau (Henderson 1995). Whereas in the works of the political economists it carries the notion of an abstract system of regulation, through the market by means of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, it is clear from the rest of Ruskin’s writing that it also carries the administrative sense of regulation. Regulation implies regulators. This is made very clear in the second paragraph with its direct references to ‘conduct and legislature’. ‘Conduct’ suggests, when taken in conjunction with ‘legislature’, something other than the application of mechanistic notions of self-interest. The administrative element, predominant in the thinking of Xenophon and Plato, is an essential aspect of Greek ideas on the nature of economic activity. It is especially prominent in the Laws in which Plato sets out to legislate for, amongst other things, the proper conduct of economic life. The administrative element is also prominent in Ruskin. A significant thrust of Ruskin’s writing consists in the desire for the development of self-regulation through moral reflection upon conditions and ends, and for the development of a legislative framework for such problems as the adulturation of goods (also a Platonic concern), the making of false claims for commercial advantage and dangerous working conditions. The topic will be returned to (see p. 98) when the role of the Guardians is discussed.

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Central to his notion of ‘moral culture’ is Ruskin’s concept of justice and of the way it is to be introduced into the conceptualization of economic process. What Plato is doing is also complex. He is attacking conventional notions of justice and developing a new basis from which the problem of justice is to be understood. In short, Plato is calling for a radical reconstruction of the meaning of justice and of the means whereby justice is secured (Annas 1981: 9–10). Ruskin, though primarily concerned with economic justice, is calling for a radical restructuring of the ideas that his contemporaries held concerning economic life and hence for a reconstruction of social relationships and institutions. Ruskin shares what Annas has called Plato’s ‘expansive’ notion of justice which puts ‘relations with others central to moral life’ (Annas 1981: 13). Ruskin insists, as does Plato, on the need to place the notion of justice with respect to the economic relations within society as a whole. A primary concern, manifest in Ruskin through a series of images of inequality as well as by way of deductive reasoning, is the analysis of justly and unjustly contrived inequalities of income. Just inequalities can arise, for example, through the prudential decisions of economic agents to save for their old age. Unjust inequalities arise from various forms of cheating including cheating on the supply of information, the promotion by capitalists of useless products such as military expenditure in poor nations and monopoly. Whilst accepting that economic justice requires collective action, Ruskin does not share Plato’s argument for communism as an appropriate life-style for the governing class. Nor did he in truth share Plato’s desire for an economic and social system which is constantly reproducing the same. Plato’s starting point in the Republic consists in an attack on the moral complacency of the wealthy. Cephalus, whose practical and limited sense of justice is based upon the capacity to perform certain actions made possible by the possession of wealth, is shown to be shallow and complacent. Plato’s approach to justice, as exemplified by Socrates, is not based upon the carrying-out of a list of actions. He shows that particular actions may be just or unjust depending upon a given context. Reacting according to a given list is not likely to secure justice. Cephalus is used to show the way that a set of unreflected ideas can lead to shallowness and the trivialization of moral matters. A prime target for Ruskin was the moral complacency of the rich of his day whom he saw as pursuing an unreflective approach to the problems of society. They were encouraged to do so by the intertwining dogmas of economic man, supply and demand, natural law and laissez-faire. Thrasymachus puts forward a cynical but significant argument for justice as the interests of the rich. Ordinarily, just people will never come out of an encounter with the unjust in a favourable position. For Thrasymachus ‘life is . . . a competition’ (Annas 1981: 30). Ruskin, in setting out his categories of economic

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actors, would seem broadly to agree with Thrasymachus’ proposition though not with the conclusions which are drawn. Shepherds are not really concerned with the ‘good of their sheep’ but with exploitation.8 For Thrasymachus, life is inherently competitive and the individual, in trying to obtain his own due, must necessarily do others down. Thrasymachus is seen by Lowry as the forerunner of ‘a pure form of hedonistic self-interest’ (Lowry 1981: 95). Hedonistic self-interest is a notion to which Ruskin so strongly objects in his analysis of economic man. Complex images in Ruskin of the meeting of rich and poor, derived from biblical sources, particularly Old Testament sources, also carry the notion of the selfinterested and greedy rich cheating the poor out of their due and natural property. This consists in their health and the returns to labour. For Ruskin, as for Xenophon and Plato, the good of the sheep is essential, both for their own sake and for the interests of their employers. Co-operation rather than competition is, for Ruskin, the social ideal within which justice can be realized. Supply and demand is likely to produce injustice, create conflict and develop a situation in which the rich and poor are ‘always plotting against each other’ and hence fail as a state by becoming incapable of effective joint action (Republic, trans. Lee 1955: 369; Republic 551d). It is the lack of co-operation, evidenced in Unto This Last by a series of disruptive strikes, that Ruskin uses as the foundation of his argument concerning the inappropriateness of unregulated self-interest as the basis for resolving the problem of justice in economic matters. For Plato a just order is the necessary outcome of a fully harmonious one, whereas for Ruskin a harmonious order is the necessary outcome of a just one. Plato focuses, then, not on the just action but on the moral state of the agent, the just person. Annas puts the argument thus: ‘Plato’s good person is a person in whom reason is supreme but we can see from this argument that he does not mean by reasoning, mere means-end reasoning, the efficient calculation of the technocrat’. (Annas 1981: 28). Here, then, is a central notion and one which finds echoes in Ruskin’s political economy for Ruskin strenuously opposes, for a variety of reasons, the mechanistic notion of economic agency, a means-ends calculator motivated by selfishness and devoid of ‘soul’ and ‘social affection’. It is often said that Ruskin attempted to challenge the interpretation of existing notions of economic life but failed to construct a replacement. Throughout his work on political economy Ruskin attempted to model a different kind of agent, motivated not by blind acceptance of the laws of supply and demand and the actions which they dictated but by a reasoned approach, e.g. the ethical consumer or the ethical employer. Lowry, for example, sees in the contrast between Glaucon’s view that those who practice justice do so unwillingly ‘from want of power to commit injustice’ and Socrates’ view that ‘it is worse to do than to suffer wrong’, Plato’s recognition of ‘the conflict between a materialist interpretation of a politico-

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economic world, where individuals are motivated by rational self-interest, and Socrates’ world where individuals are motivated by ethical self-interest’ (Lowry 1987: 98). Ethical self-interest is concerned with undertaking such actions in the world that will not damage the harmony of the soul. This is a conflict which Ruskin also observed and which he attempted to address. Plato’s analysis of justice is carried out within the context of the city-state where the issue of justice, according to Plato, can be more easily observed than it can with respect to an individual. And in making an analysis of justice in the city, Plato gives an account of the conceptual origin of cities. Cities are associations based on the satisfaction of needs through craft specialization and the division of labour. Needs in his first city are few and dictated by nature rather than by sophisticated, and in Plato’s eyes, corrupt notions of luxury. The principle which makes the specialization possible is not competition, though self-interest is the motive, but co-operation. Ruskin is interested, as is Plato, in how such cooperation can be secured. Ruskin’s slogan, ‘Government and Co-operation in all things’ is a manifestation, however transformed, of Plato’s social basis for economic life. People are by nature social, a proposition also fundamental to Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole. They come, according to Plato, naturally, in different types suitable for making different contributions to the life of the whole society. The aim is not individual fulfilment through access to a unique life-style. This is a concept essential to the functioning of a wealthy, consumption-oriented society. Rather, it is fulfilment through a specific contribution to the general good, a contribution which Plato is ready to enforce. In making use of the metaphor of the household, derived essentially from Xenophon, Ruskin stresses the social and institutional basis of economic life. The general good is too important to leave to chance: it is to be achieved by administrative action and an educational process which allocates people to the places where they can best serve that good. It is not, then, by chance that Ruskin sees, in The Political Economy of Art for example, the essential allocative role of education as part of a process of establishing a more rational approach to economic life than that which is available from the market mechanism. In addition, knowledge itself has, for Ruskin, a significant part to play in economic life, e.g. he identifies shared knowledge of market conditions as a means of preventing unequal exchange. Ruskin makes a simple and complex use of Plato on crafts. It is simple because Ruskin’s images of the complex nature of economic agency are best and most suggestively drawn when dealing with simple production processes. His image of the good farmer or the good shipwright could be drawn straight from Greek sources, in fact, from a mixture of Plato and Xenophon. Ruskin illustrates their behaviour partly because they represent a social class which was, in his eyes,

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being destroyed by the new systems of production. He sees their economic motivation as consisting in their experience as skilled and independent crafts people (he includes the skill of housewifery) and not as the result of the blind forces of the market. Plato used the argument from techné to see if there was a specialist role associated with the just person but could not find one. In the process, he argues that a physician as a physician is concerned with applying the skill of his single craft to cure the sick rather than to make money. Ruskin’s image of ‘perfect economists’ is located within the notion of techné as expounded in the early part of the Republic. And in looking for the true function of elements in contemporary society, Ruskin stresses what could be called their ‘craft’ role rather than their money-making role. This method allows him to move easily from functional to ethical economics. Ruskin recognized that the manipulation of capital was an essential feature of contemporary economic life but was more at ease with illustrating the role of the human element. According to Lowry, Plato and Xenophon relegated the manipulation of material resources to a background role (Lowry 1987: 93). Ruskin’s labouring poor are, in contrast to his glowing images of independent crafts people, debased by the type of conditions created by unregulated supply and demand. One of Ruskin’s concerns was that an unregulated market swallows up the economically significant, and individually fulfilling, role of the craftsmen. This is a role in which ‘soul’ can find a full expression in terms of ‘good work’. Its abolition reduces the fulfilled artisan to the status, and consequent degraded moral condition, of the labouring poor.9 But this is not the only use that Ruskin makes of Plato’s analysis of functional roles. In an argument which it designed to challenge the notion of self-advantage based on a ruthless self-interest, Ruskin, in Unto This Last, draws upon the examples of the soldier, the pastor, the physician, the lawyer and the merchant (defined to include industrialists). He describes their duties with respect to society as a whole: to defend it and die for it; to teach it; to keep it in health; to enforce justice; to provide for it. This conforms to Plato’s argument about the nature of social relations in the founding of the first and then the ideal city and to his notion, though in a diluted way, that morality is agent-centred. Ruskin frames his agent in terms of duty to society rather than duty to making money. This is a Platonic ideal which is to be found in both the Republic and the Laws where the object of trade is to place goods in the appropriate hands. Profit maximization would suggest mere money-making. Ruskin feels the same perplexity concerning the role of the merchant in Victorian society that Plato experiences in his own. Ruskin, who had witnessed the honesty of his father in contrast to the general standards of decency observed in trade at the time, recognized the social validity of the merchant’s task. But he deplored, as did Plato, practices such as adulteration and the making of false and exaggerated claims. Keeping his eyes firmly set on

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social validity as opposed to economic malpractice, he then uses the notion of duty as a basis for creating an ethics of economic behaviour which is not based upon short-term considerations alone. Plato’s city grows in complexity and becomes ‘inflamed’ and corrupt by a process of increasing luxuriousness in consumption; in our terms, ‘wants’, as a result of growth and trade, come to replace ‘needs’. What people want, if only by implication, is more than what is due to them. Commonality of interest based upon the mutually balanced satisfaction of needs is replaced by a divisive competition for unlimited wealth and luxury. In Unto This Last, and elsewhere, Ruskin makes a very strong case against luxurious expenditure and its translation into, for example, the acute poverty of the seamstress.10 The source of his concern is based upon direct observation and contact with the problems of poverty. When Ruskin looked at the world he endeavoured to look directly and tried to be aware of, and to take away, lenses given by convention. Ruskin’s concern for poverty is located in his respect for the intrinsic value of life, derived no doubt from his profound study of the Christian scriptures. He understands that the poor are blessed but his vision of poverty was not blinded by his understanding of Christian doctrine. His concern was also to consciously remove the lenses, from his own eyes and from the eyes of others, as supplied by conventional political economy. But Ruskin’s notion of the divisive nature of poverty and riches is also a manifestation of his interest in Plato as well as justified by his own interpretation of the causes of the Paris Commune. Such divisions held, for Plato, as for Ruskin, the potential to create not one society but two mutually antagonistic ones. Wealth and poverty are both suspect because ‘one produces luxury and idleness and a desire for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship; and the desire for revolution as well’ (Lee 1987: 188; Republic, 422a) This understanding still informs what is left of ‘one-nation’ Toryism, a (later) tradition within which Ruskin can be more comfortably placed than that of socialism.11 Plato was so concerned about the divisions caused by poverty and wealth and the social disruption that they inevitably bring that he prohibits the Guardian class from direct ownership of material assets. Ruskin’s insistence that mercantile economic wealth always implies its opposite gives rise to his efforts to challenge the moral complacency of his intended readers. Ruskin felt that an unjust distribution gave rise to an unjust system of production and that luxurious consumption, when founded upon an unfair distribution of income, brought economic benefit to the wealthy few and economic disaster to the many. Ruskin was appalled at luxury in the midst of abject poverty and took this, and the social discord that it brought in its wake, as evidence of a lack of justice and hence of a lack of a ‘true’ wealth, in the state.12 Ruskin, though he is drawn to the notion of regulated and administered approaches to economic

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life in later works, asks in Unto This Last, merely for an ethical consumerism in which the head, which Plato sees as the captain of the body, rules the romantic economic desires of the heart. Ruskin dresses up his argument by arguing against Mill about the nature of the demand for labour, but the wider context for his argument has Platonic force behind it. Plato, according to Annas, introduces the first city and its process of corruption in order to find a context for the evolution of Plato’s Guardians from the specialist class of soldiery who are needed to defend the interest of the expanded state (Annas 1981: 76–7). It is to be the Guardians’ role to cleanse the corrupt state and establish the just one. The just state is ordered, efficient and reasoned. Plato believes in rational design and superior intelligence, and hence subordination, as the means to an efficient ordering of society capable of securing the good of the whole. His object in planning such a state then: ‘is the greatest happiness of the whole and not of any one class; and in a State which is ordered with a view to the good as a whole, we think we are likely to find justice’. (Lee 1981: 185–8; Republic, 420–1). But such a state would need to be governed by the best intellects rather than by those who could argue the loudest. Here is the nub of Ruskin’s distaste, expressed throughout Fors Clavigera, for libertarian democracy. A substantial part of the Republic is devoted to the problem of selecting and educating the Guardian class, determining their duties and life-style. Ruskin’s concern of finding the fittest to lead as a basis for working-class selfhelp, is manifest in Fors Clavigera. His concern for developing such a group is located within his distrust of false rhetoric. He associated this with shallow democratic practices in societies where few are educated enough to discern rhetorical manipulation (Stoddart 1993: 4–5) Plato makes explicit a link between achieving and sustaining social reform and education. Ruskin, whose educational activities were integral to his literary and academic ones, also accepts a link between social reform and education. Education as a method of achieving justice, i.e. as a means to life, is very skilfully introduced into Unto This Last in a variety of different contexts, e.g. as consumer education and as a means of improving both family life and reducing family size amongst poorer people. The role of education and knowledge in the life of the consumer will be dealt with below (p. 103). Although there is no single, direct equivalent of Plato’s Guardians in Ruskin’s economics, his main perplexity, when faced with the economic abundance so much in evidence in mid-Victorian society, was the existence of poverty, malnutrition and ill-health amongst the labouring poor. Ruskin looked directly at society and saw abundance rather than the economist’s notion of scarcity, and wondered how a nation could be called wealthy when its means of production gave rise to so much poverty (Sherburne 1972). If wealth did not translate into the happiness

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of all a nation’s citizens how can it be called wealth? His focus is society-wide rather than the interests of a particular class. And what he is attempting is a rational means of making an analysis. He shares with Plato a concern for the welfare of the state as a whole and looks for a something other than the imperfect market to turn that concern into social action. There is no Guardian class in his political economy save in the general sense of ‘governors’, i.e. mainly but not solely the upper classes as ‘guardians’ (Spear 1984: 3). Its presence is felt, however, in many different ways.13 First, Ruskin disliked unregulated supply and demand. He saw both its potential for violence and for maintaining inequalities through monopolization (though he did not use this term). If supply and demand is to be regulated, something or someone needs to be engaged in the regulation process, hence his phrase ‘government and co-operation in all things’. His images of government, developed especially in The Political Economy of Art, embody notions of wisdom, justice, fortitude (economic farsightedness) and temperance. These cardinal virtues are the attributes of the Guardians in the Republic. Ruskin adds to these St Paul’s Christian virtues of faith, hope and love: Ruskin’s writings on political economy have a utopian quality which made it easy for some to classify his work as ‘sentimental’. For Ruskin as for Plato, economics and ethics are bound together. Unto This Last is largely directed at consumers and whilst there are some passages which refer to rational collective action (e.g. in the control of rivers), it remains relatively silent on the economic role of government.14 Ruskin is just as concerned as Plato that government be wise and that it have the authority to enforce the general good: ‘the first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attain years of discretion. But in order to the effecting of this, the government must have an authority over the people of which we now do not so much as dream’ (SV, C&W, 11: 263). A second way in which the Guardians are present in Ruskin, and which informs all the other ways listed below, is through the articulation of a true, as opposed to a ‘vulgar’, political economy. Ruskin’s notion of ‘vulgar’ political economy is derived from J. S. Mill’s essay ‘On Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy’. Whilst it is generally taken to be the case that Ruskin included Mill in the category of vulgar political economy, he does not directly say so. True political economy is defined at the start of Munera Pulveris. It is realized through a mixture of theory and practice. Thus the good work undertaken by shipwrights, housewives and brick-layers can, by their professionalism located in techné, bring their actions to be that of true political economists. Vulgar political economy is, in contrast, ‘getting on’.15 These senses are developed separately below. But political economy itself (hence political economists), by focusing not on the market’s sense of value, which is, in Ruskin, trivial and essentially incomplete

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(Munera Pulveris), but on intrinsic and biological value, i.e. in what can be thought of as the (Platonic) essence of value, is expected to undertake the role of reasoned thought. To be a true political economy, the subject must be cleansed, in the manner of Plato’s early city, of the accidental historical elements associated with an existing, and complacent, understanding of market and its associated notions of greed. This requires both moral insight and the capacity to imagine alternative economic conditions in a world, not of scarcity, but of potential abundance. In essence, Ruskin can be read as arguing that the contemporary polis can only be reformed when the ideas that govern it are challenged. Though he locates some of the problems of capitalism with the exploitation made possible by monopsonistic purchasers of labour, Ruskin is not primarily a materialist for he participates in Plato’s acceptance of what Tarnas has referred to as ‘mind and soul over matter’ (Tarnas 1991: 44). Rather, political economy is to be imaginatively and cognitively constructed and based upon rounded human motivation rather than simply externally imposed by given historical circumstances, or, on what can be taken to be a Platonic mixture identified by Tarnas, upon ‘life, soul and understanding’ (Tarnas 1991: 12). And his question is not ‘how does the economy work’ but rather ‘what is its highest or ultimate good?’ In this teleological approach he is a confirmed Platonist. Political economy must be informed in a profound way by the essential biological basis of life itself. For example, Ruskin looks at his own society and understands that industrialization merely masks the extent to which economy is engaging with nature, as Greek thinkers understood it. It is, for him, only a matter of time before all share, as a result of the spread of pollution, such an understanding. Political economy must be life-availing for the intrinsic value of life, and its possibilities, shapes and informs the whole notion of value: ‘There is no wealth but life’.16 Market values fluctuate, are fallible, and illusory, based as they are on secondhand or uninformed (i.e. romantic) opinion. Even the distinction between intrinsic value and market value can be cast, therefore, and without too much violence, into the Platonic mould suggested by the argument about the Forms, derived from the metaphor of the cave in book 8 of the Republic: value as a ‘true’ object of knowledge, i.e. ‘what wealth everlastingly is’, is revealed, by implication, to political economy, or more correctly political economists, as a constant object of knowledge by intuition and insight into first principles (MP, C&W, 17: 132). These principles are based upon nature and a sense of aesthetics. Ruskin’s criticism of Mill is that he based the science of political economy on ‘the opinions of the public’ as expressed by market prices, i.e. on ‘fuddled’ thought induced by contemplating the shadow of value rather than thinking upon, by implication, a true (Platonic) object of cognition. There is more than a hint of Socrates’ use of ‘eikasia’, defined by Melling as

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‘illusion’, ‘conjecture’ or ‘fuddle’, in Ruskin’s portrayal of Mill’s thinking (Melling 1987: 106). In this sense, Ruskin’s notions of value and of nature (including the full possibilities of the human form as grasped by great artists) are to be considered as Ideal Forms. These forms can be grasped by educated and skilled economists and realized in practical economic life in ways better than those that are likely to be secured by unregulated markets.17 The insight on the nature of ‘true’ wealth has theoretical and practical implications. Ruskin’s notion of labour as the ‘contest of the life of man with an opposite’ and its development as ‘that quantity of our toil which we die in’ illustrates the biological basis. It leads to a manifestation of the reasoned nature of the guardianship of economics: ‘The object of Political Economy is not to buy, nor to sell labour but to spare it.’ The vision of people as wealth, in response to the bleached skeleton of ‘economic man’, is at its most developed in the complex rhetoric of ‘The Veins of Wealth’. The judicial role of political economy is identified, even more strongly, in Munera Pulveris: ‘the essential work of the political economist is to determine what are in reality useful or life-giving things, and by what degrees and kinds of labour they are attainable and distributable’ (MP, C&W, 17: 152).18 It is the role of political economy, then, to redirect attention back to the substance of value and away from its shadow. In this the argument is informed by Plato’s notions of reality. Towards the end of the first chapter of Munera Pulveris, Ruskin continues to develop, though he does not use the term, the ‘guardianship’ role of economists: e.g. on allocation, he argues that ‘The business of the economist is to show how this choice may be a Wise one’ and on the direction of labour he argues that ‘The business of the economist is to show how this direction may be a Just one’ (MP, C&W, 17: 162). Ethical economists are expected, in the manner of Plato’s philosopher-kings, to posses a capacity for Wisdom, Justice and Farsightedness. These attributes are not to be located within the imperfect market nor in any passive analysis of such a market but in the intellectual apparatus of the subject itself and in the professionalism (techné) of its practitioners. In short, human welfare rather than crude production, is to be the focus of a true political economy. Economic justice consists in working with the biological basis of economic life to ensure that all members of society have access to health and those things such as education, constructive leisure and fresh air which sustain it.19 Ruskin’s criticism of the lot of the labouring poor under unregulated capitalism is based upon Plato’s idea of justice and of ‘what is due’, i.e. upon his law of property as modified by his view in Laws: ‘Ideally, no one should touch my property or tamper with it, unless I have given him some sort of permission, and if I am sensible I will treat the property of others with the same respect’ (Laws, trans. Saunders, p. 449). In passages filled with biblical quotations concerning the relationship

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between rich and poor, Ruskin extends this rather unexceptional idea from the materialistic and external to the intrinsic and biological by treating the health of the poor as their essential property, fundamental to their role as brute labour. Again, the concern for ‘health’ over ‘wealth’ (or as Ruskin would have it ‘illth’, the natural opposite of wealth as produced by the unregulated market) reflects Plato’s views on the economy as set out in his framework for regulating the market in the Laws. In ruining health by underpayment and through employment within unsuitable conditions, capitalists seek to lay hands upon that which is not their property to abuse. ‘What is due’, in other words the balanced ideal of Platonic justice, is naturally determined (e.g. health, promoted by fresh air and clean water) for life is short and material needs, as Ruskin recognized after his crisis of faith, can only be satisfied in the material world. Thus, finding a solution to the problems of current poverty is both urgent and essential to any just society. Although the argument about intrinsic value can be cast in the Platonic mould, the content of the argument is pure Ruskin. If he were capable of realizing the full text of a ‘true’ political economy and of fullfilling his ‘Ruskin/St George’ mission, then Ruskin himself would have to be considered certainly as a knight champion and probably also as a Guardian. Third, the notion of guardianship and Xenophon’s notion of managerial leadership are melded together to domesticate the role of leader within the concept of the nation and of the industrial unit as a family. The actions of paternalists, modelled upon those of Xenophon’s military leaders, are rationally designed to guarantee the common good rather than simply preserve their own, over their workers’ interests, in times of economic difficulty. Rather than Platonic trustees, agents motivated by paternalism are Ruskin’s recommended agents for ensuring a just distribution of risks and rewards in a regulated and institutionalized economic life. And there is evidence that some business people, particularly those (few) who became members of the Guild of St George, adopted Ruskinian ideas, such as the successful William Smart who in 1896 became Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow.20 Ruskin seems to have accepted, however, that paternalists would operate within the idea of supply and demand in the longer-term. Both government and paternalists would act to secure a just pattern of risk and cost sharing and production in the short-run. If Plato’s Guardians are essentially an ‘update of the patriarchal tradition [of] the God-king lawgiver’ as Lowry suggests, then Ruskin in making his own modernization, may not have strayed too far from the spirit at least of Plato’s text (Lowry 1987: 108). Ruskin shared Plato’s paternalism and his sense of social hierarchy. He even secured a Guardianship role within his Guild of St George, but he does not share Plato’s relative disregard for the artisan class.21 Given that Ruskin’s sense of justice was one that was both biological and aesthetic – the standard of justice was set

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by the noble possibilities of the human form itself, then the degradation of the labourer is just that. It was brought about by working conditions, poor education and undernourishment which denied to many the right to a healthy form. Ruskin’s paternalists, though expected to amend their behaviour, are not, however, expected to adopt in detail the life-style of Plato’s Guardians.22 Lastly, economic agents, particularly middle-class (women) consumers, need to act with wisdom and knowledge, particularly when it comes to the allocation of expenditure and allow the head, Plato’s captain of the body, to regulate the romantic expenditures of the heart.23 The notion of ‘romantic expenditures’ carries a hint of the ‘inflamed desires’ of Plato’s corrupt city. Luxury, particularly that of the indulgence of fashionable dress, since it exists in the midst of poverty, is to be avoided.24 Self-discipline and conformity to ‘the law of the house’ (a reference to Xenophon), i.e. stewardship rather than a blind acceptance of the market’s sense of value, is essential to Ruskin’s notion of individualism.25 Any notion of mechanistic and selfish demand is hence replaced by a reasoned and social one. The ethics are consequentialist. Ruskin stresses reasoned consumption as a principle means of redressing the imbalances in imperfect markets. Labouring people participated in the economy primarily as producers, and are depicted in Unto This Last as being hidden away in unloved and unlovely back streets, experiencing high social costs (mainly ill-health) as a result. Middle- and upperclass people participated as both producers and consumers and Ruskin’s conception seems to have been (given distortions brought about by monopoly, the existence of economic rent and of inherited wealth) rather more as consumers than as producers. In their quantitatively significant consumption decisions they are to demonstrate concern for the quality of environment they are commanding for the poor. Once again, the influence is both Platonic and Christian in the sense that it is the unseen labourer who is the ‘neighbour’.26 In seeing the consumer as an active agent in economic life, capable of commanding labour through the demand for goods, Ruskin is challenging, in an innovative way, a tendency, found in Ricardo and in Mill, sustained by the iron law of wages and the wages-fund doctrine, to reduce the consumer to a passive role (Bowman 1951: 11). Producers, especially those whose actions are informed by a proper professional ethic and paternalism, are expected to change conditions in the workplace. With respect to the notion of self-rule, Ruskin’s ideal also shares something of Plato’s ethical individualism. Now, under normal circumstances, the market is expected to economize on information. The consumer only needs to know the price and hence to make decisions based upon relative scarcity. If markets are imperfect, this can be a social trap: cheapness, according to Ruskin, can be bought at too high a price.27 In accordance with the Platonic insight that with the just person, reason is supreme, Ruskin’s consumers are expected to know

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the conditions under which goods are produced and the social benefits and costs which are associated with particular expenditures or patterns of expenditure. Given such knowledge, they are expected to act deliberately and reasonably, rather than accidentally through what we would call the ‘trickle-down effect’, to promote social good. Ignorance, in his conceptualization of economic processes, would not lead to any accidental benefit to the poor. Ruskin kept his strongest ridicule for the ‘trickle-down argument’ which he laughed out of court. Every wealthy consumer is expected to be his or her own guardian rather than a mere utilitarian hedonist. This concept has shown, in recent times, its practical significance. It has informed, for example, the trading activities of non-governmental aid organizations such as Oxfam and Tradecraft. Ruskin’s list of questions to be asked of any purchase has been shown to be, given the proper institutional contexts, constructive and practical rather than utopian. His discussion continues, unwittingly, to inform radical consumer issues, e.g. in questions about the consumption of commodities produced by employing child-labour (say) in Pakistan or North Africa or in the activities of those campaigning for humane farming and of those more widely involved in consumer education. Wittingly or unwittingly, ideas similar to those developed in Ruskin’s writings can be found in other, related, forms, in literature on poverty. Thus Arrow (a leading economic theorist but not a structuralist) in 1974 referred to a variety of associations and institutions, as well as economists, as ‘guardians of rationality’ and Meier, in a work devoted to the problem of poverty in the Third World talks of voluntary associations as ‘trustees of the poor’ (Streeten 1994: 107).28 If reading from Plato to Ruskin highlights the innovative nature of Ruskin’s way of thinking about economics and poverty, reading forward to structuralist ideas of the second half of the twentieth century shows that similar concerns, on a vaster scale, have led to similarities in the arguments used and values stressed. Some of the institutions which have been the means of applying the values were not ones which Ruskin was capable of foreseeing, though his Guild of St George, his emphasis on household values as a way of influencing national values, and his appreciation of institutional arrangements for the payment of labour within churches and the armed forces, suggest that institutional ideas were integral to his critique of the market. Plato, Ruskin and political economy Plato’s investigation of justice is based upon the significant insight that in transforming nature’s resources into the things that people need, specialization and co-operation are essential. Such co-operation, however, can be damaged by

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injustice (ordinary injustice in the sense of wanting and having what is not clue) and the existence of extremes of wealth and poverty. To promote the co-operation, essential for the harmony which is capable of giving rise to justice, Plato constructs an ideal state in which the happiness of the state is made up of the happiness of all its citizens, rather than the happiness of a single class. His state is ordered and maintained by rational administrative action, backed if necessary by force, to ensure that each does what can be done best, and nothing other, by the natural talents available. In turn, the state ensures that each gets, within the defined context, that which is their due. Ruskin’s notion of a just order of society, in all of its economic aspects, is one in which the interests of the rich are not allowed to swallow up the interest of the poor. In his search for a theory of society which can actually be applied, Ruskin rejects the self-interest model as one which is inapplicable, socially divisive and morally inadequate. Like Adam Smith, Ruskin is interested in the problem of social harmony but finds both practical and theoretical arguments for under- and inappropriate production, market failure and disharmony. He develops a theory based upon ‘soul’ and draws upon Platonic arguments and images to make his case for the centrality of justice to notions of economic well-being. His sense of harmony is informed by influences other than Plato: such as the unity of composition in painting designed to achieve the single aim of the work. But by reading Ruskin through a reading of Plato, the reasoned and orderly basis of his energetic prose becomes clearer. His attempts to create an ethical economics, both as a set of theories and a set of practices are, like Plato’s justice, utopian. But the problem that he posed is much more than a destructive attack on the principles of laissez-faire which is normally taken to be the case. His theories have practical policy and behavioural implications. The biological basis for value, essential to his sense of the urgency of poverty alleviation, the notion of reason guiding self-interest, the sense of market failures, the idea of unequal exchange conditions, the painfully slow nature of ‘trickledown effects’ and the need for regulation, government and co-operation suggest parallels with what today would be called a structuralist approach to economic development, and this despite the fact that his approach is not essentially materialistic but moral. The structuralist approach, which has been replaced, only recently, by the notion of market efficiency as the major post-World War Two paradigm of economic development, was to marginalize the market and put considerable emphasis on co-ordinated administrative action, because of market failures and externalities, as the means of promoting an acceptable pattern of economic growth. Ruskin saw the possibility, realized in many of today’s least developed countries, of the interests of a few monopolists permanently blocking the hopes and aspirations of a mass of poor people. Harmonization through the market could

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not bring such a society to social harmony and economic justice. If Plato is, in Lowry’s words, the ‘theologian of the administrative tradition’, Ruskin can be seen, as Smart perceptively suggests, as a modernizer of that tradition. There is, however, enough of Ruskin in his writing to ensure that Smart’s argument that Ruskin took over Plato’s ideas in toto does not apply. Rather than simply looking back to Plato or even adjusting Plato to the contemporary world, Ruskin’s complex political economy is, in some ways, looking forward to a new type of economic analysis which was to grow out of a concern for worldwide poverty. This problem first came to the attention of economists in the 1930s, though it was not until twenty or so years later that a well-developed economic analysis of the economies of poor countries came into being. This interpretation, assisted by looking at Ruskin through Plato, has located the constructive element of Ruskin’s thought not in Time and Tide and Fors Clavigera where it is has been conventionally identified, save by Hobson, but also in the text of his three earlier and more theoretical works.29 Ruskin, then, although drawing upon significant Greek sources, may be considered to have developed ideas similar to that of the ‘structuralist’ economic argument which was not fully developed until approximately one hundred years after Ruskin’s first publication of Unto This Last.

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After a general discussion which establishes and challenges prevailing notions of the rhetorical relationship between Ruskin and Mill, this chapter examines the marginal comments made by Ruskin in his second edition copy (1849) of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy for clues concerning the nature of Ruskin’s reading of Mill.1 It suggests that, whilst the details of Ruskin’s reading of Mill are a lost historical event, by using the marginalia in conjunction with the text of Mill’s Principles and the text of Ruskin’s Unto This Last, it is possible to arrive at an understanding of Ruskin’s reading that is richer than interpretations made hitherto. Comments are then made on the relationship between Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Mill’s Principles. All page numbers refer to Ruskin’s annotated copy held in the British Library. First evaluations of Ruskin’s rhetoric and that of Mill It is generally supposed, even by those such as William Smart who appreciated him, that Ruskin made only a superficial reading of Mill (Smart 1883: 4). Ruskin himself, perhaps unwittingly, seems to have contributed to this idea by stating, in A Joy for Ever, that he had never made a ‘profound’ study of political economy, other than reading Adam Smith ‘some twenty years ago’ (JFE, C&W, 16: 9–10). Ruskin had to defend himself by adding, in an ironic comment to his readers concerning his critics: ‘Did they suppose I got my knowledge of art by reading books?’ (TP, C&W, 16: 406). Ruskin did read books, as the marginalia to be considered here and the contents of his library, testify. He also had a strong preference for ancient texts and, since he made a study of Plato’s writings, at least from 1843 onwards, Ruskin could be indirectly referring to a passage in Phaedrus (274b–277a). There, Socrates outlines his case that books are a means of creating compliance rather than knowledge. Long before 1860, Ruskin was sceptical about the usefulness of existing works on the subject. If he did not think a ‘profound’ study of an unsatisfactory literature on political economy was essential, he felt, nevertheless, that in such a significant

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area an ‘accurate study . . . is necessary for us all’ (JFE, C&W, 16: 9–10). By accurate he seems to have implied a study based upon careful observation of socio-economic conditions and values as well as reading relevant literature. Observation and experience were fundamental to Ruskin’s self-education in art criticism. He extended this approach to a study of economics, a study which was equal, in his eyes, to a study of society as a whole (see Chapter 5). His critics claimed that Ruskin wrote political economy as if he were studying art history. Scientific detachment was the acceptable model for analysis rather than the subjectivities of art criticism. However, when Ruskin makes comments in his writing it is as well to keep in mind, before making any simplistic interpretation, that Ruskin’s texts are normally rhetorically complex. Ruskin’s work was usually informed by Greek models and such sources influenced both the form as well as the content of Ruskin’s writing. Taken in by the brilliance of Ruskin’s word pictures, readers can easily miss Ruskin’s irony or overlook the Socratic and Platonic elements of Ruskin’s discourse, both with respect to the style in which the ideas are developed and presented and in the argumentative forms used.2 Although he does not explicitly use the term ‘Socratic’, Fain, for example, argues that Ruskin’s claim of ignorance ‘is only a link in a typically ironic argument’ and is well aware of the links between Ruskin and Plato (Fain 1956: 18–20). The reductio ad absurdum is to be found in the opening pages of Unto This Last (Fain 1956; Spear 1984: 139). It is as well to remember, also, that Ruskin’s concern for political economy grew out of his studies in art, and more especially, of architecture, and that even before his explicit attempts at writing political economy, he was critical of, for example, the social consequences of the division of labour. His comments in The Stones of Venice and, later, in The Political Economy of Art, are in content, though not in expression, reminiscent of Adam Smith, save that Ruskin held that it was not labour which was divided but men (Henderson 1995: 119). Like Smith’s approach to the division of labour, it was observation that led to Ruskin’s understanding rather than the reading of books. Ruskin’s style and Mill’s style are effectively polar opposites, informed by fundamentally different types of rhetorical strategy. Mill is generally praised, both by his contemporaries and by later generations, for the clarity and transparency of his writing, for its measured pace, logical and scientific intent and emotional control. Mill’s ‘reasonable’ tone and professional skill in ‘summary’ and his clear sense of authority, in effect, set the standard for economics writing, more or less for the rest of the century (Williams 1960: 49; Blaug 1986: 101). Mill’s text has tended to remain privileged because of the association in the history of economic thought, noted by Rothbard, between clear style and estimates of quality of mind (Rothbard 1995: 277). It is only comparatively recently that ‘transparency’ as an

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aspect of successful writing has been challenged in the world beyond economics. In terms of an appreciation of style, some Victorian critics have viewed writings such as Unto This Last, as the highest form of English prose. Certainly Ruskin was himself pleased with the quality of his writing in that work and was baffled, angered even, by the fact that he was recommended for his style and not for his content. Others, such as a the anonymous critic in MacMillan’s Magazine, described Unto This Last as the product of the ‘Magic Lanthorn School’ of writing, an overblown set of word-pictures suitable for children but unacceptable, amongst adults, as a basis for rational discussion. Mill is, in this account, the approved model for scientific writing. In one of his letters, Ruskin illustrates that he attempted, by way of response to his critics, to explore the literary implications of ‘Millesque’ by re-writing Hamlet’s soliloquy which begins ‘To be or not to be’. He shows how quickly he became dissatisfied with the emotional sterility of the approach. Ruskin’s writing is undoubtedly a poetic contrast to what he would have seen as a dangerous scientific rhetoric. It is also generally supposed that Ruskin, in moving from reading to writing, was ‘unfair’ to John Stuart Mill (Hark 1986–7: 22). Note that this privileges Mill’s work. That their rhetorical purposes were essentially different has already been hinted at, though it is usually Ruskin who, when any comparison is made by their contemporaries, comes away wounded. Mill is, even today, set on a pedestal as a significant figure in the (eroding) ‘Great men’ tradition of the history of economic thought. However, in preparing Unto This Last, Ruskin did read John Stuart Mill. The fact of a reading is nowhere in dispute, though the nature of the reading is. Two texts make the fact of a reading apparent. The text of Unto This Last makes a number of direct references to Mill’s Principles of Political Economy. The references are clearly not the result of some second-hand reading but of a direct exploration of Mill’s ideas. A second source is the marginalia in Ruskin’s annotated, two-volume, second edition copy, now in the British Library, of Mill’s Principles.3 Neither of these sources is new but, if a richer understanding of Ruskin’s reading of Mill is to become available, both ought to be read together. A reading of the marginalia can assist in the development of a clearer understanding of Ruskin’s economics project.4 It is the case that Ruskin treats Mill with a certain amount of irony and, perhaps, disdain, in Unto This Last. This is opposed to the intense respect with which Mill was treated by others. Ruskin, both in the text of Unto This Last and in other ways, may be responsible for the notion that Mill was unfairly treated. Jones argues that Unto This Last is a watershed and that comments on Mill found in that, and later works, are highly scornful (Jones 1972: 2). Even late in his life, Ruskin insisted that Mill betrayed himself in taking part in the writing of political economy. At the end of a rigorous and interestingly written appreciation of Ruskin

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as a ‘disciple of Plato’, by the man who was to become, thirteen years later, first Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at Glasgow, William Smart, Ruskin adds: I would like to add that, while I admit there is such a thing as mercantile economy, distinguished from social, I have always said also that neither Mill, Fawcett, nor Bastiat knew the contemptible science they professed to teach.

(Ruskin in Smart 1883: 48) One possible frame for this enigmatic passage, is Ruskin’s notion of historical experience. Ruskin, particularly in his maturer years, had gradually become engaged in dialogue and action on behalf of sections of the labouring poor. Even in Unto This Last, images of death and decay in forgotten back streets are presented to the reader as part of the consideration of unregulated capitalist economics and of ill-distributed, and ill-gotten, national wealth. Mill, according to Ruskin, was simply ignorant of the implications of that which he wrote. Ruskin tended to put personal experience, in his writings on political economy, above any notion of system. Ruskin was not alone in his feeling that a dissonance existed between Mill’s Principles and other aspects of Mill’s life and works. The comic poem by Clerihew: ‘John Stuart Mill, by an effort of will, overcame his natural bonhomie, and wrote Principles of Political Economy’ carries something of Ruskin’s idea. For much of his life, of course, Ruskin lived with the knowledge that most of his reader’s thought that he had misunderstood the nature of political economy. Ruskin’s writings on political economy are shot through with an emotional reaction to poverty and its implications and with the sense that existing political economy is inapplicable to existing social problems. Here then is the essence of Ruskin’s approach to the text of Unto This Last and it is rhetorically similar to his writings on art history: observe the world directly, accurately record and react to what you observe, write to recreate that response in others (Smith 1994: 162–3). The contrast is between a scientific detachment on the one hand, which may lead to a system of analysis but which may also lead to social complacency, and, on the other, detailed observation informed by Baconian principles as these were understood in mid-Victorian intellectual society, leading to involvement, action and change. It was Ruskin’s judgement that the notions of laissez-faire, served up with the strength of economic laws, had in fact lead to social complacency and social coldness. Two sets of issues, then, are likely to be relevant: the problematic relationship between abstract theory and social and practical experience based upon observation and reflection – a fault line which, according to Bagehot, runs through

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mid-Victorian economics – and the appropriateness or otherwise of a technical or of an emotional response to key issues in society (Bagehot 1885: 10). There is bound to be, at the heart of any discussion of the relationship between Mill’s writing and Ruskin’s, a need for a more profound discussion about the nature of social knowledge. Description of the marginalia This section will explore two questions: What is the nature of the marginalia? Do they tell anything of Ruskin’s approach to reading Mill? The context is the notion that a deep, as opposed to a superficial, reading involves the reader in an act or acts of textual processing in which the text and the reader’s interest meld to create meaning. Some theory of reading, such as hermeneutics, in which the reading of economics is seen as an interactive and interpretative process, as suggested by McCloskey, is required (McCloskey 1994). Naturally, significant details of Ruskin’s reading are lost historical events. Nonetheless, given Ruskin’s concern for an ‘accurate’ reading, the marginalia may suggest something about Ruskin’s approach to Mill and so help recover at least some aspects of that lost reading. The marginal comments come, as might be expected, in a variety of types: sentences or sentence-like comments, phrases, single words, textual underlining of phrases, isolating sentences or subordinate clauses by ‘circling’, a hierarchy of vertical marginal lines, in which intensity is indicated by the number of lines, and a numbering system of limited application but of some significance. The location of the vertical lines is generally in the left-hand margin of an evennumbered page or the left- or right-hand margin of an odd-numbered page.5 Written comments appear in all the marginal spaces though there is a pattern (see p. 114). In short, they are the sort of defacement commonly found in texts in any university library. It could be argued that the verbal comments are the most interesting, largely because they allow easier access to interpretation. These are either sentence or sentence-like comments usually on the top margin or, sometimes, along the bottom margin of a page, or words or phrases found on the left-hand margin of an evennumbered page or in the right-hand margin of an odd-numbered page. However, there are some examples of complex marking and comment, such as the mixture of comment and lines on page 2 in the ‘Preliminary Remarks’ section and on page 161 in the chapter on ‘Production on a Large and on a Small Scale’, which are interesting from the point of view of text-processing, for they show that Ruskin was engaged in complex interaction with the text. On page two, Ruskin marks a 1 against the sentence ‘Every one has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth’. This is

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directly incorporated into the text of Unto This Last and subjected to a process of what may be taken, for the present, as ridicule. Elements of the paragraph which follows are linked together by a series of simple but ‘joined’ underlinings. Mill is stating that the questions of how a nation is made wealthy or ‘free, or virtuous or eminent in literature’ are ‘totally distinct’. The textual links drawn by Ruskin conclude with the circled statement ‘The creed and laws of a people act powerfully upon their economical condition’. In the margin Ruskin writes ‘show contradiction and compare with page 25’. On page 25, ‘moral and psychological’ is underlined and enclosed in a square bracket set out horizontally. The context is a discussion about factors influencing human motivation. The phrase is incorporated into Unto This Last where an extensive analysis of economic motivation is made.6 The comment in the margin is ‘copm. page 2’. The full comment on page two could only have been written after page 25 had also been read. Ruskin, in Unto This Last, concentrates on exposing the inconsistencies, such exposure being essential to the admission of his own argument. In this, Ruskin has usually been accused of nit-picking. Modern-day criticisms of Mill make much of his inconsistencies (Rothbard 1995: 277). In Chapter X, ‘Production on a Large and a Small Scale’, Ruskin signals his agreement with Mill’s analysis of patterns of costs associated with a single Post Office service thus: ‘Quite right: arg in favour of centralization under Government, and against competition’. Mill then questions whether or not the advantages can be realized in fact by developing an argument which suggests the possibility of managerial dis-economies of scale. The comments and visuals on page 161 indicate, even if we cannot be entirely certain of the precise implications of the markings, that Ruskin is using a simple form of linguistic analysis (he looks at the subordinate clause, bracketed and marked by the number ‘3’, and its ‘induction words’) and notion of text structure (signalled by a number system) to arrive at his judgement that the next passage is ‘entirely confused’ (p. 161 top margin). The final sentence in the passage is marked by a single square bracket and the number four. Against a number ‘4’ in the lower margin is written: ‘Refer to under head of Throwing out of employment’. These two examples are the most complex and extensive of the instances, but other marginal comments, though less complex, illustrate textual processing of a similar nature. They suggest that Ruskin’s approach to the text was analytical in the sense that he uses both language and content to detect what he takes to be inconsistencies. They also reinforce the notion, established in the literature, that Ruskin enjoyed detecting confusion and inconsistency in systematic works. Ruskin’s use of the marginalia

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There is no doubt that, given the extent of Mill’s text, the quantity of Ruskin’s marginal notes is comparatively small. They are quantitatively and qualitatively more significant in volume one that they are in volume two. Nor are they necessarily directly incorporated into Ruskin’s subsequent writing in a manner predicted by the uses suggested in the margin. This (relative) paucity and distribution may account for the fact that I can find no systematic analysis of them in the existing literature: at first glance they do not seem to deserve comment other than that of superficiality.7 The comparative fewness of the marginal notes may have been taken by some commentators to support the notion that Ruskin only read Mill on a very highly selective basis. At least three points are worthy of consideration. First, quantity of notes is not necessarily directly related to the quality of a reading experience. Textual understanding or the generation of meaning is not usually achieved by textual reproduction (except in very special circumstances such as trying to understand an author’s style). Second, if the size of Mill’s Principles is relevant with respect to making a judgement on Ruskin’s reading, the length and content of the much smaller Unto This Last must also be considered. That which Ruskin marked, whilst relatively insignificant in relation to Mill’s text as a whole, is relatively signifcant in terms of the realization of Unto This Last. Finally, Ruskin may have read widely in the Principles and either commented sparingly on the text of the book or kept notes elsewhere. Isolated marginal marks found in volume two amidst a huge number of uncommented pages could suggest a less intense reading or less suggestive reading. Even if the evidence of comparative paucity is admitted, and I am inclined to admit it mainly because, in addition, the volumes show little indication of having been well-thumbed, a selective reading of Mill is not the same as a superficial reading of Mill. Ruskin’s intention in reading Mill could not have been to reproduce Mill’s ideas, say, in a more popular form: he would have seen little point in propagating a literature that he thought essentially mistaken. Recall that Ruskin had earlier stated a concern for an ‘accurate’ reading rather than a ‘profound’ reading and also that Ruskin was used to reading difficult texts, such as Xenophon and Plato. Furthermore, though the comments and markings are comparatively few, what is surprising, given the judgements made on Ruskin’s reading, is not so much the quantity but the style and content of his response to his readings of Mill. ‘Readings’, because it is clear that he did not read it all at once: there are comments in ink in volume one and in pencil and ink in volume two. For the comments in ink it can be supposed, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, that he was seated formally, perhaps at his desk with easy access to an ink-well, when he undertook the reading. Marginal comments, such as those on page 25 (‘good stop here’ at the end of the second paragraph, accompanied by a very short horizontal line),

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indicate that he broke off his reading at a point that he enjoyed. Evidence that he intended to re-read is found, for example, on page 7 at lines 33–35 where the text is dealing with a country with, and a country without, money, and where Ruskin has written ‘examine’ or on page 39 where, after an expression of scepticism about ideas in the top half of the page, is found ‘Examine it at leisure’. That he read forwards and backwards in the text for evidence of consistency and inconsistency is also to be found, for example, on pages 2, 76 and 92, and elsewhere. Here, the marginalia suggest that passages are being re-read as a result of such forward and backward movement in a text usually held to be essential to the development of an informed reading. On the top margin of page 89 (the opening page of Chapter XIV, ‘Of Excess Supply’), Ruskin writes ‘An admirable chapter in general aim overthrowing Sismondi’s momentous idea’. This is written after he reads the chapter, whereas the marginal comments in the chapter itself seem to have been written as he reads. This was, then, neither a rapid nor a straightthrough nor even an unappreciative reading. Ruskin, according to the evidence of the marginalia, is reading with a clear purpose in mind – that of finding material with which to support and sustain his writing. This is in evidence in a number of ways, e.g. in the various types of response that Ruskin makes to Mill. Thus, on page 7, and against the opening of the following passage from Mill, Ruskin adds ‘quote’: It often happens that the universal belief of one age of mankind – a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage, could at that time be free – becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible. It has so happened with the doctrine that money is synonymous with wealth.

Ruskin does not in fact quote this in Unto This Last, but he makes use of it indirectly when setting out his views on money and on wealth. Ironically, with respect to the notion of an unregulated supply and demand and the nature of economic laws, at least in as far as these notions were popularly understood, Ruskin could claim to be in the position of making the effort of genius as described by Mill. Ruskin, according to Spear, developed, from a very early age, a selfimage in which he was a knight errant contesting false ideas and doctrines in the world. This self-image was to be finally realized in the Guild of St George, formed by Ruskin to re-establish the productive links between men and nature, snapped by industrial change (Spear 1984: 128). Such a passage would be, for Ruskin, very suggestive. In trying to challenge laissez-faire as an uncontested economic principle for the economic organization of society, Ruskin, though not alone in

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making such a challenge, seems to have approached it with the zeal of someone contesting such a universal belief. There is further evidence that Ruskin enjoyed his reading of Mill and that at many points in the text he appreciates the quality of both expression and content. Comments such as ‘quote’ usually a positive evaluation (for examples, see below), ‘good’ (pages 8-9), ‘excellent’ (page 9) and ‘admirable’ (page 20) ‘capital’ (implying ‘good’ on page 23) and ‘this is valuable’ (passage on page 105) are all found. Ruskin’s marginalia are, as will be shown, the product of an interested, analytical and reactive reading which could not be described, on this evidence, as unfair. Even when critical of the text, there is ample evidence that the criticism is based upon some form of textual analysis. A (sole) rude and unexplained comment, though suggestive of Ruskin pursuing the text for stimulating ideas, is ‘Bosh’ and ‘no use’ found at page 33. Significant evaluations are found with respect to Mill’s account of the rise of modern economic life. At page 18 Ruskin writes ‘excellent account of rise of modern prosperity’ and, in general, this section of Mill’s ‘Preliminary Remarks’ seems to have stimulated a number of ideas, including reflections on landed property, luxury and the relationship between rich and poor. On page 20 he writes ‘admirable – quote’ against the following passage from Mill: It is unnecessary to dwell on the melancholy economical history of the Roman Empire. When inequality of wealth once commences in a community not constantly engaged in repairing by industry the injuries of fortune, its advances are gigantic: the great masses of wealth swallow up the small.

Ruskin, again, does not seem to have quoted this passage, though it and the sentences which follow, which contrast the luxury and ostentation of the rich with the impoverishment of the rest of the population, predict something of Ruskin’s approach in Unto This Last. His interest in classical ideas and events, evidenced in all of his writings, no doubt drew this section to his attention and helped him transform its significance. There can be little doubt, however, that he made admirable use of it. One of Ruskin’s concerns in Unto This Last is the nature of inequalities justly and unjustly arrived at. Ruskin was hugely concerned at the prospect of capitalists swallowing up the independent small-scale artisans and labouring men by beating down the level of wages. Whether or not he held this view before or after reading Mill cannot be determined from the marginalia alone. Even if the language is not directly equivalent to Mill’s, his notion of ‘the great masses of wealth’ swallowing up ‘the small’ is enshrined in numerous passages in Unto This Last. It is given at least two distinct expressions.8 First, in the purely economic

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context of the labour market, Ruskin envisages that large-scale employers of labour will drive down the price of labour by exploiting their monopsonistic power (UTL, C&W, 17: 73). Ruskin does not, of course, use the term ‘monopsony’ but his analysis can be readily interpreted within such a model. The second, and related aspect, is an ethical one. Ruskin sees existing society, constructed on unregulated notions of supply and demand as inevitably leading to the moral vice identified by the Greeks as pleonexia. This is a condition of taking and of desiring more than one has a right to, i.e. greed. It is, in many ways, central to Ruskin’s conception of the working of unregulated supply and demand. Ruskin portrays this condition, using biblical references and emotive descriptions of the physical condition of poor people, as the actions of robbing the poor of what is theirs, i.e. their health and the ‘just’ returns for their labour. But it is at the top of page 21, where Mill is still dealing with the rise of modern prosperity, that Ruskin’s response to Mill is truly remarkable for the production of Unto This Last. Ruskin writes: ‘Show how it all depends on Peace and Justice opposed to Roman War and Oriental Robbery’. This is quite simply a fascinating response: the verb implies action by Ruskin rather than a summarization of what Mill is taken to have written. Can it be supposed that Ruskin’s images of ‘Byzantine gold in the eyes of the barbarians’ has its origins in a textual comment on a reading of Mill? If this were the case then the relationship between Unto This Last and Mill’s Principles is much more complex than has hitherto been suspected. Another idea, that of life and death, and of the capacity of economic activity to sustain life, a notion which was to become central to Ruskin’s understanding of wealth and of value, appears, (though not for the first time, for his earlier work in art history carried the germ of this idea) as a simple marginal comment on a passage of Mill’s dealing with sustaining the health and strength of the workforce. At lines 14–16 and 17–23 on page 64, Ruskin has re-labelled Mill’s ideas as ‘Life’ and ‘Not Life’. How Ruskin comes to settle on his notion of ‘life’ is complex but part of his growing understanding of the immediacy of life (in the same sense as is found in Keynes’s notion that we are all dead in the long-run) may also have been a reaction to Mill’s insistence of ‘futurity’ of actions.9 At the start of Chapter XI (’Of the Law of Increase of Capital’) Ruskin scrawls ‘regard to futurity; the great [thing?] in his mind not the wise and unwise expenditure’.10 This is of course, in its textual realization, a passage identified as highly significant by Hobson. Tracing the significance of this comment in Ruskin’s writing is not easy. For example, in a considerable hyperbole, Ruskin declares that political economy is not a science ‘because, namely, it has omitted the study of exactly the most important branch of the business – the study of spending’ (CWO, C&W, 18: 451– 2). Second, in Unto This Last, he argues for a notion and analysis of capital which

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is subservient to consumption, fearful of capital being allocated an independent function and hence giving rise to ‘ploughshares’ but never to ‘bread’. ‘Ad Valorem’, which also contains an attack on what Ruskin refers to as Mill’s ‘hardware theory’, probably draws more from this simple distinction between present and future, made as a direct response to Mill’s Principles, than has hitherto been realized.11 In the brief statement which follows the sentence on futurity, the first word is difficult to read but the context suggests ‘no’ to give ‘no expenditure at all’. Ruskin was to see a powerful role for considered expenditure, on the part of ethically motivated economic agents, as one way of eliminating poverty. In stressing ‘life’ and the quality of life in Unto This Last, Ruskin shows how keenly he feels the fact that any individual only gets one chance. This sense of the urgency that is required for dealing with poverty could have been re-enforced by a consideration of Mill’s subsequent passage, in the same chapter, on the analogy between capital growth and population growth, marked by Ruskin with four vertical lines of diminishing length as they move out from the text, in which Mill states: ‘Every individual who is born, dies, but in each year the number born exceeds the number who die: the population, therefore, always increases, although not one person of those composing it was alive until a very recent date’. Ruskin was highly suspicious of capital which yielded only capital and never ‘bread’, so the textual manifestation of his criticism of Mill’s concern for ‘futurity’ is likely to be complex.12 ‘Peace’ in Ruskin takes on complex ideas about the nature of the ‘consumption’ of military goods and justice is almost the central theme, if it is possible to summarize in one word a complex set of ideas, of the whole of Unto This Last. Ruskin’s notion of justice is complex and though illustrated, remains essentially undefined. His developing ideas on the subject were stimulated by sources such as the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, by Plato and Xenophon as well as Latin sources. To see it as also a response to a reading of Mill’s Principles suggests that Ruskin pursued a creative reading of Mill and that his responses were a mixture of positive and negative. It also suggests that the hermeneutical insight that meaning is located between a text and a reader rather than between a writer and a text, is particularly useful in making an evaluation of the notion of Ruskin making a ‘superficial’ reading of Mill. Where Mill is dealing with the condition of the labouring poor, particularly with the question of provident and improvident behaviour and the growth of population, as in Chapters XII and XIII, Ruskin’s comments link, yet again, the text of Mill’s Principles with that of Unto This Last. Ruskin indicates that he engaged in backward and forward referencing between Chapter XII para. 4, and ideas developed by Mill on pages 448 and 449. In the top margin of the earlier

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reference Ruskin writes ‘Drunkenness’ and then ‘show that education will, nothing else but [suppress?]’.13 Mill’s sentence below, marked by underlining from ‘sometimes’ to the end, and by a cross in the margin, is ‘the possession of land, we are sometimes told, renders the labourer provident’. At the top margin of page 449, where Mill begins his interpretation of the ‘population problem’, Ruskin writes ‘He has only 3 plans. Diminish Population Colonization and Waste land’. (The elements are set out as a list at the top margin.) Malthusian ideas are reviewed by Ruskin and the categories listed in the marginalia incorporated into the text. Ruskin takes a dim view of Malthusian notions of unemployment, talking, in Unto This Last, of ‘a degree of population locally unmanageable under existing circumstances for want of forethought’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 73). Ruskin sees education as a means of amending the behaviour of the poor and this is realized, with great irony, in the text of Unto This Last. What Ruskin does is to challenge Mill’s notion, developed by Mill in language which according to Gray, ‘quivers with a righteous indignation’, that the poor are responsible for their own progressive demoralization (quoted in Rothbard 1995: 283).14 In a highly charged, rhetorically complex and ironic passage, Ruskin domesticates the issue in terms of father– son relations: ‘Who gave your son these dispositions?’ – I should enquire. Has he had them by inheritance or by education? By one or the other they must surely come; and as in him so also in the poor. Either these poor are of a race essentially different from ours, and, unredeemable (which, however often implied, I have heard yet none openly say), or else by such care as we have ourselves received, we may make them continent and sober as ourselves – wise and dispassionate as we are – models arduous of imitation.

(UTL, C&W, 17: 106)15 The link between Mill’s text, Ruskin’s marginal response and the intellectual content, though not, of course, the rhetorical intent of the subsequent writing, is a direct one. Ruskin’s approach to the interrogation of the formal proposition, and to Mill’s prejudicial judgement on drunkenness, is both social and realistic. Ruskin sees education as essential to raising the skills and expectations of poor people and so as having a major part to play in the transformation of their behaviour. However, Ruskin’s marginal comments can lead to a more fundamental challenge. Take the passage which is marked on page 7 of ‘Preliminary Remarks’ in which Mill states: ‘The difference between a country with money, and a country altogether without it, would be only one of convenience, a saving of time and trouble, like grinding by water instead of by hand’. Ruskin makes a single comment

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in the margin: ‘examine’! There is no evidence in the marginalia as to how the examination is to be conducted. But there can be little doubt that Ruskin did examine, in fact, the idea very closely. In Unto This Last, he develops the notion of money as a deferred legal claim on production and hence on labour. Rather than accepting money as mere veil, Ruskin, in a parable of two castaways, shows that legal claims in his sense can result in a situation in which the national product is less than it might otherwise have been and its distribution unjust (UTL, C&W, 17: 49-51). In other words, money can have a direct influence on the ‘real’ aspects of the economy. But, if ‘quote’ did not give rise to an actual quotation, the number 2 on page 2 placed beside the following sentence, found a very clearly signalled incorporation into Unto This Last: ‘It is no part of the design of this treatise to aim at a metaphysical nicety of definition, where the ideas suggested by a term are already as determinate as practical purposes require’. There is no other comment though this became the basis of a withering attack by Ruskin, in the preface to Unto This Last, on Mill’s project. What it suggested to Ruskin whilst he read is not recorded in the margin. The available evidence, however flawed, suggests a respectful approach to the reading of Mill’s Principles and supports Fain’s notion that, in private, Ruskin held a higher regard for Mill than he did in public (Fain 1951: 151–2). Ruskin’s reading is compatible with the notion that Mill’s Principles, as Ruskin elsewhere stated, is a serious work. There is little in the marginalia that can be taken to confirm the idea that Ruskin merely read Mill’s Principles to confirm his preconceptions. From reading to writing As it is not in his reading, then perhaps it is in his writing that Ruskin may have been ‘unfair’. Inge puts the general problem nicely: It is strange that a man who in private life was conspicuous for his gentle and private courtesy should, when he got a pen in his hand, have begun to storm and rail like a major prophet. It was a kind of literary intoxication; his pen always ran away with him when he became excited. But his political economy is not so absurd as the Victorians with one voice declared it to be.

(Inge 1934: 56) Ruskin himself talked about a ‘divine rage’ which infused some of his writings on social problems. Inge’s view is unsatisfactory in that it suggests that there is a lack of control in Ruskin’s writings as well as a lack of judgement. That Ruskin

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quibbles with Mill, a notion which contrasts with Inge’s judgement, is accepted by Fain, for example, who is, otherwise, an acute interpreter of Ruskin. Fain adds: ‘Whether he is so from malice or misinformation is not always easy to decide’ (Fain 1956: 101).16 Fain approached his analysis by direct textual comparisons rather than working through the inter-mediation of the marginal comments which Fain feels cannot be dated. But for an understanding of Ruskin on Mill, neither view is sufficient. There is no malice in the marginalia but the text of Unto This Last is more difficult to interpret. Whilst Ruskin’s writing can appear associative rather than logical, Unto This Last has a consistent structure based around domestic metaphors. It also can be interpretated as having a consistent rhetorical purpose. There are many markers in Unto This Last which show that Ruskin is attempting to shock his intended readers out of a moral torpor induced by what he saw as a false political economy. His target is often not Mill, in any direct sense, despite the close textual association between Mill and ‘vulgar political economy’ or most of the other political economists of his time, but the set of social attitudes which Ruskin felt that political economy supported. Thus he criticizes the lack of a precise definition of wealth in Mill, but the context of his decision is Mill’s appeal to commonsense, carried in the phrase ‘Everyone has a notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth . . .’ (quoted by Ruskin from Mill, second edition, ‘Preliminary Remarks’) (UTL, C&W, 17: 18). What immediately follows is highly critical, even satirical, but whether or not it is ‘unfair’ is a matter of judgement and of placing the comments in a wider context. The question of the ‘true’ nature of wealth is central to Unto This Last and some of Ruskin’s notions are compatible with Mill’s and others much less so.17 Ruskin’s major rhetorical point becomes that ‘not one person in ten thousand’ has such a notion, though he does not make this explicit until the Preface of Munera Pulveris (MP, C&W, 17: 131). However, in the preface of Unto This Last he makes it clear that getting ‘a sufficient quantity of honesty in our captains’ is, with establishing a sound notion of wealth, a key point of the essay (UTL, C&W, 17: 20). Mill, in this reading, is a convenient peg upon which to hang an argument about the relationship between political economy and social understanding. Ruskin’s move from ‘wealth’, in the sense of national wealth, to ‘riches’ in the personal sense is, perhaps, unfair to Mill and to political economy as a whole, but probably not unfair to the targeted readers. Spear argues that, given the writing of members of the Classical School, ‘the Victorian lay reader’ could be excused ‘for making a move from economic principles to personal application in terms of wealth seeking’ (Spear 1984: 140).18 In addition, close reading reveals that even minor elements may be seen, in some sense, as a response to Mill’s text. Take, for example, Ruskin’s image of the

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action of mercantile economists: ‘Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest’. A set of actions which he locates (historically; concretely) in the specific context of charcoal sales after a house fire and which he then subjects to ridicule. Ruskin’s question, linked very much to his understanding of the potential of an unregulated market to exploit, is ‘But what made your charcoal cheap?’ He claims in a letter, describing his current study of Xenophon and written sometime after the writing of the essays which make up Unto This Last, to have derived this clause from a reading of Xenophon. As it is found in Unto This Last, Ruskin may have been mistaken about the source. At page 520, where Mill is discussing the mechanism of the market, Ruskin marks the following passage with three vertical lines: are those in which values and prices are determined by competition alone. In so far as they are thus determined, can they be reduced to any assignable law. The buyers must be supposed as studious to buy cheap, as the sellers to sell dear.

(Mill, 1849: 520) But Ruskin’s analysis, which stressed the historically located nature of any given market event, exemplified by the cheapness of charcoal amongst the roof timbers after a fire, remains valid whatever the rhetoric within which it is given communicative force. Ruskin’s question, here as elsewhere in his writing, is not, to quote Collingwood, ‘what general law does this fact illustrate?’ but, ‘in what particular circumstances did it arise?’ (Collingwood [1922] 1971: 11). Ruskin is, as Collingwood so forcefully described him, a historicist. When all else is stripped away, a contrast remains between Mill’s abstract logic and Ruskin’s historicism. It is difficult, therefore, to set up criteria for ‘fairness’ given the marked contrast in the rhetorical construction and philosophical intentions of the relevant texts. If only Ruskin had written like Mill, there would have been no problem! (see Livingstone 1945: 6). This is not a useful approach, for Ruskin specifically rejects, for fear of translating an emotional coldness of text into an emotional coldness of social relations, Mill’s approach to social analysis. It is ‘economical science’, based upon an ‘accidental’ stage of human society, which Ruskin rejects as impossible.19 Mill’s writing cannot be taken, though it tended to be taken by Ruskin’s critics, as a sole basis for making a judgement. Where Mill is concerned with the construction of a complete system based upon a neutral analysis, Ruskin’s text cast doubts on the possibility of neutrality and attempts to unsettle attitudes by exposing inconsistencies and by challenging accepted meanings. Where Mill generally seeks a scientific detachment from his version of political economy, Ruskin is directly present in his own writing on the subject. Where Mill is restrained in order to test and develop knowledge, Ruskin resorts to irony,

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satire and hyperbole in order to challenge accepted categories and change attitudes. Mill self-consciously develops a given genre, that of the consensusbuilding textbook, on the basis of a reasonable synthesis whereas Ruskin selfconsciously blurs the distinction between one genre and another.20 Mill’s Principles is located, as it were, on the boundaries between social science and science. Ruskin’s Unto This Last, whilst it contains systematic argument, is located on the boundary with literature. It is a literary text which cannot be adequately described as fiction just as it is a social science text which cannot be adequately described as science. Hark argues, for example, that Ruskin produces a satiric text in which he ‘converts the specific individual into a symbol of the ills his general . . . economic practices have fostered’ (Hark 1986–7: 23). In this interpretation, Mill and political economy are constructed and satirized as ‘dunces’ as attention is drawn to the ‘sores’ of society rather than to a balanced construction of it.21 Such a categorization can be thought of as very unfair to Mill if the standard is set by routine academic writing but not so if the context is a literary tradition of satire in which everyone is fair game. Ruskin’s rhetoric can be compared with that of Marx who talked of Mill’s ‘shallow syncretism’, of his ‘absurd contradictions’, and his attempts to ‘reconcile the irreconcilable’ (Rothbard 1995: 279). Rothbard’s own recent comments on Mill rival those of Ruskin in tone and in judgement: Mill’s writing is a ‘vast kitchen midden of diverse and contradictory positions’ and Mill himself a ‘woolly minded man of mush’ (Rothbard 1995: 277). Adam Smith was subjected to similar treatment, particularly in Fors Clavigera, and is depicted as a ‘Devil’ and a blasphemer for promoting covetousness as natural, though it is clear that Ruskin’s hyperbole is not meant to be taken literaly (Fors, C&W, 28: 516, 764). Hark’s argument, further testament to the mixed nature of Ruskin’s prose, is interesting in that it reasserts Ruskin’s command over his own writing whilst shifting the basis for an evaluation away from expectations generated by Mill’s Principles. It should not be taken to imply that Ruskin’s text lacks systematic economic insight, for, as has been shown, it remains linked to Mill’s. Ruskin can tell, in addition, an interesting and analytical economic story when it is required, as in the case of money and two castaways. However, Ruskin is more complex than this for his criticisms are based on the irrelevance of a scientific approach, and the centrality of an ethical, aesthetic and historicist approach, for the realization of social harmony. Ruskin intends that his notions be taken seriously. A recurrent theme in Unto This Last is a search for institutional context within which ethically-informed, economic management becomes possible. Ruskin finds the contexts within a series of metaphors based upon relations within the household. His texts construct a sharp contrast between a cold mechanistic political economy and the ethical management of economic life.

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Ruskin and Mill Ruskin uses the marginal comments and markings either to evaluate Mill’s writing and ideas or to monitor his own responses to them. Few of his longer comments are neutral summarizations of Mill’s argument. Ruskin’s reading of Mill is, in as far as it can be recaptured from consideration of the marginalia, one that is analytical, reasoned and productive. He reads within the context of his observations and previous reflections on political economy and with his own writing tasks in mind. Looking back at the marginalia from the perspective of Unto This Last suggests that Ruskin is not attempting to develop, through a reading of Mill, schemata that would lead him to adopt a set of meanings closer to those meanings generated by those who held that political economy was sound. The direct evidence of the marginalia, however, confirms Fain’s judgement that in private Ruskin was very generous to Mill. Unto This Last, though textually linked to Mill’s Principles, is not always a direct parallel. If a ‘Principles’ text, such as Mill’s, is, as Plato’s Socrates might contend, intent on achieving conformity, through a range of rhetorical devices aimed at the production of a text which would command consensus (‘clarity’ being a significant outcome), then Ruskin’s response is intent on disturbing that conformity. This, of course, has the disadvantage that Ruskin’s text, in turn, may not secure an audience because its disruptive nature will not readily allow conformity to its own principles. The consequence of both ideas would be that, if read naively, Ruskin appears inadequate in his understanding and criticisms of political economy and hence deficient in the way in which he evaluates ideas specifically linked to Mill. Ruskin’s basic view is that Mill has to contradict his science in order to accommodate his ethics. The marginalia suggest that Ruskin was, in his reading, open and interested in considering the thoughts presented to him. But the responses in the margins, such as the note on ‘Peace and Justice’, also suggest an intention to transform and to extend meanings. It is what he then made of these ideas which makes Ruskin’s writing on political economy so rich and potentially confusing especially if it is read through a set of expectations generated by Mill’s text. Ruskin’s reading is not, then, superficial but a skilled reader’s reading. Furthermore, Ruskin’s reading assisted in the production of Unto This Last both with respect to concepts and detail. There are many more interesting intertextual links between Ruskin and Mill than is suggested by simply focusing on Ruskin’s specific criticism of a few statements lifted from Mill’s text and evaluating them as ‘unfair’. Ruskin’s much-criticized notions of money or his alternative understanding of productive and unproductive labour are examples of direct counter-argument, whereas his views on Malthusian ideas are an example of the development of a critique by extending the range of possible solutions. Hark’s

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useful understanding of Unto This Last as satire captures only some of the ways in which it is cantilevered on Mill’s text. Unto This Last, when read against the background of Ruskin’s marginalia, becomes, paradoxically, both a literary continuation of, and an alternative to, Mill’s Principles.

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7 SYSTEMATIC AND ANTI-SYSTEMATIC THINKING Ruskin and Mill Revisited

Ruskin in writing against the market system was engaged in an intertextual debate with the Classical School. He made a number of direct points against Mill but Mill made no response to Ruskin’s criticisms. Mill had ‘given no sign that he was aware of the existence of his contemporaries, Marx, Engels and Lassalles’ (Foxwell 1899: lxxviii). Ruskin was treated no differently. Fawcett, whose Manual of Political Economy is modelled upon Mill’s Principles, does refer, in his preface, to unspecified attacks upon the subject and those who practise it. An economist, according to Fawcett, is taken in the popular mind to be a ‘a hardhearted and selfish being’ who has ‘no sympathy with those higher qualities which enoble the character of men’ (Fawcett 1869: 4). These attacks come from ‘sentimental moralists’ though his phrase simply suggests feelings rather than sentimentalist morality (Fawcett 1869: 6). Ruskin is implied. There could have been many reasons why Mill, who must have been aware of Ruskin’s economics writings, made no response to them. Did Mill feel that Ruskin would get the better of any open debate between them, on the grounds of rhetoric? Or did he feel that society was generally in line with his thinking and that he could therefore afford to ignore Ruskin? Or did he feel that Ruskin had not made a case deserving an answer since Mill had made a strong philosophical case for a separate science of economics in The Logic of the Moral Sciences? The answers, at least in terms of Mill’s thinking, cannot be other than speculative for Mill had earlier in life determined to ‘to avoid all occasions for debate’ (Letters, XII, p. 30, to John Sterling, April 1829, quoted in Murray 1970: 9). According to Murray, that became Mill’s ‘accustomed approach to controversy’ (Murray 1970: 9). Thus, as far as De Quincey’s work was concerned, Mill was prepared, according to Murray, to discover ‘sense in nonsense’ and so find a basis for accommodation (Murray 1970: 11). Yet it is curious that Ruskin, whom Mill had earlier depicted as his equal in creative ideas, goes unanswered, for Ruskin’s work was to find a basis in the regeneration of

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reader’s minds which would push forward social change, a project with which Mill must have sympathized. Ruskin was at the time compared to Mill, the contrast being stated in terms of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ writing, a contrast of which Mill would have disapproved (Henderson 1995: Birch 1988b). Can we throw any light on this by a rhetorical analysis of systematic and unsystematic thought? And did Ruskin manage to achieve valid insights into economic analysis from an alternative point of view and by a different style of economic prose? Systematic and anti-systematic thinking Mill as an economist tends to be noted for his clarity and technical competence. Indeed, in modern-day literature his reputation for technical competence has tended to increase, Rothbart’s criticisms not withstanding. Ruskin was and is often treated as a joke even although, he initiated a sustained attack on Mill’s version of political economy, particularly on his theory of value before Jevons finally dislodged it. Laski talks of Mill’s sense of the completeness of value theory and ‘Jevons and Menger arose to demonstrate the instability of scientific hypotheses’ (Laski in Mill 1929: x1x). But the idea was also Ruskin’s. Also, he helped sensitize Hobson, Smart, Foxwell and Marshall to the narrowness and rigidity of classical thought. Mill has been portrayed as a systematic, and Ruskin as an unsystematic, thinker. We can substantiate or repudiate such claims by subjecting the writings to rhetorical analyses. There are, of course, other ways of reading both Mill and Ruskin (see Cook 1998). Economic thought is understood to be systematic: such thought has developed as a coherent set of abstract propositions and these can be established at a given point of time and the evolution of that thought traced over periods of time. Theory is expected to involve higher-order thinking and somehow to be, at the same time, simple, generalizable and consistent. System implies a consistent set of simple parts, each with an appropriate and useful contribution to make to the whole. With respect to the nineteenth century, the subject built upon central ideas of the Enlightenment concerning individual, atomistic rationality, ‘universality’ and ‘homogeneity’ and the notion of science (Still 1997: 10–11). Whereas the Enlightenment accepted the need to consider values, and to place the study of economy within a wider study of society, mid-nineteenth-century economics excluded the social – including the concept of power – and moral, in an effort to establish economic science. Such a discourse requires a concise and incisive analysis and a literary style which supports critical reasoning. A technical vocabulary for accurately constructing theoretical propositions is essential. Malthus responded to the need for readers to assimilate concepts by setting out existing terms in a dictionary. Martineau complained in the 1830s of the extent of the technical vocabulary of

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classical economics. Ruskin felt called upon to suggest that technical experts did not understand the origins and significance of their own vocabulary and worked to prevent subjects (‘working men’) being turned into objects (‘labour’). Schumpeter’s notion, admitted in Chapter 4, of a specialized and conceptually isolated economy and theoretical systems for the analysis of such an economy becomes once again relevant, for Mill saw this possibility and argued for it with great clarity in both his Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy and, later, in The Logic of the Moral Sciences. Mill built his case for a science of political economy on the psychological notion that more wealth would be preferred to less, together with the idea of ‘aversion to labour’, i.e. the notion that less labour would be preferred to more, other things being equal. On this basis and given the argument that economic phenomena ‘do mainly depend’ on these propensities, Mill is convinced of the appropriateness, in principle, of isolated, systematic economic thinking and of a stripped-down model of economic man. He is also equally clear, as a methodologist, that if there are other causes, then political economy will fail ‘of being applicable to the explanation or prediction of real events’ (Mill [1843] 1987: 91). It is essential to understand the centrality of these propositions to Mill’s argument for the possibility of economic science. It is equally important to acknowledge that Ruskin’s case against Mill can be readily constructed as a sustained critique of them. Ruskin, despite the exaggerated brilliance of the writing in Unto This Last, attacks Mill through his Achilles’ heel. But how is anti-systematic thinking to be categorized? Is it a contradiction in terms? Anti-systematic thought encompasses both writing against a system such as the market system as presented by classical economists and unsystematic thinking as developed in open-ended, fluid, metaphorical and implicit texts. If it is presented negatively then it is difficult to see how any positive outcome can be expected from it. Ruskin, in as much as he worried that the outcome of system was likely to be an intellectual laziness which refuses to confront problems as they are, felt that unsystematic thinking left other possibilities open. Keynes in The General Theory, in complaining about the lack of understanding of neoclassical theorists when compared to the correct understanding of practical men, is voicing similar concerns. Indeed Keynes, in a manner that is more Foxwellian than Marshallian, and hence potentially closer to Ruskin, claimed a significant role for aesthetics (he thought unemployment was ‘ugly’) and for intuition, arguing that it is better to be approximately right than formally correct, but wrong (Skidelsky 1996: 8–11). Professionals can all too readily become prisoners of their own formal systems, used, as it were, by the root metaphors which form the basis of their allegedly scientific arguments (Henderson 1998: 292). Ruskin understood his own ‘system’ very well: ‘the only doctrine or system that is peculiar to me is the abhorrence of all that is doctrinal instead of demonstrable, and of all that is systematic instead of

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useful’ (St Mark’s, C&W, 24: 371). Anti-systematic writing, in terms of a response to political economy, such as Ruskin’s, means challenging: mechanistic rationality (i.e. by de-bunking economic man as a selfish means-ends calculator); universality (i.e. by insisting upon the diversity of ends and possible means; by insisting that economic phenomena are historical and temporary rather than fixed and universal); homogeneity of economic inputs (i.e. by insisting, for example, on the diversity of labour); and ‘science’ (i.e. by acknowledging the penetration of the scientific domain of production by values emanating from the domestic or from ethical systems outside the market). Mill’s writing Mill’s writing, though not universally held in high esteem, is readily recognized as systematic. Fawcett held, in 1869, that Mill’s Principles were ‘perhaps the most remarkable work of that great author’ and that ‘the book will be remembered as amongst the most enduring productions of the nineteenth century’ (Facwett 1869: vii-viii). According to Harrison, in a passage which contrasts Mill with ‘Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin’, Mill was ‘a singularly systematic product of a singularly systematic school of philosophers’ (Harrison 1899: 272). This school, by Harrison’s definition, consists of Locke, Hume, Smith, Bentham, Malthus and James Mill. Ricardo is presumably absorbed into James Mill. Accordingly, it is their ideas, in Harrison’s view, which are cast in a new form by Mill. Mill’s economic thought is embodied in Mill’s economic writing. But the writing itself, i.e. the rhetoric, has rarely been subjected to systematic analysis. What then are the characteristic features of Mill’s writing? How did Mill fashion his writing to create in text his version of a hypothetical-deductive economic science? This question is rarely asked directly, though the status of Mill’s Principles as ‘a measured polemic’ have been investigated and nearly 3,500 textual modifications discovered over the seven editions (Robson 1968: II, lxxxix). Yet it is essential to the task of making comparisons between Mill and Ruskin. First, take Mill’s reputation as a writer, more widely, in terms of his style. Blaug acknowledges that Mill’s clarity and precision formed the basis for the rhetorical success of Mill’s Principles (Blaug 1986: 101). These comments are apt, though some must, like Ruskin, also find Mill’s prose deadly dull, or, like Caroline Fox, a contemporary reader who, in reflecting upon On Liberty, found herself shuddering at writing that was ‘so clear, and calm, and cold’ (Alexander 1970: 12). Ruskin, who realized that Mill’s style was the antithesis of his own writing, described its emotional coldness as ‘Millesque’. But such judgments are not presented with supporting evidence drawn from a rigorous analysis of Mill’s writing. Indeed, the idea of making such an analysis is somewhat foreign to historians of economic thought. They are

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usually more concerned with content than with process. A balanced approach would look at both. The exercise, despite McCloskey’s plea for a poetics for economics, is more appealing to those concerned with the development of Victorian prose. D. R. Sanderson has made an analysis of one feature of Mill’s prose style, ‘the absence of metaphor’ in On Liberty (Sanderson 1968: 22). Mill’s Liberty is generally held to be based upon an individualism which is absolute, and which Ruskin, almost by family instinct, could not accept. It was written over a two-year period, itself a contrast with the Principles, and each sentence was subjected to rigorous analysis by Mill and his partner, Harriet Taylor. Propositions tend to be developed, according to Harrison, ‘with the rigid generality of mathematical axioms’ rather than with any degree of sensitivity to the metaphorical nature of propositions suitable for social science (Harrison 1899: 278–9). Given that Ruskin’s writings are, by comparison, awash with metaphor, parable and other literary devices, consciously used, it would seem useful to explore Mill’s relationship with metaphor, starting with the insights as a result of Sanderson’s work. In making his claim for the writing in On Liberty, Sanderson is careful to define his terms: ‘metaphorical language, representing the intuitive leaps of mind, is often unruly and expansive’ (Sanderson 1968: 23). This instability is not a welcome characteristic of systematic thinking. Mill is clear in various places in his Principles that he desires a stable and accurate language with which to express and manipulate his developing set of scientific propositions. Sanderson makes it clear that Mill does not, and cannot, avoid commonplace metaphors, decayed by habitual use into cliché, ‘no longer representing an intuitive mode of thought’ being ‘vestigal’ or merely ‘decorative’.1 Sanderson argues that even such metaphors are rarely sustained and provides only one extended example, that of the ‘king of the vultures’ (Sanderson 1968: 23), which he feels remains decorative though apt for dealing with issues of ‘liberty, tyranny and public opinion’. Though he does present two examples of ‘vital metaphor’, human nature as a ‘tree’ rather than ‘a machine’, and a set of mixed, essentially biological, metaphors from one short passage whose inconsistencies and confusions illustrate that Mill is ‘not at ease in the mode of metaphorical thinking’ (Sanderson 1968: 23–4). This is so, even although the notion than human kind are not machines but growing things like trees is the intuitive insight which promotes his subsequent analysis. Mill’s On Liberty is, according to Sanderson, a destructive work which develops a principle, proposes objections which are then subjected in turn to criticism and rejection, leaving Mill’s proposition ‘unencumbered of error’. This, Mill selfconsciously calls elsewhere, ‘the exhaustive method’ and ‘negative logic’ (Sanderson 1968: 24). On Liberty works by ‘cutting and dividing, stripping and dissecting’ whereas metaphor ‘assimilates and synthesizes’. Mill’s selection of words and significant elements of his style come ‘from his epistemological method’

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(Sanderson 1968: 24). Is it possible that Mill did not respond to Ruskin because he was thoroughly uncomfortable with the nature of Ruskin’s rhetoric? What, then, of the textual processes in Mill’s Principles? The inconsistencies and change of perspective in the Principles as a whole has already been dealt with elsewhere and these modify the sense in which it can be taken as a single-voiced work. What is of interest is the extent to which Mill uses or avoids ‘vital’ metaphor in his search for a language that is capable of achieving the demands of his epistemology. Mill’s Principles was written at some speed. Mill, in his autobiography, acknowledges the role that Harriet Taylor had in assisting the development of the division in it between production of wealth, where the natural laws of nature operate, and the distribution process where social institutions have an influence (Mill Autobiography, 207–10). Mill praises with sincerity and gratitude Taylor’s influence on the social aspects, but the (masculine?) scientific domain he seems to have reserved to himself. The intention was a book which refined the abstract principles of the subject whilst integrating such insight into practical concerns relevant to society. In other words, a book which heightened the systematic elements in political economy by distinguishing between ‘science’ and ‘art’. Mill was anxious to ensure that the ‘abstract propositions’ should nonetheless be seen as significant. Ruskin, though he twisted Mill’s notion of ‘vulgar political economy’, understood this point: his contention was that in making practical applications, Mill, in effect, had to put aside most of his abstract principles, no matter how carefully Mill may have hedged, in his methodological writings, any conclusions drawn from assumed premises. Mill’s caution also extended to his observations of contemporary society (Bladen 1974: 216). If Ruskin could make a strong argument about the lack of universality of the notion of self-interest then he was on ground which Mill would, by his own logic, have to give up. At the end of ‘Preliminary Remarks’ Mill makes a distinction between physical and economic knowledge, and continues, ‘But in so far as the causes are moral or psychological, dependent on institutions and social relations, or on the principles of human nature, their investigation belongs not to physical, but moral or social science, and is the object of what is called Political Economy’ (Mill 1849: 21; ‘Preliminary Remarks’ p. 21). In this respect, Ruskin, whose economics is not sui generis but cantilevered, to some extent, on a reading of Mill, took Mill at his word. Ruskin did not think that Mill managed to achieve any such moral understanding from his arguments about principles. Mill’s textbook is constructed along lines that places it readily within the Classical School: Mill starts with Production, then deals with Distribution and Consumption. In the process he modifies his initial views. Mill sees production as closer to physical requirements and distribution to institutional requirements, a

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division which Ruskin, who locates the moving force of economics firmly with consumption, does not readily recognize. Ruskin’s choice of ends, manifest in healthy labour, is at least explicit and this explicitness raises questions both of ends and means. Labour, in such a view, is no longer a simple means to an end: wealth. Ruskin insisted that the output of capitalist production was damaged people. Ruskin saw that work itself, the conditions of work and human motivation, must be themselves valued given the cultural significance of production. Frank Knight, in Ethics of Competition talks about an ‘appeal to intrinsic interest in action’ and ‘incentive’ rather than ‘mere appetite or cupidity’, thus capturing something of Ruskin’s concerns (Knight, quoted in Bladen 1974: 221). Similarly, Ruskin, in expecting his consumers to think about the worthwhileness of their consumption considered in terms of its total impact, including the production process that they are directly commanding, is taking, according to Bladen, value questions straight into the heartland of Mill’s scientific political economy. In so far as his science is concerned, Mill appears to have side-stepped the issue. Bladen makes the case that values are essential, both the choice of ends and the choice of means. Mill, in clinging to his view of science, fails to integrate an understanding of the influence of values in all aspects of economic life into his Principles (Bladen 1974: 220). In this respect, Mill’s methodological distinction between ‘science’ and ‘art’ is too rigid. Mill’s approach to the content of the Principles is both ‘systematic’ (‘Preliminary Remarks’) and analytical. Overall aims, highlighted in the part devoted to Production, are the development of ‘principles’ and ‘deductions’ (Principles, bk I, chap. 1, sect. 4), the establishment of ‘elementary propositions or theorems’ (I, 5, 1) but also the eradication of ‘erroneous notions’ (I, 4, 1). These general statements place the process, as predicted by Mill, close to that used in the essay On Liberty. The problem of developing a language fit for analytical purposes is identified early in the work. If ‘truth’ in political economy is to be set forth in a systematic and logical manner, then close attention needs to be placed in removing confusing and inconsistent language. Mill is sometimes in full pursuit of conceptual clarity in a positive way (see p. 133), sometimes negatively, especially when he is irritated by the lack of such clarity on the part of others. Consider his treatment of those who question whether bank notes are to be treated as money: ‘The question is so purely verbal as to be scarcely worth raising . . .’, though raise it he does (III, 12, 7). Mill can be as high-handed towards the public as Ruskin though his irritation and sarcasm, because it is delivered in a monotone, is less readily detected. See, for example, the passage in Principles, III, 13, 3 where he talks of the notion of the limitation of paper issue being ‘effectually drummed into the public mind’ and talks of the possible effects of an ‘unlimited issue’ in terms of expectations about the ‘philosopher’s stone’. But whether constructively or destructively engaged, the

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focus on clarity is a central part of his method. Mill has an refined understanding of the properties of language, conscious of metaphor, synonym, the nature of spoken conventions (‘the money market’ – a market in which capital rather than money is exchanged – and other ‘accidents of language’), and ambiguity. Care over language was part of Mill’s theoretical enterprise. For example, the notion of talking of ‘instruments’ rather than ‘wealth’ is dismissed because it ‘departs . . . too widely from the custom of language’ to gain currency, though Mill sometimes reverts to its use. The term was part of Adam Smith’s vocabulary. Mill certainly defines ‘instruments’ as ‘the whole accumulation’ which communities make use of ‘for the attainment of their ends’ (Principles, bk V) Ruskin adopts it in Munera Pulveris and was ridiculed for its use, presumably by those who did not know their Mill! (‘Preliminary Remarks’).2 Cassels, in his comparison of definitions of wealth in Ruskin and Mill, neatly sums up Ruskin’s perception: ‘the tendency of [Mill’s] very short sighted economy, is to enable the strong to make instruments of the weak’ (Cassels 1882: 18).3 The desire on the part of others to avoid the use of the terms ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour, a distinction which Mill is anxious to promote, is seen as a confusion by them of ‘mere language and classification’. Mill, of course, must explore the meanings and does so by distinguishing ‘utility’ from ‘wealth’: productive labour is productive of wealth, ‘services which only exist while being performed, cannot be spoken as wealth, except by an acknowledged metaphor’ (I, 3, 3). All labour produces utilities but not all labour produces wealth. The producer should not be confused with the thing produced: ‘A country would hardly be said to be richer, except by a metaphor, however precious a possession it might have in the genius, the virtues, or the accomplishments if its inhabitants’ (I, 3, 3). Mill’s suspicion of metaphor and his dismissive attitude towards it is apparent in both quotes.4 His analysis of the meaning of productive labour is consistent and he does not seem to have been too concerned that his precise definitions lead to a statement that ‘the labour of saving a friend’s life is not productive, unless the friend is a productive labourer and produces more than he consumes’ which pushes ordinary language much further from ordinary custom than does the prohibited use of ‘instruments’. It offends against Mill’s own attempt to do ‘the least possible violence to usage’ (I, 3, 3). Mill’s sense of language gave way to his need to construct a theory of growth. When viewed in this light, it is perhaps easier to see why Ruskin may have wished to subject Mill’s text to satirical abuse. It is characteristic of Mill’s method, illustrated above for productive and unproductive labour but easily exemplified by many other passages, that he defines his terms, following through each example, exhaustively, until a clear and consistent conclusion is reached. In various places the development of the analysis is sustained

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by ‘suppose’ or ‘let us therefore consider’, ‘let us now vary the hypothesis still further’. These are imaginary examples, and have become a hallmark of the way economic ideas are analysed and presented in modern-day economic textbooks. But, in Mill, they are not sustained by the imagination, rather they are further instances of the pursuit of Mill’s characteristic methods. He needs clear principles to hold fast to ‘in the crowd and confusion of the actual facts of society’. Such principles require a specialist language built to serve the needs of precision (I, 5, 3). Mill uses, then, in the construction of his Principles the same ‘exhaustive method’ (as far as the subject-matter will allow) that he used in the construction of On Liberty. However, Mill did not achieve the same unity in the Principles that was achieved in Liberty. Paradoxically, Mill frequently shifted ground and both promoted and undermined classical political economy. Ruskin, outside the economics profession, was one of the first to seize upon this. What of metaphor? Mill, as any other writer, uses metaphorically extended language in the ordinary course of writing. Thus he talks, for example, about the ‘application’ of labour, perhaps unaware of the metaphorical element, and of the need to ‘clear from our path a formidable ambiguity of language’. At other times he is aware, and critical, of such language as with the concept of ‘Circulating Capital’ and the notion of ‘rapidity of circulation’. He is, of course, careful to criticize such terminology as ‘not very appropriate’ as well as to define it (I, 6, 1; III, 8, 3). Definition in this sense reduces the force of the metaphor (Henderson 1998: 291). But ‘extended’ metaphor, either decorative or heuristic, is rare though not totally absent (how could it be?). Thus Mill talks of ‘the bulwarks which society purposely throws around what it recognises as property’ (I, 7, 6).5 Decorative metaphor is used sparingly; Mill is steeped in the ‘plain speech’ tradition of scientific writing, established by the Royal Society in the seventeenth century. But even other dedicated ‘plain speakers’ tend to resort to heuristic metaphors when trying to illustrate a difficult idea or persuade readers to accept a particular point of view. So the heuristic metaphor (not analysed as such by Sanderson in his treatment of On Liberty) is present in the Principles, but its textual role is restricted. Consider this example: The limitation to production from the properties of the soil, is not like the obstacle opposed by a wall, and offers no hindrance to motion short of stopping it entirely. We may rather compare it to a highly elastic and extensible band, which is hardly every so violently stretched that it could not possibly be stretched any more, yet the pressure of which is felt long before the final limit is reached, and felt more severely the nearer that limit is approached.

(Mill, Principles, I, 12, 2)

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This is a startling and illuminating metaphor consisting, essentially, of two similies. Simile is a figure of speech in which object is depicted as being ‘like’ another, different object. The figure is readily assimilated to metaphor. The images presented are highly visual and effective, though the heuristic nature of the metaphor is underscored by the formal rather than poetic language in which it is developed. That it is intended to bring the reader into close co-operation with the text is suggested by the joint activity: ‘we may rather compare it . . .’. It could have been used in a developing educational exercise to suggest the relative nature of the constraints at any point in time. But Mill abandons it, leaving it isolated in the text without allocating it any further use. This is typical of his approach to heuristic metaphor in the rest of the Principles. In his treatment of ‘money’, Mill is on his guard against ‘the misapplication of language’. Because of discussion by ‘minds not scientifically instructed on the subject’ and of the ‘mass of vapoury and baseless speculation’, Mill subjects the concept of the value of money to his rigorous method of analysis. He needs to ‘clear from our path a formidable ambiguity of language’ (II, 8, 1). But in preparing for what is to come, Mill has already used, in the same limited fashion as exemplified earlier, an effective though conventional mechanistic metaphor: There cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money; except in the character of the contrivance. It is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously, what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it: and like many other kinds of machinery, it only gets a distinct and independent influence of its own when it gets out of order.

(Mill, Principles, III, 7, 3) Mill makes no use of this heuristic metaphor in the chapters on money which follow though he does deal with the problem of the over-issue of assignats and the question of expansionary monetary policy. These are discussions within which is would have been possible to reactivate the metaphor in a purposeful way. I have not been able to find any evidence of vital metaphor, thus far, in my reading of Mill’s Principles. Evidence has already been presented that suggests that whilst, for Mill, metaphors can have a valid, though limited heuristic role, metaphors tend to mislead. Mill prefers a literal language. When a metaphorical term is used, it seems to be used grudgingly: ‘The variety itself has an invigorating effect on what, for want of a more philosophical appellation, we must term the animal spirits’ (I, 8, 5).6 This is a fundamental contrast with Ruskin. Mill’s text, because of its definitional, analytical and technical aspirations, carries, at face value at any rate, a literalness, passing for realism, that is absent from Ruskin’s work. Mill’s Principles shares the same hesitancy towards metaphor as does his essay On

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Liberty. It was this literalism and finality that Ruskin suspected and which, according to Foxwell, occasioned its ‘soporific’ influence (Foxwell 1899: lxxviii). Foxwell, in reaching this conclusion, may have had Ruskinian ideas in his mind for he admired Ruskin’s social criticism and took an open-minded approach concerning the direct relevance of economic theory for an analysis of contemporary economic problems (Keynes 1972: 271). So what? To answer this question some attention needs to be given to the relationship between reason and the imagination. This is not, of course, new ground. Mill has often been taken as pursuing dry reason ‘as almost an antidote to the imagination’, and of making science ‘fully accountable to reason’ (Medawar 1984: 45). Medawar, of course, sees scientific reasoning as ‘a dialogue between two voices, the one imaginative and the other critical’ (Medawar 1984: 46). Mill, in his search for conceptual clarity, in line with the tradition of scientific thinking as approved by the doctrine of plain speech, is nervous of the imaginative use of metaphor and of the role of the imagination more widely. If it is a question of balance, then Mill gets the balance wrong! In this he did not follow Adam Smith. Smith, operating under the influence of Hume’s philosophy, exhibited a more progressive stance for he saw a positive role for it in his study of scientific method (Skinner 1979: 14–25). Though the Principles are based upon deduction, as suggested by the application of the ‘physical method’, or at least upon the priority of ‘reason of principle’ over ‘reason of facts’, Mill’s prose is in keeping with his firm belief in the notion that critical reasoning would lead to general truths. Mill is a highly skilled and controlled writer: his style is not in any sense an accidental trait but the result of informed choices and predisposition. A text that is concerned with general principles and which avoids metaphor claims a direct relationship with reality. Mill is strongly harnessed to truths (the result of the avoidance of error) and this in turn leads to a lack of reflection or of an imaginative (i.e. metaphorically vital) as opposed to destructive analysis of other possibilities, at least as far as his science is concerned. Ruskin may have been on stronger ground than was accepted in his day when he criticized both the lack of truth in the premises of economic thinking (see his criticism of economic man and of the central place of production in the conceptual framework) and lack of applicability of the principles. Mill’s method meant spelling out statements which have the capacity to be empirically ‘true’. Ruskin, in contrast, started with what is observable, the central feature of which was the concept of poverty in the midst of plenty, and was more concerned with what ought to be. His aesthetics and notions of justice are central. Though his writing is located within the scientific norms of plain speech and clarity, Mill, as a result of underplaying the imagination, does occasionally exhibit the dogmatic consequences of systematic

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thinking that Ruskin fears, as, for example, when he writes of the completeness of the existing thought on value theory. There is, as a result of the under-use of imagination, a lack of balance in Mill’s concept of scientific reasoning as such reasoning is embodied in his Principles. Ruskin’s writing Ruskin’s writing is imaginative, metaphorical, satirical, formal and frequently ambiguous. It constructs images of economic life and narrates parables – pictures and stories which are to be understood at more than one level. In genre terms, Ruskin sometimes imitates, sometimes deconstructs, existing expectations of economics writing (Henderson 1995: 122–7). Enough evidence has been presented in earlier chapters to show that metaphor is used decoratively, heuristically and vitally. Ruskin’s political economy writings are developed imaginatively. Medawar argues that ‘Imagination without criticism may burst out into a comic profusion of grandiose and silly notions’ (Medawar 1984: 46). This was the notion held by Ruskin’s contemporary critics. If we continue a relationship with Medwar’s notion of balance, Ruskin becomes an imaginative writer whose innovative ideas, born out of observation and impatience, are not matched by adequate critical reasoning. Ruskin, too, gets the balance wrong, but in a way which differs from Mill’s disequilibrium. What will be demonstrated here are ways in which Ruskin unites critical thinking with the imaginative process and tracing out the consequences. Thus, for example, Ruskin found Mill’s notion of the neutrality of money preposterous. He held that as long as money was unfairly divided it could not be neutral. This is, of course, not the same as Mill’s interests, for Mill is concerned with money itself. Ruskin locates his analysis in social and ethical concerns rather than in a conceptual space, though Chapter 6 has shown that his reflections were prompted by Mill’s notion of neutrality. Ruskin considers the form of money as a legal document which itself implies some form of ordered social relationship. Such a document has its origins in claims on material objects, a proposition which is not without historical validity. Ruskin builds his analysis on the most significant social manifestation of such claims: the claim to the labour of others. Its form is treated in ways which make a direct link with what Lerner calls ‘its effects on men’s lives, that is, in functional terms’ (Lerner 1975: 113). Thus he does not ignore the details of money in domestic life, and integrates his notion of expenditure as command over all other resources (i.e. the national store, a notion also found, however briefy, in Mill) with his notion of money. Ruskin, who shared, as did Mill, his notion of ‘observation’ with Bacon, also shared Bacon’s sense of the uses of riches: ‘Of great riches there is no real use, except to be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit’ (Bacon, quoted in Salter 1963: 101).

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Ruskin’s analysis of money is a further operational link between laissez-faire and the lack of justice. Like Marx, Ruskin dislikes the abstract properties of money and its linked concept of price and value. He wishes to re-emphasize the social and individual human meaning of an economic action, such as consumption (for insight into Marx in this context, see Lerner 1975: 120–1). If the rich are not to be possessed by their wealth, an ironic reversal derived from Plato which also challenges Mill’s notion of ‘useful’ and one that D. H. Lawrence readily absorbed from Ruskin, an economic action such as consumption must become, by eschewing an unreflected luxury, an opportunity to reassert stewardship. Whether or not Marx’s notion of ‘fetishism’ or Ruskin’s notion of the centrality of greed are justified, money, by the process of abstraction that it essentially makes possible, is not neutral. Its institutional development and abstraction changes economic and social relationships: it makes distance possible and with distance comes ignorance of the social conditions that money transactions induce. Effective power can only be sustained by inequalities. And these can only be sustained by social distance. Ruskin is also part of a tradition of moral thinking which sees money as a metaphor for death, as illustrated in Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale and other medieval and older sources (Lerner 1975: 106). As he does with other thought, Ruskin modernizes these ideas and places them within the context of middle-class attitudes in mid-Victorian society. His contrasts between ‘life’ and ‘death’, central to his image of capitalism in Unto This Last, generalizes his insight to the whole of mid-Victorian capitalism and places the ‘vitality’ of labour in a central position. For Ruskin, the proper uses of wealth, which Ruskin links directly with money, are ethically evaluated and without such an ethical evaluation, the fact of the power of money will lead to economic distress. In this respect he is very close to Carlyle who, given the poverty he saw all around him, puzzled over the nature of England’s wealth. But Ruskin also made a formal analysis of money in the narrative of the two castaways. Self-consciously narrative episodes are not entirely absent from Mill, though he may call upon De Quincey for assistance to narrate episodes from the theory of value. Ruskin shows that money can have an impact on the size of the national income without anything going wrong with money as a machine. Ruskin goes from the money economy to the real economy in one interesting dramatic move by treating money as a legal claim on resources and so linking it with economic power. Money only makes sense as an instrument used to enhance individual control and power: ‘the writings of our vulgar political economists, calling money only a “medium of exchange,” blind the foolish public conveniently to all the practical actions of the machinery of currency. Money is not a medium of exchange but a token of right’ [my emphasis] (Fors, C&W, 28: 134–5). Such a token makes moral questions difficult to ask. And Ruskin is able to do this because he sees the

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primacy of consumption over production. The possession of money commands consumer products and in turn constitutes a demand for labour, a point which Ruskin disputes textually with Mill. Ruskin is not constrained by Mill’s system and so can construct and reconstruct capitalism in ways different from Mill. He also understands the circulation metaphor but, like Marx, refuses to be used by it. If it is treated as a metaphor it is legitimate for any critical analyst to ask ‘What circulates when it is said that money circulates’? It could be the value of money, it could be goods. Ruskin insists, in Fors Clavigera, that what circulates is people, manipulated by those who can command resources through the expenditure of wealth in the form of money. The passages, illustrated by a sample below, can be too readily dismissed as the uncritical outcome of an overworked imagination. They can equally be seen as the outcome of a critical line of reasoning that suggests that the neutrality of money itself is an impossibility since money has no meaning without the social ends to which it is put. The unregulated mechanics of money are expressed in power and inequalities: Tendency of the entire national energy is therefore to approximate more and more to the state of a squirrel in a cage, or a turnspit in a wheel, fed by foreign masters with nuts and dog’s meat. And indeed, when we rightly conceive of the relation of London to the country, the sight of it becomes more fantastic and wonderful than any dream. Hyde Park , in the season, is the great rotary form of the vast squirrelcage; round and round it go the idle company, in their reverse streams, urging themselves to their necessary exercise. . . . And then think of all the rest of the metropolis as the creation and ordinance of these squirrels, that they may squeak and whirl to their satisfaction, and yet be fed. Measure the space of its entirely miserable life. Begin with that diagonal which I struck from Regent Circus . . .

(Fors, C&W, 28: 136) For Ruskin, a prime concern is to see society as it is and to challenge contemporary economic understanding of it. The central puzzle is that of wealth, its appropriate and inappropriate uses and consequences. Ruskin refuses to contemplate wealth until poverty is honestly and directly addressed. Though he attempts to look directly at social and economic conditions, his search is, as Spear argues, for an ideal social order (Spear 1984: 135). His search for an ethical economics was one means of realizing the ideal. Ruskin’s methodology Much has been written about Ruskin’s method of social and economic criticism: his critical eye and keen sense of observation (at once both aesthetic and Baconian)

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and the importance he attaches to the observer’s response (see Smith 1994: 171–2; Helsinger 1982: 64). Here the focus is on making a comparison with Mill’s writing, so we are attempting, in this and the section which follows, to bring content and rhetoric together. Ruskin knew that Mill’s writing was closely argued: even if his point of view and prose style differed from those of Mill, he could only really succeed, methodologically, if he challenged Mill’s premise rather than his deductions. The prime target is mechanistic rationality as represented by that meansends calculator, economic man. This has been adequately explored in Chapter 3. J. Bates Clark, in his preface to his collection of 1887, challenges orthodox economics in Ruskinian terms, starting with the ‘defective’ premises, and suggests that ‘the man of scientific formula was more mechanical and more selfish than the man of the actual world’. Clark’s conclusion was the same as Ruskin’s: ‘A degraded conception of human nature vitiated the theory of the distribution of wealth’ (Clark 1886: iii). Other targets (see p. 140) include the rarefied economic language by which propositions are accumulated and incommensurable units measured. In his writings on political economy, Ruskin’s starting point was observed and experienced social phenomena. His excessive personalism, already alluded to in the chapter on agency, is often presented as evidence of his lack of systematic reasoning. Ruskin intended the introspection to show the lack of force of natural economic laws as well as to illustrate the situated nature of economic life. Mill, also concerned with society, starts with general principles and then works towards social experience. The two thinkers start from different habits of mind. This distinction is put very clearly by R. G. Collingwood in a study of Ruskin’s philosophy. Collingwood makes a distinction between ‘the logical method of thinking’ and ‘the historical habit of mind’. The logical method works on the premise that ‘every individual fact is an instance of some unchanging principle’ (Collingwood [1922] 1971: 9). The principle is of greater significance that the given fact. The historical approach ‘looks for individual facts, and explains these facts by appealing not to laws, but to other facts’. In offering explanations the historical mind considers ‘in what particular circumstances did it arise?’ (Collingwood [1922] 1971: 11). Though it is important not to over-draw the distinction, Mill worked on the logical method and Ruskin on the historical. Ruskin was, in addition, a Platonist: those with a mind for justice had a responsibility to act administratively to achieve it. Ruskin was entirely consistent in this respect whereas Mill, in the Principles, is caught in a muddle amongst various ‘isms’. Like Mill, Ruskin believes that attention to the use of words is an essential part of the critical process, though Ruskin glories in metaphor. He disliked the technical vocabulary of economics for the same reason as he disliked Mill’s notion of money. The existing technical vocabulary gave a false sense of entities and capacities, e.g. the discussion on money. Similarly, the division of labour was, in fact, according to

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Ruskin, a division of men. Damaged men gave rise to damaged lives, hence the moral degradation and apathy of the poor, a product of capitalism and not a given of nature. Ruskin objected to a knowledge process which reduces, for example, the diversity of workers and work to an objectified, homogeneous ‘labour’, an economic input or resource to be exploited like any other resource. His substitution of people as wealth for material wealth, challenges political economy’s construction of the ends-means relationship by upsetting categories and bringing the question of value and values into the scientific domain of production. His analysis is far from sentimental in the ordinary sense for he uses his vocabulary to explore the negative side of the division of labour. The false nature of economic vocabulary, in this sense, was also understood by Marx. As a consequence, Ruskin reworks existing economic vocabulary, drawing together ‘value’ and ‘values’; the object valued and the economic agent making the evaluation; ‘work’ and ‘labour’; ‘wealth’ and its natural opposite, ‘illth’. Ruskin insists that terms in a thoughtless, mercantile political economy are capable of implying their opposite, of operating through their own negations. Thus ‘wealth’ implies ‘illth’ (see p. 142), ‘riches’ implies ‘poverty’ (in insight common to much utopian writing) and getting-on, one of the objectives of vulgar political economy, implies impeding the progress of others. Using this method, Ruskin faces his readers with direct social consequences made impossible by social distance. If Mill created a textbook to which followers were expected to conform (this is a main purpose of a textbook) then Ruskin sought to create texts which challenge and subvert. Anti-systematic writing and systematic outcomes What were the main concepts of classical thinking that Ruskin rejected? Wilenski sets out six which can be extracted from Ruskin’s economic corpus and which form the basis of the ‘prevailing creed’ as filtered through social action. Wilenski’s categories are (in my order and in my summary form): the postulate of economic man; the doctrine of laisser-faire; the law of wages; the science of catallactics; the interchangeability of money and wealth (which moves Ruskin towards an analysis of income and expenditure); the social productiveness of unfettered competition (Wilenski 1933: 290–1). Though a useful starting point, this list underestimates Ruskin’s critique, both explicit and implicit, of Mill’s methodology. Much of what is written in Unto This Last is about the role of values throughout the economy. Ruskin has a basic objection to the way in which Mill sets out the economic problem. What Ruskin sees is the unsustainable nature of the division between economic science, located in production and distribution and consumption, as socially and institutionally

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influenced. Human nature need not be one thing in one place and something different in another place. Motivation, institutional arrangements and values permeate all aspects of economic life. In addition, ‘disturbing factors’ cannot be, as is friction, systematically measured. Human agents are equipped to question both ends and means. Ruskin’s metaphorical style and implicit meanings leads to a situation in which his subtler messages do not strike home. We do not need, however, to accept all of Ruskin’s examples in order to accept his overall methodological point, which is that all of economic life is malleable and can be made to serve human ends. But this list, even for the main works from which it is extracted, further understates Ruskin’s criticisms. He makes a useful analysis of the concept of money, rejecting Mill’s notion of its neutrality. In this respect he goes on to criticize, in Fors Clavigera, the notion of the neutral circulation of money, pointing out, as has been shown, that if money is really in command of people then it is neither money nor goods which circulates but people themselves. This is one illustration of Ruskin’s understanding of political economy as a system of power relationships. The point is both methodological and empirical: any examination of an economy as it is will reveal the centrality of power in market, social and political manifestations. Ruskin’s search for the notion of economic justice is key to the whole critical enterprise, for his search for a true political economy is essentially ethical and hence has a direct link with the development of economic policy. Economic agency, according to Ruskin, was socially constructed: political economy had overlooked the social dimension in as much as agency responds to social mores and expectations. It also confused temporary economic conditions with a ‘natural order’ as realized through ‘natural laws’. It fixed what was fluid and attempted, in Ruskin’s eyes, to restrict social choice to what was necessary to achieve maximum output rather than to think out alternative ways of achieving a better balance of human welfare, implied by Ruskin’s definition of wealth as that which is ‘life availing’. Ruskin’s attacks on economic man and laissez-faire have been already analysed. His idea of the duties of paternalistic government, his direct answer to the idiocies of laisser-faire, are derived from various sources including Plato’s anti-market Laws mixed with the concerns of the Republic. In waging an attack on the crude principles of supply and demand, Ruskin looked for a developing set of institutional arrangements, in which both parties were expected to make institutional adjustments. His notion of paternalism is one such arrangement intended to create an anti-market allocation within family firms but which expected the market to operate between such firms. The extent of his institutional search is only now being realized, e.g. in fair trading arrangements promoted by NGOs for trade activities with poorer producers in the Third World. In looking at value as that which ‘avails towards life’ Ruskin rejects all false

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values which confuse ‘useless’ (that which avails towards ‘death’) with ‘useful’ (using what he saw as Mill’s own unanalysed notion). Ruskin appreciated that Mill tended to use words with care which may be why he found the unanalysed ‘useful’ unacceptable. This notion of ‘useful’ informs Ruskin’s notion of ‘illth’, of wealth and of national product and goes to the heart of Mill’s justification for a science of political economy. At its simplest, Mill’s case is that ‘more’ of what is useful is always a good thing. Ruskin throws doubts upon the meaning of useful and the proposition that more is always better. In his political economy note book he writes: ‘If plunged to his neck in Orinoco, he shall yet drink only to his true thirsty measure – if more – at his peril’. Beyond this natural limit, illustrated for clothes and houses too, ‘we can only destroy, administer or bequeath’ (Ruskin, Diaries, p. 244) the implication is that we cannot ‘use’ in the simple sense suggested by Mill. Ruskin’s theory of value is, as a result of its notion of a personal limit beyond which ‘useful’ becomes ‘illth’, its natural opposite, is at least as interesting as De Quincy’s, more interesting than Mill’s and carries with it elements that were to be articulated by the Marginal School. Ruskin’s ‘illth’, though it carries the idea of negative goods, can also be construed as a form of negative utility. Marginalists also used the physical consumption of food to illustrate marginal utility. Though Ruskin worked with discrete lumps of wealth such as additional numbers of houses, he does from outside the profession when seen in this light that which Jevons was, much later, to do from within. However, Ruskin also never loses sight of the power. Again he goes beyond Mill in understanding that ‘it is not enjoyment of, but power over wealth which most men covet’ (Ruskin, Diaries, p. 247). In the Library Edition, the word ‘power’ is used 6,928 times. Whilst many of the references will be to the power of art and to mechanical power, it would be surprising if there was not also frequent references, in one way or another, to economy as a system of power. Ruskin also pointed to the development of institutional economics. Ruskin’s value theory, as so many other aspects of his work, is not to be dismissed lightly, for without the benefit of incrementalist or marginalist thinking, Ruskin grappled with rigorous ideas even if his attempts to develop a language and analysis capable of changing the technical discourse were in the short-term ineffective. Furthermore, in arguing that ‘nature’ had ‘intrinsic value’, as opposed to no given value within the economic system, Ruskin was setting up a basis for the prevention of the ruthless and unsustainable exploitation of nature. He accepted that nature’s role was the ‘re-creation’ of man. In the present day, environmental economists have attempted to place an economic value on nature as a result of the services it supplies us with, e.g. waste disposal. Ruskin attempted to force the issue of a gap in economic ideas concerning the evaluation of the environment, a gap which was later also spotted by Clark (see Chapter 9). Ruskin could not follow through the analysis but searched for an institutional basis for the preservation of

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natural beauty. This search eventually led to the formation of the National Trust. Ruskin understood the cultural significance of political economy. In the end, the differences between systematic and anti-systematic thinking, at least in terms of Ruskin and Mill, is reduced to questions about the balance between the logical and historical method; balance between reason and the imagination or, if we use Keynes’ term, intuition. In Modern Painters, where he was concerned with artistic truths, Ruskin had put it like this: ‘the virtue of the Imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power), a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things’ (ModP, C&W, 4: 284). The historical method, based upon observation, gave rise to a new method of economics, which still has its followers today. Ruskin’s writings make much more sense when read against Mill’s view of economics as a science. If systematic thinking underplays the role of the imagination as it strives towards a scientific clarity funded by literalness, then anti-systematic thinking welcomes the imagination in order to find new connections and images from which to argue. If systematic thinking tends to be convergent and singlevoiced in order to achieve a closed, logical and stable argument then anti-systematic thinking is characterized by an openness and implicitness designed to puzzle, intrigue and by so doing, stimulate new thought. Mill achieved a logical system and Ruskin achieved a set of insights concerning the relative nature of economic knowledge which eventually worried its way into the thought of his later economically concerned readers. Mill’s notion of science expelled literary claims to higher truth but in so doing, Mill also excised the imagination. To understand midnineteenth-century economic representations, we need to read Ruskin and Mill against each other. What became of Ruskin’s ideas and understanding, in the longer term, constitutes the subject-matter of chapters 8 and 9.

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8 WILLIAM SMART (1853–1915) Economist and Ruskinian?1

Introduction Smart, despite his applauded translations of works by Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser, earns only a small reference in the New Palgrave. In terms of the wider history of economic thought, he is seen as a minor figure. Some of his writings are probably now better known to Ruskin scholars than they are to historians of economic thought. As the first holder of the Adam Smith Chair, translator, careful teacher, commemorated in the Smart prize for distinguished undergraduate work by honours students at Glasgow, and as a social economist, active in private and municipal initiatives to house poorer people, he deserves to be better known than he is. The entry for Smart in the New Palgrave, and Jones’s ‘Biographical Sketch’ which accompanies Smart’s final work, suggest that Smart outgrew his Ruskinian ideas of the early 1880s as he gradually matured in his understanding of economics. This chapter argues that Smart developed those interests which first took him to a study of Ruskin’s ideas and that, through a synthesis of ideas and action, he managed to be both an economist and an acculturated Ruskinian. If this is possible, then Smart can be taken as a case study of the way, identified more generally by Ingram, and analysed by Curtin, in which economics accommodated Ruskin-like elements from the 1880s onwards (Ingram 1893; Curtin 1939). Hobson is the economist normally selected for a detailed analysis of this process, but Smart, though less well known, is no less interesting. Smart and Ruskin: an overview Smart enters the annals of studies in Ruskin primarily as the author of two lengthy pamphlets on Ruskin. The first, ‘John Ruskin: His life and Work’, is an account of Ruskin written especially for an inaugural talk to the Ruskin Society that was formed in Glasgow in 1879.2 The society, also known as the Society of the Rose, aimed to stimulate the circulation of Ruskin’s ideas, to provide a ‘centre of union for Mr. Ruskin’s friends and disciples’ and to promote ‘life and learning as may fitly and usefully abide in this country’ (List of Members, 1884). It must be presumed, in the absence of any direct evidence, that, as this was Smart’s

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Presidential lecture, he was actively involved in the promotion of the idea for such a society.3 It can be presumed, also, that he was, at this time, in close and direct communication with Ruskin. Smart, as a member of the Guild of St George, was also very committed to philanthropic activities. The second paper, published in 1883 and which contains a useful, and carefully crafted, and more reflective analysis of the relationship between Ruskin and Plato, has already been referred to in the chapter on ‘Plato and Ruskin’.4 However, from what is known of Smart’s life, both as an industrialist and as a professor, the influence of Ruskin seems to have been significant, even if an astonished Ruskin felt a sense of betrayal in William Smart’s final choice of profession: ‘Then greatly to his astonishment, I became an economist. I have the letter in which he says, “You!” ’ (Smart 1916: 4).5 In his last work, Second Thoughts of an Economist, published after his death, Smart gives a glowing account of Ruskin: while still in business, I had found the springs of my intellectual life, like many young men of my day, in Carlyle and Ruskin. The former I never met, but with the latter it was my good fortune to get into close touch. As I came to know him well, I experienced nothing of the disillusionment which one often does in meeting a great writer in the flesh. It seemed to me that there never was a more entirely loveable man nor one who tried harder to carry out the principles which he preached. . . .

(Smart 1916: 2) What Ruskin did, of course, was help provide a reformist, but not revolutionary, focus for the young man’s own concerns. And Smart was concerned. It is recorded that, whilst employing women in Clark’s thread-mill at Mile-End, ‘he once tried for a week the experiment of living on tea and bread and butter after their manner somewhere in the East-End’ (Jones 1915: 238). It is easy to see why someone who shared this kind of concern could be attracted to Ruskin and to the Guild of St George. Smart himself makes it clear that, after he became a professional economist, he continued to hold that business needed to be reminded of an oath of professional concern such as that made in the process of becoming a member of the Guild. Ruskin’s influence was gradually replaced, according to J. H. Jones, by that of Edward Caird (Professor of Philosophy) and by a maturer understanding of what it was that economics as a subject of study was trying to achieve. T. Jones, in an obituary notice, offers a slightly different view of the relationship when he states that the ‘influence of Ruskin was plain upon his speech and writing, and of Edward Caird upon his thinking’ (Jones 1915: 238).6 Smart outgrew Ruskin’s concept of economics as a false science though he accepted, in Second Thoughts, that Ruskin had gone to the ‘heart of economic principles’ in his study of the nature of wealth

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as command over labour and of the associated notion of exploitation. Ruskin had been attacking a science that had become ‘arrogant’ and inflexible, particularly when it held that success, promoted by mechanistic laws, was divorced directly from ‘moral purpose’. Smart’s judgement on Ruskin’s understanding of political economy had become that ‘Ruskin had neither the time nor the interest to give years to it’ (Smart 1916: 4). He adds that ‘in Ruskin . . . an economist had been lost’ (p. 8). Smart’s judgement is given within a wider piece of work which can be seen as a commonsense reflection upon ‘the ethical aspects of the science to which he had given his life’ (Jones, 1916: xxiii). Smart acknowledges that questions about what Mill called ‘the art of living’ had been ‘forced’ upon him in the course of his professional life. The relevant chapter ends with the following statement which closes a discussion about ethical issues in business: ‘Surely it is a painful confession of failure if a man who wishes to “spend a week with God” has to leave his business and go “into retreat”!’ (Smart 1916: 14). It would be hard to detect whether it was Caird or Ruskin or Smart himself who had first whispered the thought. Both Caird and Ruskin would have welcomed, and in the case of Caird, did welcome in his lifetime, Smart’s commitment to social reform and the links between reform and the investigations that it gave rise to and the links with the teaching provided to the Honours class in political economy at the University of Glasgow. Fain, although he claims that Smart is ‘usually mentioned as one of Ruskin’s disciples’ (Fain 1982: 206), seems to have been the only Ruskin scholar in recent times to have detailed the nature of Ruskin’s influence on him. Fain uses primarily the textual method, taking as the sources for his illustrations of Ruskin’s ‘pervading spirit’, passages from Studies in Economics and from Second Thoughts of an Economist (published after his death) which may be counted as Smart’s first and last book-length works. Fain’s essay is useful as a starting point but as Second Thoughts is constructed as a revisionist work, some evidence from the years in between is required. Ruskin’s influence and that of Edward Caird’s doctrine of Idealism, which Smart was introduced to as a student when he returned to the university to re-start his studies after a successful business career, also worked together in the social fabric of Smart’s life to integrate the study of economics with analyses of, and practical action for, social reform.7 Smart took his own route and there is little doubt that the forthright Ruskinian of 1880 gradually developed into the mature economist of the 1890s. If Ruskin had no distinct system of economic analysis, as he himself suggests, then any enduring influence on Smart is more likely to be found in the types of problems chosen for investigation and comment and the language used rather than in the precise method of economic analysis. Although Smart’s professorship was founded on his translations of Böhm-Bawerk’s work, he himself ‘made no discoveries, and invented no new technicalities’ though Yves Guyot held that he

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was an ‘économiste de primier ordre’ (Cannan 1915: 303; MacAlister 1916: 236). Smart’s biography, such as is available, suggests that he started (encouraged? furthered?) a tradition, at Glasgow, of social economics which has never been quite eclipsed by the (allegedly?) brighter star of abstract economic theory. This social economics exhibited, at least in the questions that it asked, and in the close relationship between theory and practice that it by choice followed, an approach which suggests an ethical basis for questioning provision in fields such as housing, women’s wages and of poverty and improvidence. Smart, because of his manufacturing experience, knew that women were significant in the labour force and sympathized with their problems. Smart engaged in an investigation of the role of custom in women’s wages in the thread industry (an industry, given his manufacturing background, that he knew well) and, in addition, attempted direct involvement through the promotion, in 1888, of the Women’s Protective and Provident League. Again, according to Jones, in one of his housing initiatives, the Glasgow Workmen’s Dwelling Company, he develops ideas along the lines of those put in practice by Ruskin and Octavia Hill.8 Contrary to the impression created in Second Thoughts, his biography suggests that ethical concerns, based upon a humane response to the problems of individuals, had a part in his life, during and after hours. Ruskin’s influence on Smart’s works Are ethical concerns in evidence in any of his publications prior to Second Thoughts? Given that Smart started in Caird’s Philosophy Department it must be expected that ethical issues would have been woven into the fabric of Smart’s teaching. It must also be expected that the ethical influences would be mixed. The focus here is on Ruskin’s, rather than on Caird’s, influence. Smart’s topics for social concern, and the personal and direct nature of that concern, reflect the subjectmatter debated in the Ruskin Society from its foundation: ‘Housing, the purification of the air, the planting of trees, civic art as well as economic subjects, were discussed by the society’ (Jones 1916: xvii). In 1882, for example, a report (author not yet identified) was ‘read before’ the society ‘On some of the Homes of the Poor in Glasgow’ (Catalogue of Books, 6). Fain quotes an interesting passage from Studies in Economics, published in 1895, when it might be supposed that Ruskin-type thought had been replaced by a harder-edged approach, in which Ruskinian ideas are evocatively treated: ‘Perhaps it is a new conception to some that the factory and the farm are the analogue of the study and the garden, and should be pleasant places to work in; but not till that perception has been grasped can we have a true idea of the work which makes men at the same time as it makes goods’ (Fain 1982: 206–14, quoting Smart 1895). This

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sentence echoes Ruskin’s view, derived from Xenophon, on the significance of the domestic as a metaphor for what is required in the commercial sphere. It draws upon images of farm and garden as models of a ‘true political economy’ as found in Ruskin’s Political Economy of Art. The Platonic notion of reaching beyond the ‘shadow’ to an originating ‘truth’, as well as, as Fain points out, the ‘two products of labor’, men and goods, also points directly to Ruskin’s influence. This evidence, however richly layered is not in itself enough to make a case. A quick reading of even just the titles of some of Smart’s articles and pamphlets suggests, in this genre if not so immediately in his other book-length works, a commitment to the social ideal which took him earlier in his life to a study of Ruskin: ‘Toynbee Hall: A short account of the Universities Settlement in East London, with suggestions for a similar work in Glasgow’ (1886); ‘Housing of the Poor in London. Report to the Glasgow Commission on the Housing of the Poor’ (1892); ‘Women’s Wages’ (1892); ‘The Place of Industry in the Social Organism’ (1893); ‘A Living Wage’ (1893); ‘An Address on the Meaning of a Profession’ (1902); ‘The Housing Problem and the Municipality’ (1902); and ‘The Problem of Housing’ (1904). His first major work as an economist, The Distribution of Income (1899), is an economist’s working of a topic which was central to many of Ruskin’s concerns. The two papers from this list which most closely link Smart’s political economy directly with Ruskinian thinking are those directed at lay audiences. In his final work, Smart, according to Jones, looks ‘over the hedge’ in order to reflect on economics and ethics. This is, in a sense, what he is already doing in ‘The Place of Industry in the Social Organism’ and in ‘An Address on the Meaning of a Profession’. By addressing, albeit in a professional capacity, a lay audience, Smart can be both economist and Ruskinian in ways that were not, perhaps, so readily available in more directly professional writing. In the first paper, Smart, not yet secure in a university post, makes no direct reference to Ruskin. In the second paper, he is, though critical, also more than generous. Although there are no direct references to Ruskin in Smart’s paper on ‘The Place of Industry . . .’, Ruskin’s ideas, and even a sense of Ruskin’s characteristic language, are embodied in it.9 Smart provides a picture of a changing economics profession, aware of the need to consider links between economics and ethics in a way that it had not done in the past:

The science is realizing that we are not living under the industrial system of Ricardo’s or even Mill’s time. A century of laisser faire has made laisser faire impossible. The question has been forced on the economist, What is the place and dignity of economic effort among the other activities of human life: is it really the ‘business’ of man’s life, as the time devoted to it seems to infer; or is it merely a current in the main

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stream of spiritual development and realization?

(Smart 1892–3: 437) Whilst it is historical experience that ‘forced’ the question, the question as it stands reflects Ruskin’s concerns in Unto This Last, written thirty years or so earlier. Smart argues that ‘the older economists were very optimistic’ concerning the power of ‘economic effort to work out social salvation’. Ruskin had argued the case for ethical considerations. In Smart’s world, people are still poor but are also ‘slaves to incessant work’. The majority of people are ‘mere living machines, wearing out their bodies in toil and spending their non-working hours in making up wear and tear’ (Smart, 1892–3: 438). The language is, once again, strongly reminiscent of details of Ruskin’s prose about capitalism turning the labourer into a machine, which, starting from ‘The nature of the Gothic’, builds into the critique of economic man that is such a significant part of his rejection of political economy in Unto This Last. Such ideas, expressed in similar language, influenced Christian Socialists and William Morris. Smart does not deny that the working man is in some sense better off than in the past but puts the improvement down to ‘the fact that there is a great deal of wealth which the upper classes cannot consume selfishly’, and lists communally produced, and Ruskinian, items such as clean streets, cheap public lighting and clean water.10 He also restates, in his own terms, Ruskin’s scepticism at what would now we call ‘the trickle-down effect’: ‘The crumbs which fall from the rich man’s table are not to be counted the worker’s share in the increasing wealth of mankind’ (Smart 1892–3: 439). He goes on to recognize the political nature of the distribution of income. Smart continues: The question naturally suggests itself, Has any plan of regulation emerged to guide the actions of those who have rejected the policy of laisser faire, and yet are very far from embracing the other extreme of socialism?

(Smart 1892–3: 440) Two answers are given which are then subjected to negative evaluation: trade unionism and ‘the old patriarchal theory of the relation of capital and labor, which tells the working-classes that their interests are safe in the hands of the enlightened employer’ (Smart 1893: 442). This ‘old theory’ is one that was promoted by Ruskin in Unto This Last, though Smart makes no direct mention of it. Trade Unionism is based upon war and ‘is but a temporary ideal as all ideals based on war must be’ (Smart 1892–3: 441). In a Platonic-type argument, Smart demonstrates a lack of ease with ‘a definition of just wage which determines it by the relative strength of two parties’, all capital and all labour (Smart 1892–3: 442). Paternalism, as an alternative,

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is rejected not because capitalists are unethical per se, nor because, as Mill argued, paternalism prevents the development of full human potential. Rather, the argument is that beneficial paternalism in leading firms cannot overcome the logical problem of the link between recession and the economic dilemma of marginal firms within marginal industries. Such firms must cut production and costs and hence both employment and wages will fluctuate. The question of industrial fluctuations was one that, in Unto This Last, Ruskin chose to side-step as he struggled to work out an institutional basis for fixing wages (see Chapter 3). This brings Smart to the following conclusion: The failure, then, of trade unionism on the one hand, and of the patriarchal relation on the other, to supply any permanent basis for the future of industry, may serve to suggest that is not possible to formulate, on purely economic lines, anything but a temporary policy, for the reason that, sooner or later, economic tendencies left to themselves come into conflict with the total development of society.

(Smart 1892–3: 443) This conclusion, with which Ruskin would have agreed, raises questions concerning ‘the function of the economist’. The ordinary economist is content to consider and analyse the ‘drift’ of contemporary economic activity whereas: ‘the philosophic economist has something further to do. Is it not becoming evident that philosophy and economics must now join hands to find out and declare what is the true end and right relation of economic activity among the other activities of human life?’ (Smart 1892–3: 444). This is not Ruskin’s concept of a purified economics as set out in Munera Pulveris, but it is very close for it suggests that an ethicallyinformed economics should develop the required ‘plan of action’. Smart’s examination of the economic environment is also close to Ruskin’s approach. The examination is essential, for the economic environment is both a product of nature (hence the profound biological and aesthetic bases characteristic of Ruskin’s economic thinking) and of human effort and achievement.11 There is a huge capacity to add to wealth but also to add wants. Smart, in the context of the economic environment, makes a brief analysis of the consumption behaviour of the rich. He argues that their family aspirations make it unlikely that they would voluntarily forego any luxury expenditures in order to influence the distribution of income.12 Although he does not make any direct reference to Ruskin’s notion of the ethical consumer as set out in the final essay of Unto This Last, the links made between consumption, distribution, agency and poverty, whilst ‘economic’, are suggestive of what Fain has called ‘the pervading spirit’ of Ruskin, even if, as in this case, Smart is arguing against Ruskin. (Fain 1982: 206–14). Prophetically, in the world terms chosen for the construction of the sentence, Smart argues the possibility,

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that Ruskin also argued, that ‘a small minority of the world’s inhabitants may take up all the increases in wealth, leaving the majority at the old level’ (Smart 1892–3: 443). In the end, Smart explicitly challenges orthodox economic thinking and, implicitly, the ethical consumer aspect of Ruskin’s thinking for there is no selfrectification when it comes to the distribution of wealth.13 Given that the industrial system has the capacity to produce vast wealth, Smart argues that new circumstances call for new thinking. Labour now has the potential, contrary to views expressed in Mill, of being ‘pain free’ (at least in the physical sense as used by Mill and Jevons) and to carry on thinking about the inevitably of pain reduces the capacity to think about alternatives: ‘we have forgotten the proper end of man, and have looked upon the worker not as a spirit, but as an instrument of production’ (Smart 1892–3: 449). The teleology is both Christian and Ruskinian. Ruskin’s notions of ‘soul’ and ‘social affection’ are not very far removed from Smart’s ‘spirit’ (later in the text changed to ‘human soul’). Smart holds that poverty can be and needs to be abolished, i.e. by administrative or managerial action on the institutional and other arrangements made for economic life. To make this practically possible he continues to argue in terms which are closer to Ruskin than any other social reformer: ‘we must take what we may, without irreverence, conceive as the stand-point of the Almighty himself. To us all men must be equal in the one respect, that the end of their being is the same, – that is, the realisation of all the powers of spirit in a free life.’14 Whilst Smart offers, in this paper, no programme of practical details for such a reform, he sees, as did Ruskin, the important role of changed attitudes and of a birthright secured through ‘education and training’. Smart’s ‘An Address on the Meaning of a Profession’ was delivered at the opening of the winter session of the Medical School (17 October 1902) and subsequently (and rapidly) published in The Lancet. Smart opens by reflecting upon the meaning of the term ‘profession’ and then uses Ruskin’s method of ‘derivation’: ‘My old friend Ruskin used to get very striking results by appealing to derivation. He used, I think, to astonish himself, and certainly astonished us, by what he found, or thought he found, in derivations’ (Smart 1902: 1519). Justified by some play with the meaning of grocer (the maker of ‘unrighteous gains’), Smart states that ‘one is not hopeful of discovering truth by derivation in my science’. In such moves Smart is signalling the extent to which he was, and was not, influenced by Ruskin. This, in a sense, illustrates the ambiguity about Ruskin found elsewhere in Smart’s work. He mildly debunks Ruskin’s approach to economics, for Ruskin felt that he had shown something significant when, for example, he found that ‘value’ and ‘valour’ developed from a common root. Smart’s economic analysis, developed in the rest of the talk, surprisingly, given the mild debunking, retains something of Ruskin’s influence. The analysis that Smart makes begins with ‘the farm field’ as the ‘microcosm’ of

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industry. He takes his audience, who could not be expected to know anything of formal economics, on a characteristic step-by-step journey from the simplicity of the peasant’s field to the complexities of modern trade.15 This location of economic activity in a labour-nature nexus is a recurrent theme in Smart’s expository writings (including in his ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Böhm-Bawerk’s The Positive Theory of Capital) and he develops more generally the notion of wrestling resources from nature in very interesting ways.16 Marshall believed in the possibility of a biological economics, and some of Marshall’s writing was part of the curriculum at Queen Margaret’s College (where Smart first lectured) and later at the University of Glasgow. Ruskin’s ‘true’ political economy also had a very strong biological basis, for Ruskin took the biblical sentiment ‘that by the sweat of the brow we shall eat bread’ and proposed that ‘the economy of the field is the first science’. The moves that Smart makes, from agriculture to trade, and the examples that are provided also attest to his skill as a teacher, which Jones so warmly records in his ‘Biographical sketch’.17 The tradesman is concerned with his wage. ‘But’, Smart adds, ‘you can see that his real end – the thing which he is over-ruled into doing – is to feed and cloth humanity’. The language here is not Ruskin’s but the sentiment and the way that it is constructed puts it closer to Ruskin than to Adam Smith. A profession is ‘at least’ a trade and students are reminded of the material basis of their profession, throwing their goods into the market in the same way as a ‘barber’ or ‘kitchenmaid’ and hence part of the great division of labour which encompasses all of modern life and whereby we all live. The medical profession is not ‘sui generis’. It is only because others do the dirty work that professionals can do theirs! From the material basis, rooted in specialization and the division of labour, Smart turns to the inner basis or the ethical basis for action, a second characteristic move in the later genre of writing upon professions: ‘What then differentiates the profession from the trade? I think I can tell you. I learned it from that great man who, whatever his extravagances, invariably saw right through to the heart of things – John Ruskin.’ Smart then uses Ruskin’s ideas, drawn essentially from Unto This Last, in which they are in turn derived from Plato, to set out the ethical basis for professional behaviour. A professional ‘will die rather than earn a fee by doing what he knows will hurt and destroy’ (Smart 1902: 1521). And Smart uses Ruskin with skill for he compares the false rhetoric of the American industrial trusts, a topic which was also exercising his mind at the time, who claimed ‘service to humanity’, with the true rhetoric of ‘service’ in the professions and adds: ‘Indeed Ruskin was writing just to bring out how thin the distinction was and how easy it was to pass from the one to the other, if people would only think’ (Smart 1902: 1521). The mark of a profession is to set the work first, rather than do wrong knowingly, and the wage second. In the inner life of the medical profession, the seller looks with detailed knowledge at the standard of the service that is sold.

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Motivational power is located in ‘the good of the patient’ and normal market expectations of consumer sovereignty are, in this sense, reversed. This location of a profession in its external economic circumstances and in a capacity for an inner life predates Weber’s notions on the meaning of ‘a profession’. Smart’s understanding derives directly, and indirectly via Ruskin, from Plato. In this imaginative lecture, Smart perfectly blends economic insight and Ruskinian ideas of doing ‘good’ and doing ‘right’ to produce innovative insights! It was not only in his teaching that Smart confronted ethical issues. His consistent concern for the condition of poor people had a significant impact upon the type of ‘after-hours’ work with which he became involved. The welfare of the poor is a consistent concern of Smart’s, informing the development of his whole career from the Ruskin Society onwards. His involvement with the Public House Trust (Glasgow District),18 the Glasgow Workmen’s Dwellings Company Ltd (formed in 1890, i.e. during the period when he was still putting down the foundations of his career in economics) and the University Settlement Association all provided opportunities for combining professional and business insight with Ruskinian notions of guardianship. Such activities, in which Smart was associated with leading industrial and philanthropic figures of the Glasgow of his day, suggest an approachability and even a sociability which to some extent belies his preference for ‘the quiet life of the scholar’. The Bailie describes him thus: ‘Professor Smart is essentially of the type of professors who hold sway to-day. Suave and scholarly, holding strong views on the application of the principles of economics to the regulation of modern society, and above all an apostle of culture, he may be said to represent, in a most satisfactory fashion, the ties which bind the life within the University to the life which exists outside her walls’ (The Bailie, no. 1495, 12 June 1901).19 Smart’s active interest in housing issues began with discussions within the Ruskin Society though such discussions were part of a socially wider set of concerns. In 1884, John Bright had made housing the subject of his Rectoral Inauguration. J. B. Russell, concerned about the city’s health, focused on housing in a series of public talks given in 1887 and 1888. Smart’s involvement was furthered by the establishment of the Presbytery of Glasgow’s ‘Commission on the Housing of the Poor’, (1888–91), the Church’s response to those such as the Cairds from the university, and concerned business people such as William Bisland (Fraser and Maver 1996: 420). Smart was involved directly in the work of the Commission in two ways. He was a member, with Sir J. Cuthbertson and others, of the group that was asked to gather existing documentary evidence on Glasgow housing. In addition, and more significantly for the future development of his career, he was appointed convenor of the group charged with investigating ‘remedial measures already attempted in Glasgow and elsewhere’. Amongst the membership was

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Leonard Gow.20 Smart carried the burden of such investigations. The result was the ‘Housing of the Poor in London’. This report is worth a brief examination for it provides the basis for the development of the Glasgow Workmen’s Dwelling Company Ltd which, together with the report, gives Smart a practical basis from which to make an analysis of the housing issue in the same way, though to much greater effect, that his business experience enabled him to make an analysis of women’s wages. Smart’s analysis is a mixture of documentary material (Blue Books, Company Reports) and direct observation and discussion. Whilst the report contains clear, factual analysis, what is of interest in the present context is the special attention given to Octavia Hill. Hill’s views are presented in a section approximately two and a half pages long. And in presenting a report on the conversations with Hill, Smart is careful to incorporate Ruskin. Talking of Ruskin’s support, Hill acknowledges her benefactor’s vision: ‘Whilst he assured me that this money was entirely, fully and freely given for the good of the cause, yet he foretold that the work would spread if I could make it pay, and urged me therefore to try – a foresight and practical wisdom far beyond mine at the time’ (Smart 1888: 17).21 Smart includes the reference to Ruskin, as with the whole reference to the views of Hill, as a matter of rhetorical choice. The relevant section stands in marked contrast to the requirements of the report format that Smart uses in the sections on specific companies. This idea of a market-based set of initiatives which secure costs control through personal supervision, inspired by Ruskin and his astounding faith (in context) in Octavia Hill, appeals to Smart. Hill’s working methods, which allowed her to collect rent money in places where the police ‘only dared go in pairs’, were a practical manifestation of Ruskin’s notion of the significance, in the majority of problems faced by poor people, of ‘guidance rather than gift’ as well as his views as to the possibility of women, being engaged outside the home, in a process which Spear has referred to as the ‘feminisation’ of society (Spear 1984: 168). Smart, perhaps unwittingly, provides evidence of this process at work. In recording Hill’s concern that it is destructiveness which makes it difficult to house the very poor, he writes: ‘This destructiveness can only be eradicated by personal influence, and only by replacing the traditional hostility between landlord and tenant by a new relation of friendship and respect. It is here that the new institution of rent-collecting by ladies comes in. Its theoretical economic claim has been justified by its particular success, and it is only now sneered at by those who do not know what it means and what it has done’ (Smart 1888: 18). Hill’s relationship with the Kyrle Society, the idea of tenant supervision and the notion of social facilities within the provision, rent reductions for regular payers as well as Smart’s insight that housing for poor people must not be out of step with what the poor can practically afford (hence the emphasis on cost management

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through supervision) get built into the activities of the Glasgow Workmen’s Dwelling Company Ltd. Smart becomes an ordinary director of the company in association with, amongst others, Leonard Gow and John Neilson Cuthbertson, who were members of the two sub-committees on the Housing Commission. A comparison between Smart’s report and documentation produced by the GWDC Ltd shows that the report provided a conceptual framework, both economic and social, within which the company in practice operated, subject to modifications created by practical and local conditions (see GWDC Ltd, ‘Notes upon some Housing Experiments of the Glasgow Workmen’s Dwellings Co. Ltd’). It was this practical basis that Smart used as the foundation for further concern with Glasgow housing. He earned the admiration of The Bailie where in 1902 he is commended in glowing terms for the high profile he was then taking on the discussion of Glasgow housing. The Municipal Housing Commission (1902–3) was created largely at his suggestion, and this is also acknowledged by The Bailie. The paper was disturbed, however, by Smart’s ability to argue both sides of a question: ‘He is apt, indeed, to worry people who want him to say what he thinks, instead of impartially putting both sides of the question’, and again, in the same article, ‘What Professor Smart’s ideas are as to the ultimate solution of the Housing Problem, he is too wise to say’ (The Bailie, no. 1536, 26 March 1902, p. 1). And Smart certainly cultivated this approach. Smart, however, influenced by Octavia Hill and his own direct experience of the GWDC Ltd, believed that the housing market should consist of a broad range of providers including philanthropic and municipal action along with private initiatives. He attended thirty-nine out of the forty-two sittings of the Commission and made sure that the economic and social issues raised were discussed as the hearings developed by his Honours students in the political economy class (Jones in Smart 1916: xxxv-xxxvi). He used his experience as the basis for his presidential address, ‘The Problem of Housing’ to the Economics Section of the British Association. This is essentially a technical paper but it has a long history. It is based upon experience arising out of early discussions within the Ruskin Society, investigations made for the Presbytery of Glasgow with respect to the housing of the London poor, including discussions with Octavia Hill, and his direct experience of workingclass housing based upon his work with the Glasgow Workmen’s Dwellings Company. It so impressed Balfour that he later appointed Smart to membership of the Poor Law Commission where he concentrated on the exploration of unemployment. Smart may have seen competition as ‘co-operation if we chose to look at it like that’ but, at many stages in his life, he was closely, though critically, involved with ‘government’ and even ‘trade union’ activity, areas in which the normal laws of unregulated supply and demand are either suspended or modified by collective action.22 He signed the majority report of the Poor Law Commission rather

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than the more radical minority report. He avoided any part in the subsequent controversies. Smart’s willingness to ask ethical questions was not simply an indulgence committed in Second Thoughts which Jones likens to ‘looking over the hedge’. Asking questions about ends is found in various contexts in his life’s work. Thus his concern appears in his ‘Translator’s Preface’ to The Positive Theory of Capital.23 Take, for example, the following excerpts from a lengthy passage in the preface where he is justifying Böhm-Bawerk’s notion of wealth as helping to ‘subsist’ workers during the production period: Even when we rise – as economists may do – to wider conceptions, and point to man’s full free life as the goal of economic effort, we ought to recognise that the working life which we lead, and should lead, is at once an end and a mean. In working we live; and in working we produce wealth; this wealth, again, permits of freer work and fuller life . . . thus instead of making wealth the final cause of industry – as the economist in virtue of his professional bias is apt to do – or making it the beginning and limit of industry – as the wage fund theory tended to do – this conception places wealth in the centre as the maintenance of the working world during its rise to higher and higher levels of working life. In other words it puts the economic conception into line with the moral by making wealth simply the means to the working life.

(Smart in Böhm-Bawerk [1891] 1930: xvii) This passage contains traces of Ruskin’s notion of ‘life’ as the end of a true economics and ‘illth’ or ‘death’ as the outcome of wealth accumulation under laisserfaire capitalism. Smart seems to see in Böhm-Bawerk’s analysis, a plausible resolution of the conflict between the interests of workers and of wealth. In the final sentence, it is almost as if Smart breathes a sigh of relief as many potential ghosts, including that of socialism as well as Ruskin, are exorcised at once. But, as Second Thoughts shows, the doubts were never quite put to rest. However, as far as the depth of his ethical thinking is concerned, Smart does not seem to have moved substantially beyond a clarification and evaluation of Ruskinian ideas. He was a mild-mannered, apolitical reformist rather than a radical. Economist and Ruskinian Is it possible to be both economist and Ruskinian? J. A. Hobson’s career suggests that too many unorthodoxies leads to professional marginalization. Hobson directly explored Ruskin’s political economy as a body of work which said something significant about social costs and benefits in a manner which was distinct from

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that of Mill. Smart, who was anxious to secure a university post, was not a Ruskinian in the same sense that Hobson was. In which sense or senses can Smart be taken, then, as both an economist and a Ruskinian? The New Palgrave and Jones, for example, suggest a sequence in which one set of ideas based upon Ruskin gives way to another set, based upon orthodox economics. Fain, in contrast, depicts a sense of Ruskin pervading Smart’s first and last work on economics, though no evidence in supplied for the main part of his working life. It is possible, given the evidence, to suggest a continuing interest, less robust than the beginning and the end of his publishing career, which suggests that he remained firstly an economist but also secondly a Ruskinian, throughout. Smart implicitly and (too?) comfortably answers the first question in Second Thoughts thus: ‘I never, indeed, could see anything like contradiction between the main lines of my friend’s writings and the science he so frankly abused’ (Smart 1916: 4).24 It is easy to cast the distinction between Ruskin and political economy, as suggested in The Nation, as one between analysis and policy and there are some areas in which this approach can work, especially if a ‘century of laisser faire has made laisser faire impossible’.25 Jones has argued that when Mill’s writings are compared with Ruskin’s in terms of the overall view of human nature and society, a remarkable similarity of purpose emerges (Jones 1972). So this is a plausible position. If the science had become less dogmatic (a point also argued by Marshall) then it may be possible to accommodate some of Ruskin within a more orthodox framework. Social change and the underlying structural conditions in the economy led to a situation in which more attention was starting to be given to questions concerning the welfare of labouring people. In this sense Ruskin can be re-evaluated as a ‘social prophet’ and although this happened in the late 1880s, Smart was not so active a Ruskinian to take any direct interest in this process. Nonetheless in realizing the need for an ethically-informed economics, Smart is acting in a manner consistent with Ruskin’s vision and where ethical issues are to the fore he tends to make direct and indirect reference to Ruskin’s work. It is equally possible to argue that, despite areas of overlap, including conceptual and textual similarities, between Ruskin and Mill, a significant difference remains between the tenor of Mill’s Principles and Ruskin’s rejection of economics as a science in Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris: Ruskin thought it unlikely that wealth itself would solve social problems without some deliberate action based upon clear ethical principles. This is the position to which Smart also came. Ruskin started, as Smart realizes, with the problem of justice and worked towards his version of political economy whereas orthodox economics starts with the market. Ruskin also started with a notion that the market was essentially imperfect. He was, to use an anachronism, a structuralist. Smart tends to start his formal economic analysis with the co-operation found in competitive markets. However, careful observation

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and analysis allowed him to see market imperfections as in the paper on ‘Women’s Wages’ where he argued that the labour market was, to use Edgeworth’s words, ‘clogged by custom’ (Edgeworth 1881: 118). Furthermore, his explorations of value theory show that there is, in this area, little trace of Ruskin’s notion of value. In the sense that he started with economic theory, and believed, according to Jones, that it was ‘the duty of the economist to examine and explain the nature of the economic world rather than to advocate changes’, Smart is, in this sense, an orthodox and technical economist pure and simple (Jones 1915: 237). This is not, however, the whole story, for his ‘after hours’ actions as well as some of his formal working life kept him closely in contact with the sorts of issues that had been addressed in the Ruskin Society whilst Smart was still in business. Although his Chair was founded upon his translations of the theoretical works of the Austrian Böhm-Bawerk, some of Smart’s time was taken up by social economics. He worked in areas in which it was necessary to challenge assumptions associated with laisser-faire though it is characteristic of his thoroughness that he could argue persuasively both for and against (say) the municipilization of production. This ability, of which he was proud, frustrated some of his contemporaries as has been shown. In this sense Ruskinian questions were still asked but the style of analysis and the content of answers offered up by Smart differed. Smart’s notion of compatibility between Ruskin and economics was referred to (above) as perhaps ‘too comfortable’. Consumption is the end of economic activity but the question of what, by whom and at what social cost is not thereby completely prohibited or exorcised and Smart also realised this. Smart was a late-comer to the economics profession and he had every reason to keep to a rather narrow analytical focus until he had established his reputation. Second Thoughts, in a sense, makes up for what he constructs as the comparative neglect of ethical issues earlier in his professional life. But ethical issues, with a smack of Ruskin, were never fully eclipsed in his published work. Second Thoughts draws upon earlier published work as well as a lifetime’s experience. Ruskin-type issues, largely about the ends of the economic system, developed in a moderated version of Ruskin-like language, are prominent in the papers given to other professional bodies. Even in his prefaces to BöhmBawerk’s work, the question about the nature of the ‘ends’ of economics intrudes upon the text, even if in slightly defensive ways, e.g. through appeals to an abstract or ideal professional, ‘the economist’ or ‘the philosophic economist’, rather than directly to personal practice. A sense that Smart was never quite convinced by his own notion of compatibility between orthodox economics and Ruskin-type questions, or a sense of lingering nervousness of the issues (which Smart himself admits to in Second Thoughts) in an economics context, can be detected. Smart maintained his interest in Ruskin-type questions and it is felt throughout his work, including in his ‘doing good’ after hours, though his rhetoric is, professionally at

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least, carefully adjusted to different audiences and different contexts. Second Thoughts, as an effort to adjust the balance, overtly addresses some of the issues raised, in some form or another, earlier in his career. Even in Second Thoughts, Smart did not engage in a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Ruskin in the formal sense of making a wholesale reassessment of his writings. There would have been little point in this – the change of mind-set which Ruskin had looked for had already taken place in the wider social world. Smart, economics and the wider society had already moved on. He certainly evaluated details of Ruskin’s ideas in some of his earlier work, rejecting some (such as the Ruskin-like notion of work as a ‘tax on life’) and furthering other aspects such as concerns about increased security for working people. But such issues were increasingly part of the social climate. In a sense, Smart’s worries about capitalism are not subjected, in the works cited, to a thoroughgoing academic and consistent examination, despite his rehearsal of arguments for and against municipilization. Although he outgrew Ruskin’s notion of political economy, he did not outgrow Ruskin as a softer option to socialism. Smart rejected both socialism and details of laisser-faire, acknowledged the need for administrative and institutional action to change the distribution of wealth. Although he exhausted himself in the pursuit of reformist notions or in work which would further such notions, in a sense he preferred to operate almost apolitically with a given set of economic and ethical notions. Perhaps, after all, given his work and the organization of Second Thoughts, and his reputation, amongst students and colleagues, of making economics ‘one of the humane sciences’, he continued to share Ruskin’s view of the significance of personal ethics in the social reconstruction of society.

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9 RUSKINIAN INFLUENCES ON OTHER THEORISTS John Bates Clark and Alfred Marshall

An examination of the life-experiences of William Smart has illustrated in detail, for one distinguished, mainstream, though overlooked, British economist, that Ruskinian thinking interpenetrated practical and theoretical discussion of economics in the final decades of what some historians refer to as the long nineteenth century. Smart, whose work is relatively underexplored in the literature on economic thought, was by no means an exceptional case. This chapter will look in detail at samples of writing drawn from John Bates Clark, ‘the first’, according to the New Palgrave, ‘American economist to deserve and gain an international reputation’ (Dewey 1987: 428) and at a piece of writing by Alfred Marshall, in order to highlight both the Ruskinian influences and the changed climate of opinion concerning the cultural significance of economic theory. Ruskin’s influence on Clark has not been acknowledged before in the literature and it may come as a surprise since he went on to become a major neoclassical theorist. John Bates Clark and The Philosophy of Wealth Clark’s Philosophy of Wealth (1886) is described in the New Palgrave as an embarrassment to his followers, because of its Victorian high mindedness (Dewey 1987: 429). Good economists, like economics, should stand, it would seem, outside culture, a dispensation which even the physical sciences have not been granted! The title alone marks it as a Victorian work though its methodological force is not to be overlooked. It was praised, at the time, as a publication which ‘redeemed’ the dismal science (Memorial, 1938, p. 17). All of Ruskin’s political economy could be described, without too much violence, as a philosophical reflection upon the science of wealth as outlined in classical economics in general and Mill in particular. In Britain, Cliffe Leslie, whom Jevons described in 1876 as ‘at the forefront of the inductive and historical school of economists’, had written reflectively on ‘The love of money’ (Leslie 1879, dating from November 1862),

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concluding that political economists needed to turn from production to a study of ‘the deeper laws which regulate the demand of the consumers’ (Jevons 1876: 622; Leslie 1879: 8). This is a project which had already engaged Ruskin. In 1876, when the earlier orthodoxy was, according to Jevons, being disrupted, Leslie was complaining that the existing theory of wealth throws ‘hardy any light on the nature of wealth’ (Jevons 1876: 619; Leslie 1879: 217). The topic was not short lived either: Taussig talked to the American Economic Association as late as 1905 on ‘The Love of Wealth and the Public Service’, criticizing Nassau Senior’s concept of economic man and drawing upon Leslie’s sense of the complexities of economic motivation. Marshall’s lecture, the subject of the second part of the chapter, is also partly concerned with the appropriate uses of wealth. Money, wealth and its uses was not a topic peculiar to Ruskin nor did Ruskin have a monopoly in moralizing about it even if he stimulated discussion of it. The economic, moral and cultural dimensions of wealth was a significant topic and the crises in classical political economy, experienced in various forms in the 1870s and 1880s, led to a widening sense of unease with the rigidity of classical dogma (Koot 1987: 10–22). Leslie’s Ruskinian view of political economy as ‘an assemblage of speculations and doctrines which are the result of a particular history’ rather than a body of ‘universal and immutable truths’, marks the start of the crises as formally recognized in the literature (Leslie 1879: 148; Koot 1987: 40). Wealth was seen as the subject-matter of economics but also, given its social and cultural significance, a moral concern. It was becoming accepted that the conventional notion was also at fault. Ruskin’s reaction had been radical but by this time no longer idiosyncratic. Whatever his followers later sensitivities, Clark himself was not embarrassed by the topic for the work was reprinted regularly until 1904. And in the Memorial prepared by his children, it is given proper attention both by the family and by other academics. It was admired by Woodrow Wilson which suggests that Clark was, in the book, hitting his target audience (Memorial, 1938, p. 20). It is no different in tone from what we know of Marshall’s attempts to structure an evolutionary economics in which economic ideas are addressed with a framework not only of markets and technologies but of social amelioration, change and institutional development. Marshall never realized this vision either, though he discovered many interesting economic questions in trying. What a brief analysis hopes to show is that Clark progressed by way of a contemplation of observed and experienced socio-economic life to a new understanding of the nature and purpose of economic intellectual speculation. The cultural implications of economics were not lost on Clark. Ruskinian and other ideas, subjected to Clark’s own precise and systematic thought processes and developed in an effective prose, had a significant and useful part to play in the transition. The book is a

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staging post towards The Distribution of Wealth. Clark’s later development as an economist, however, will not be considered. Clark was born at Providence, Rhode Island, on 26 January 1847. He was born into a prosperous, serious-minded family, much influenced by the culture of ‘old New England’. In this culture, which united ‘religion with secular practicality’, Clark was immersed (Memorial, 1938, p. 6). Clark considered a career in the ministry but settled finally for an academic career in economics. His father was engaged, latterly, in selling agricultural equipment and Clark knew something of the business ethics of a merchant trader and the nature of the links with the farming communities that his father supplied. Clark’s background was not unlike that of William Smart. There is no doubt that both were influenced in their social thinking by their Christian upbringing and that they both brought commercial experience to their initial study of economics (Memorial, 1938, p. 8). Clark’s energy was reduced from 1876 after suffering an incapacitating illness. The Memorial does not provide details when it is dealing with the issue directly, but later in the text severe pneumonia is hinted at. After restarting his studies, interrupted by the death of his father from tuberculosis, Clark opted to further his education in Heidelberg and Zurich. Here he studied under members of the German Historical School, a school of economic thinking of which Ruskin would have approved. The English versions of the German School held Ruskin in high esteem though they were not concerned with ‘building a new system of economic theory’ as the German’s were (Koot 1987: 2). Rather, the English version was concerned with the ‘limitations of theory’ and the promotion of ‘the inductive studies of economic history and applied economics in the service of social reform’ (Koot 1987: 1–2). Clark was attracted to the German School because of its ‘ethical orientation’ (Memorial, 1938, p. 15). Dewey’s judgement, on the consequences of this German influence for Clark (he did not notice Ruskin’s) is ambiguous: ‘Whether this influence was for good or ill is not clear. It probably slowed his development as theorist’ (Dewey 1987: 429). What Dewey intends is the development of Clark as a neoclassical theorist. The Ruskinian and German Historicist tenor of The Philosophy of Wealth does not prevent, however, a neoclassical-type utility theory, notions of ‘inappropriable utilities’ (externalities) or the insight that free goods needed to be subjected to economic analysis, from emerging within it. Ruskin’s criticism of the vacuum on classical economic thinking concerning nature may or may not have influenced Clark in this respect. Also, with the term ‘inappropriable utilities’, Clark recognizes the possibility of competitive or market failure. The Philosophy of Wealth is an economics work with both methodological and direct economic content. The significance of biographical facts arises from their historicity and may be contrasted with the sense of a historical necessity which can be associated with

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the idea of the linear development of science from error to truth, at least in some versions of the history of economic thought. For a defence of biographical knowledge in the context of science, see Young 1987. Individual thinkers are perforce enmeshed in a set of associations and attitudes which arise out of the lived quality of their lives. Clark’s thinking was influenced by the society in which he lived and the literature that he read and that intellectual culture is inscribed in his first book. The challenge of thinking anew outside a rigid classical system acted as a stimulation to new theoretical insights in general. Though he did contribute to system building, he believed in the continued need for ‘sound intuitive judgments’ (Memorial, 1938, p. 22). Like many other economists at this time, Clark had to free himself from an economic and social orthodoxy which accepted laissez-faire and the dogmatic truths of an unreflected classical political economy bound together, in the United States, with the social Darwinism of William Graham Sumner (Pickens 1968: 202). Amasa Walker’s textbook The Science of Wealth, published in 1866 and from which Clark had studied under the guidance of Julius Seelye, President of Amhurst College, disseminated a rigid belief in the primacy of established laws and the necessity of society conforming to them. Walker’s textbook does, however, link economics and ‘morals’ and the laws ‘appertain to the higher nature . . . of man’ (Henry 1995: 14). Notwithstanding, Ruskin, had he known of it, would have readily classified it as ‘vulgar’. Even if Sumner’s Darwinist views were not crude but couched in terms of what Pickens has called Scottish ‘ethical naturalism’, there can be little doubt that the intellectual climate of the United States in the later nineteenth century tended to favour laissez-faire and the single-minded, wealthaccumulating, ‘masterly’ entrepreneur as a necessary cultural hero – Rockafeller and Carnegie being the ruthless exemplars (McCloskey 1951: 131). It is in this context that Clark’s Philosophy of Wealth is to be considered for it is set in an economy which is in transition ‘from a competitive to a non-competitive capitalism’ (Henry 1995: 15). The German Historical School was only one such influence, for Clark had read the works of the systematic-minded Henry George. Clark, according to Stabile, does not make reference to George in The Distribution of Wealth and though he is mentioned twice in The Philosophy of Wealth (Gaffney 1987: 514; Stabile 1995: 375–6). Gaffney, who sees Clark as George’s ‘nemesis’, adds to Stabile’s insight that Clark was adept in borrowing good ideas, with the following: ‘but he was not always willing to give credit’ (Gaffney 1987: 515; 1995: 384). Although Ruskin is only mentioned once in the Philosophy of Wealth, this is not reason enough to suppose, given Gafney’s comment, that there is not more to his influence. The Memorial is frank about influences upon Clark arguing that ‘His independence of thought was such as to make it a peculiarly difficult task to trace sources of

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formative influences’ (Memorial, 1938, p. 15). The question is best approached textually. Ruskinian and other influences in The Philosophy of Wealth The Philosophy of Wealth is composed of a series of essays published up to ten years earlier in the New Englander. As its title suggests, it is a reflection upon economics as the science of wealth. In others words, it is concerned with finding a new methodological basis for scientific discussion of the subject. Its target audience is ‘readers and thinkers who have long been in revolt against the general spirit of the old political economy’ (Clark 1886: v). Despite, or perhaps because of, its high Victorian moral appeal, it is a serious attempt to address problems in Ricardo’s and Mill’s approach to wealth, as well as an attempt to find a collective approach to economic ills. The targets are compatible with Ruskin’s targets: the notion of economic man; the meaning of wealth in Mill and Bastiat (another direct Ruskin target); the unwarranted division between productive and unproductive labour; Mill’s notion of utility; the attack on the notion of ‘man as machine’; the contrast between ‘strife’ and ‘co-operation’ and ‘the increased need of moral agencies’. Clark is sensitive to the moral dualism of Church or family on the one hand and business on the other and, at one point, comes close to Smart when he says that ‘a sensitive conscience must be left at home when its possessor goes to the office or the shop’ (Clark 1886: 157). Did Smart read Clark or were they both drawing on a common source, perhaps in Christian idealism? Henry talks of Clark’s ‘Christian socialism’ as a way of characterizing his early writings but the aims of Christian idealism may be just as relevant (Henry 1995: 25). The parallelisms in the intellectual development of Clark and Smart are interesting. In the opening essay, Clark uses Ruskin’s typical method, etymology, to trace out the meaning of wealth: it is derived, according to Clark, from the Saxon word ‘weal’ which signifies a ‘relative well-being’. Clark is aware that the ‘greatest social wealth does not necessarily create the greatest social weal’ (Clark 1886: 58). The general methodological issues, including Clark’s Leslie-like attempts to place the individual within a wider set of collective and primitive forces, suggested as appropriate also by organicism, place it solidly within the reappraising literature more generally of the late 1870s and early 1880s. This is a literature which Ruskin influenced, at least in England. In the United States it has to be borne in mind that Sumner had also worked to develop an understanding of society in which balance between public and private good was achieved by moral sense. The Philosophy of Wealth is a work of intellectual synthesis. Ruskin’s invisible textual presence is discovered in the big methodological issues which Clark explores, but also, as with Smart, though not to the same extent,

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in details of the language. When Clark is dealing with ‘fuel’ and the ‘motive power’ of the labourer he is calling upon images of human motivation derived directly from Ruskin’s treatment of the topic in Unto This Last (Clark 1886: 53). Ruskin’s grand and comprehensive notion of ‘illth’ has a textual presence in Clark’s notion of ‘irrational wealth’: ‘immoral books, poisonous beverages, and adulterated articles of food’ and his Political Economy of Art in Clark’s example of ‘Beauty and truth’ having ‘never been monopolized and sold to the highest bidder’ (Clark 1886: 205, 209). This is true of beauty and truth as a whole or as ideal forms but it is not true of the individual works of artists who manage to realize the ideals in material product. Clark disclaims any borrowings from other persons, Jevons being the primary unspoken ‘other’, since Clark works out, in his examination of the theory of value, a utility theory close to Jevon’s theory of marginal utility. There are, no doubt, others, for Dr Roscher, a seminal German historical economist, is mentioned in the context of the inappropriateness of the productive/unproductive division of labour but is also textually present, though not named, in the conception of the organic nature of society. Ruskin, too, is given a direct textual presence in the methodological discussion of economic law, supported by material drawn from the opening moves of Unto This Last. Karl Knies, another member of the German School, is, like Ruskin, summoned to a textual presence and in the same capacity – to undermine Mill’s methodology. Jevons is specifically mentioned in the preface to the second edition and the independent status of Clark’s approach affirmed. In the preface to the second edition, Clark claims that nine of the twelve topics fall ‘within the traditional limits of economic science’ whereas three ‘discuss subjects which a highly orthodox view may perhaps regard as lying outside of economic limits’ (such as Chapter 12, ‘The economic function of the Church’). Again, it is interesting, given this chapter, that Smart worked closely with the Church of Scotland in the development of his ideas on housing and housing policy. Clark reinforces his appeal to progressive thinkers by stating that ‘Those who believe in a progressive system of economic science will probably not desire to exclude them; (The Philosophy of Wealth, p. viii). Clark continued to emphasis a ‘new’ approach to economic theory in later lay publications such as ‘Economic theory in a new character and relation’ (Clark 1906: 47–56). This is all signalled in the subtitle of the work, ‘Economic principles newly formulated’. But it is in his first preface’s opening paragraph that Clark sets out an agenda which is clearly, when Unto This Last is kept firmly in mind, Ruskinian, even if Clark, like Smart, went on to become a cutting-edge economist: The traditional system was obviously defective in its premises. These were

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assumptions rather than facts, and the conclusions deduced from them were, for that reason, uncertain. The assumed premises were, at certain points, at variance with the facts, and the conclusions were erroneous. The better elements of human nature were a forgotten factor in certain economic calculations; the man of the scientific formula was more mechanical than the man of the actual world. A degraded conception of human nature vitiated the theory of the distribution of wealth.

(Clark 1886: iii) This is not the end of the Ruskinian argument, for the second paragraph contains the gem: ‘Economic science, in general, found an adequate place for the intellectual activities of men . . .’. By limiting the notion of intervention in the market, political economy, according to Ruskin, disallowed the possibility of an administering intelligence. Clark’s articles attempted ‘to bring the premises of the science into better accordance with facts, and to bring the general spirit of it into greater harmony with the instinctive demands of a healthy human nature’ (Clark 1888: iv). Such endeavours were common both to Ruskinians and to the German Historical School. Clark’s biographical development was as complicated as Smart’s in terms of the influences and experiences which shaped his perceptions. Even if Clark became a leading neoclassical economist, he understood that his assumptions were neither historically correct nor realistic, but, like. Jevons and Marshall, came to accept them as merely hypothetical. This change radically altered the cultural significance of economic theory. His guiding force throughout the work is summed up in ‘Non-Competitive Economics’, ‘Economic science needs modernizing’ (Clark 1888: 203). And this is, of course, what Clark went on to do, though not in a manner necessarily predicted by much of the content of his first published book. Alfred Marshall, Ruskin and ‘The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry’ Given Alfred Marshall’s long career and unparalleled influence on the development of economics in Britain, it may seem inappropriate to spend considerable time on a lecture which may appear, in the light of modern economics, somewhat eccentric. However, this lecture was given at The Congress of the Royal Economic Society which was held on the 9th and 10th of January 1907, at the London School of Economics, in the presence of ‘leading English economists and many distinguished foreigners’. In such a context it has an added significance. Pigou thought enough of the lecture to reprint it, in 1925, in Memorials to Alfred Marshall.

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The Congress was seen by Haldane, who gave the inaugural address, as an occasion at which ‘the brotherhood of science’ could develop a wider outlook than the mere national or insular and take stock of the methods and progression of economic analysis (Haldane 1907: 3). Marshall’s paper was given at the dinner on the 9th of January and the published version was developed from the notes that Marshall made for that occasion. In the lecture, Marshall takes stock of the new cultural context within which economic ideas and economists were working. Haldane had already used, at the conference, a military image to depict the economist at work: ‘economists were to the statesmen very much what, to use a military metaphor, the General Staff were to the commanders of armies; they worked out principles and plans for them. But they warned that no principles and no plans could be sufficient guides to unforeseen emergencies’ (Haldane 1907: 3). Marshall foresaw in his lecture the highly significant role of economic questions ‘in the life and thought of the present century’, particularly the life of parliaments and governments. This is one example of his sustained vision of the significance of the economic profession that he had been developing at Cambridge. But Marshall’s reflections were to be concentrated not on methodological grounds but on a discussion of the question which had troubled Carlyle and Ruskin nearly half a century earlier: ‘I would like to ask you this evening to consider what it is that such a study can do towards helping the world to turn its growing attention to the best account for social well-being’. The question of the relationship between wealth and virtue has already been shown to be a longstanding topic in human history. It was discussed by the Scottish Enlightenment long before it was discussed by Ruskin (Hont and Ignatieff 1983). Marshall’s sources could have been varied but the details of the language and the theme of chivalry suggest Ruskin. Marshall, though prepared to trust the material benefits of increased economic activity, was always sensitive to the charge that economics was not as concerned as it ought to have been with moral questions. The Ruskinian theme, common also to Carlyle, continues into the lead sentence of the paragraph which follows: ‘It is a common saying that we have more reason to be proud of our ways of making wealth than of our ways of using it’ (Marshall 1907: 8). Such a question was not out of character, for Marshall had been drawn to a study of economics through a concern with the moral basis for the human sciences and through a concern for an understanding of a relationship between wealth and poverty (Whitaker 1987: 350, 353). Marshall says so in his lecture: ‘it was my desire to know what was practicable in social reform . . . which led me to read Adam Smith and Mill, Marx and Lassalle, forty years ago’ (Marshall 1907: 17). Marshall, reacting to an inflexible and dogmatic interpretation of classical economics, had always been anxious not to overstate the case for economic man

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and to remind his students and readers that human motivation was to be thought about in broader terms, taking into account moral, institutional and other constraints. He also held that increases in the possibilities of human life required firstly an increase in the national capacity for economic production and change. His concern for improved quality of life rather than simply increased standards of living, marks him as a Victorian thinker and places him in a framework of values which would also include John Ruskin. Seen in this light, Marshall’s lecture takes a different status. Whitaker’s description of the social context of Marshall’s economic thinking embodies much that Ruskin would have approved. Yet Ruskin is rarely mentioned in biographies of Marshall’s intellectual development or in Marshall’s correspondence (Keynes 1972: 244). Marshall and Ruskin did meet at Oxford dinner parties, but direct social communication between them seems to have been limited. Marshall’s lecture is an economic lecture in the sense that general ideas such as redistribution or the extent of poverty in London are evaluated by economic means. It is also an economic work in the sense that economic and materialistic ideas are merged with ideas that are materially or culturally ameliorating. Morris’s News from Nowhere, receiving, along with More’s Utopia, a special mention with respect to the idea of cultural improvement. Both works contain reflections upon capitalistic production, More’s dealing with the new economy as it was appearing in his time and Morris’s with late Victorian capitalism. Marshall would have known that Morris was an intellectual heir of both Carlyle and Ruskin. Such utopias, according to Marshall, ‘stimulate aspirations’ without being a programme of practical activities. So utopias are not idle daydreams but they are not blueprints for reform either. The inapplicability is, in his eyes, their best recommendation, for Marshall seems to have both distrusted and admired the genre. Perhaps it is fairer to conclude that he had a hesitant attitude towards socialist utopias, for he himself penned, in 1922, an incomplete piece entitled, ‘Ye route to ordered progress towards Utopia’ (Groenewegen 1995: 727). Morris’s work is mentioned in the passage headed ‘Progress in the long run delayed by the exaggeration of the evils inherent in present economic conditions’. But it is part of the work of News from Nowhere to encourage reflection upon existing conditions by constructing a radical contrast. ‘The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry’ is likely to prove a rhetorically complex work. Morris, who described reading Ruskin’s books, in his ‘long-winded sketch’ of his life, as ‘a sort of revelation’, adapted many of Ruskin’s ideas (Morris 1883: 29). Like Ruskin, he approached social criticism via nature, art and architecture (Briggs 1962: 16). News from Nowhere, published in book form in 1891, was written in reaction to Bellamy’s view of a future governed by ever-increasing levels of machinery and urbanization. Intellectually, Morris borrowed many aesthetic and

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social ideas from Ruskin and from Carlyle and gave them a strong socialist bias. Morris, in contrast to prevailing conditions, envisaged a future, post-revolutionary society in which economic life is decentralized, rural and self-managed, and where pollution, the waste created by unnecessary competition, privilege and poverty, has been abolished (CPRE 1990: 7). Marshall’s notion of the details of economic progress is left unspecified in his lecture, though he had long wished to see, like Ruskin, good housing and fresh air for working people. His long-term aim had been to fit ‘ordinary human beings for a higher form of life’ (Groenwegen 1995: 727). Marshall’s views on character being moulded ‘by his every day work’ is entirely Ruskinian, for Ruskin held that workers were produced by the working environment they inhabited, and potentially utopian (Marshall, quoted in Parsons 1932: 107; Employment, C&W 17: 541). Textually it would seem that progress would consist in moral reform and large-scale industrial and bureaucratic experimentation. Such experimentation being essential, when appraised by strong characters, for the movement of the economic system forward. Nature as a model for farm and factory is a legacy that Ruskin left to Morris and to the garden city movement. In News from Nowhere, people work because to work is ‘life’ and is ‘pleasurable’, either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant; or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as in the case with what you may call mechanical work; and lastly . . . because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists.

(Morris [1890] 1962: 262) Marshall, nervous of socialist utopian visions and what they implied about contemporary economic progress, devotes a section of his lecture to consider what failed utopian experiments, as opposed to utopian literature, have to say about human motivation. It is worth noting, given that Marshall mentions it, that More’s Utopia is sometimes interpreted as a utopian socialist tract and that More’s arguments for communism are in fact economic rather than moral as they are in Plato’s Republic (Still 1997: 41). Chivalry according to Marshall Consistent with his theme of ‘social well-being’, Marshall examines ways of enlisting ‘wealth in the service of the true glory of the world’ (Marshall 1907: 13). The images that he draws upon are medieval and astounding:

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Chivalry in business includes public spirit, as chivalry in war includes unselfish loyalty to the cause of prince, or of Country, of crusade. But it includes also a delight in doing noble and difficult things because they are noble and difficult; as knightly chivalry called on a man to begin by making his own armour for choice in those contests in which his skill and resource, his courage and endurance, would be put to the severest tests. It includes a scorn for cheap victories, and a delight in succouring those who need a helping hand. It does not disdain the gains to be one on the way, but it has the fine pride of the warrior who esteems the spoils of a well-fought battle, or the prizes of a tournament, mainly for the sake of the achievements to which they testify, and only ion the secondary degree for the value at which they are appraised in the money of the market.

(Marshall 1907: 14) That there is more to business that chicanery is a theme, already mentioned in Clark’s Philosophy of Wealth. No doubt the notion of chivalry can be drawn from the general culture. It was a theme, for example, in the popular paintings and tapestries of the Pre-Raphaelites, especially of Burne-Jones and earlier, under the guise of ‘Heroism’, and ‘the Chivalry of Labour’, it was used by Carlyle as a way of urging concerns for welfare on the owners and operators of capital (Carlyle 1909: 277, 283). But it was Ruskin who consistently propagated the idea of economic chivalry starting in his lecture on ‘Traffic’ given to the citizens of Bradford on the occasion of reflecting on their architectural plans for the building of the Bradford Exchange. On that occasion, Ruskin challenged the Christian notion of the impious and hence anti-heroic nature of commerce: The wonder has always been great to me, that heroism has never been supposed to be in anywise consistent with the practice of supplying people with food or clothes; but rather or quartering one’s self upon them for food, and stripping them of their clothes. Spoiling of armour is an heroic deed in all ages; but the selling of clothes, old, or new, has never taken any colour of magnanimity. Yet one does not see why feeding the hungry and clothing the naked should ever become base business, even when engaged in on a large scale.

(CWO, C&W, 18: 449) When the two passages are read side by side, it is hard to envisage that Marshall had not either directly or indirectly taken in Ruskin’s version of economic heroism as set out in ‘Traffic’. The Crown of Wild Olives, in which the lecture was republished, was one of Ruskin’s works which touched upon economic ideas and which was well received as a kind of cultural primer by late Victorian readers. Indeed, together with Sesame and Lilies the work achieved an almost immediate

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popularity which had been denied to Ruskin’s earlier writings. There is extratextual evidence that Marshall reflected upon Ruskin’s Political Economy of Art and on Morris’s notions of art, beauty and economic life (Groenewegen 1995: 774). Even if the notion of chivalry does not come directly from Ruskin, Morris’s News from Nowhere depicts economic agency based upon hospitality, the ‘gift’ and hence far-reaching notions of chivalry. Ruskin, in working upon his idea of the Guild of St George, developed these notions. St George, the Christian knight who came to the defence of the weak, was Ruskin’s figurative and aesthetic response to the debased anti-hero, economic man, whose response to weakness and poverty was exploitation. What links Ruskin’s text with Marshall’s is the attempt to reconstruct the entrepreneur as economic hero, free of the ugly distortions occasioned by laissez-faire and the ruthlessness of unbridled economic man. Marshall’s aim was to develop an economic culture in which those who achieve wealth can be ‘proud of the elevation of life which has been achieved by training the finer elements of human nature to full account in the production of wealth and in its uses’ (Marshall 1907: 14). It was a consistent theme of Ruskin’s that, in a sense, nature imitated art and hence economic man crowded out the finer aspects of human motivation. Unlike those of Ruskin, Marshall’s aim was not constructed in radical terms. Whereas Ruskin was constructing a hero to be called into existence, Marshall is outlining ways in which the hero, to some extent at least, already exists. His economic knight, though highly imaginative, is manly and responsible, and has wisdom enough to test his creative ideas and discipline them ‘by a stronger will’: ‘His strong nervous force is at the opposite extreme of human nature from that nervous irresponsibility which conceives hasty Utopian schemes’ (Marshall 1907: 16). It would seem that distinction between reasoned manly writing (and hence thoughts and deeds) and effeminate and sentimental writing, which was used successfully to undermine Ruskin in the 1860s is here being revived and used against utopian radicals at the turn of the century. This curious tension between the (allegedly) gendered attributes of ‘thought’ (‘logic/masculine’) and ‘feelings’ (‘intuitions/feminine’) runs though discussions of economics method and becomes most explicit in later talk about Keynes and The General Theory. Marshall was not alone in making use of such imagery. Taussig, in a lecture to which Marshall refers, had talked earlier of ‘the active and healthy man’ whose wish was ‘to be up and doing’ and of the entrepreneur’s ‘passion for domination’ and ‘mastery’ (Taussig 1906: 6, 7). This is the economy of boys’ games and sexual sublimation. All of this is in contrast to the bohemian Morris who, in his revolt against the established commercial economy, imagines an anti-market, antiphilistine and feminized economy of ‘gift’ as well as of domestic, craft and smallscale production (Williams 1980: 158). Marshall would have known, also, about

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Ruskin’s concerns with what Spear has called the ‘feminization of culture’ (Spear 1984: 168). At this stage in his lecture Marshall is also, wittingly or unwittingly, participating in the literary tradition characterized by Spear as ‘realized romance’ (Spear 1984: 7). Thus, both positively and negatively, Marshall’s lecture is a continuation of Ruskinian themes. In an economic world peopled with Marshallian heroes, the implication is that radical socialism would have no place. Marshall both uses and subverts Ruskinian images in order to defend the economic order against the unnamed utopianists and collectivists who were calling for a radical redistribution of wealth. But what is the motivating force of such an entrepreneur? ‘The chief motive to the highest constructive work in industry is a chivalrous desire to master difficulties and obtain recognised leadership’ (Marshall 1907: 14). In other words a Ruskinian and Morrisonian desire to work for the sake of work that is rewarding in itself. Pecuniary gain is the measure of success rather than the incentive to perform! Capitalists gain in honour and wealth, to use Morris’s terms for Marshall focuses on ‘success’, by undertaking tasks on which ‘the progress of industry most depends’ (Marshall 1907: 15). This is surely an answer to Morris: it already happens. Marshall’s next move is equally forceful: such heroes are unlikely to prosper within state or any other bureaucracies, ‘no fairly good substitute has been found, or seems likely to be found, for the bracing fresh air which a strong man with a chivalrous yearning for leadership draws into his lungs when he set out on a business experiment at his own risk’ (Marshall 1907: 17). The young knight is also a muscular Christian. The image shares much with Clark’s idea of the instinctive demands of ‘a healthy human nature’. And it is in the contemplation of this figure that Marshall finds his answer to collectivism: But I am convinced that so soon as collectivist control had spread so far as to considerably narrow the field left for free enterprise, the pressure of bureaucratic methods would impair not only the springs of material wealth, but also many of those higher qualities of human nature, the strengthening of which should be the chief aim of social endavour.

(Marshall 1907: 18) Marshall concedes that government has a role and an expanded role, but the state must do only that which is vital. It must not ‘imitate those people who have time and energy enough to manage their neighbours’ households, while their own is always in disorder’ (Marshall 1907: 19). Though Marshall makes the case negatively, where work needs never-ending innovation, it needs to generate the

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new knowledge through business experiment. Marshall turns to the evidence from utopian schemes including ‘some of the most recent experiments in America’ (Marshall 1907: 23). Although individual schemes are not mentioned, Ruskinians in the United States had experimented with communistic societies which had failed, largely due to discontentment with those who were unwillling to work on the part of those who were. Marshall seems to have reached this conclusion by himself and uses the results as evidence of the degree of ‘economic chivalry there is in the breast of the common man – that is, of the man who is not endowed with the qualities of leadership’ (Marshall 1907: 24). He concludes that in such a man, ‘jealousy is a more potent force than chivalry’. Chivalry exists but it is not distributed well and has to be both economized and nurtured: ‘the world under free enterprise will fall far short of the finest ideals until economic chivalry is developed. But until it is developed, every great step in the direction of collectivism is a grave menace to the maintenance even of our moderate rate of progress’ (Marshall 1907: 2). Marshall’s concluding section is also dealt with in language and sentiment which accepts and subverts Ruskinian ideals: And if coming generations can search out and honour that which is truly creative and chivalric in modern business work, the world will grow rapidly in material wealth and in wealth of character. Noble efforts could be evoked; and even dull men would gradually cease to pay homage to wealth per se without inquiring how it had been acquired.

(Marshall 1907: 26) However, what emerges is a sense of the possibility of reforming capitalism by merely reforming the character of those who inherit riches. Marshall uses ‘chivalry’, which must be based upon personal, rather enforced, acceptance of a code of ethical conduct, as a reactionary device to avoid the horrors of any more radical programme of action. Ruskin’s influence The decision to look at John Bates Clark and Alfred Marshall as a way of rounding off the section of Ruskin’s influence on economic discussion in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth was, perhaps, a surprising one. The most commonly acknowledged influence is through Hobson who constructed his sense of market failure along lines suggested by Ruskin. But Hobson as an example carries the disadvantage that he too was an outsider, a heretic. Any influence Ruskinian ideas had on Hobson can be too readily

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discounted as aiding his fall from grace, Keynes’ efforts towards his rehabilitation not withstanding. Ruskin is rarely treated in the histories of economic thought, though his mentor Carlyle, because of his direct communications with Mill, is sometimes mentioned. Ruskin clearly stands outside the profession even if his political economy is constructed around that of John Stuart Mill. Literature on the evolution of the concept of economic man, a literature which is highly developed and which contains interesting and useful work, tends to ignore Ruskin’s contribution to the discussion. But if Ruskinian influences are to be found in the works of leading neoclassical economists such as Marshall, Clark and Smart, then there is stronger ground for accepting that Ruskin was indeed manipulating a knowledge-base or raising questions of the relationship between economics and society which had significant implications. The choice has been justified by what a study of the two texts has revealed. Ruskin’s views, language and methodology and ethical concerns, hardly acknowledged, have interpenetrated the texts. Albeit the texts are unconventional and reflective but this is not in itself insignificant. Clark is caught in the act of questioning the rigidity of the Classical School and searching for a new set of insights which could form the basis for his own economic inquiries. This is a turning point at which he tries to open himself to different ways of constructing the world. That he went on to become a distinguished economist, challenging the trust-based system of business enterprise that had started to develop in the United States suggests that his efforts were justified. The piece by Marshall, rhetorically complex and revealing of his aspirations and fears, and of his manipulative skill, illustrates how images first used by Ruskin to raise understanding of the problem of economic welfare and social justice, were expropriated by a mainstream economist to challenge more radical agendas. And if Ruskin’s influence is strong in this one piece of writing, it is likely to be so wherever Marshall is exploring his version of economic man or his vision of a moralized economic society. For Marshall, economics also had political and cultural significance. His lecture to the Congress of the Royal Economic Society fixes him in an interesting cultural and political context. Marshall is caught in the text on a turning point concerning the reform of capitalism and the development of a social economics, already exemplified in the chapter on Smart, which took into account the welfare of ordinary people. That he chooses to challenge the social Darwinian notion of the characteristics of the captains of industry, by images drawn from Ruskin’s The Crown of Wild Olives, is both economically and culturally interesting. It is economically interesting because Marshall, like Ruskin, was often engaged in challenging a one-dimensional picture of economic man, an economic creation which became culturally inscribed. It is culturally interesting because Ruskinian

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images were appropriate not only to him but also to those who listened and read. In taking for granted the appropriateness of the images, Marshall is acknowledging their cultural significance, even within the context of the economics profession. It is testimony to Marshall’s rhetorical skills that he can manipulate the image both to support his own case and subvert types of utopian theory and practice of which Ruskin would have approved. Smart’s concerns towards the end of his life were similarly oriented towards a changed perception of the possibilities of lived economic life and of economic well-being more widely. His resort to Ruskinian language and concerns is more than nostalgia. Although Ruskin had constructed a radical critique of Victorian capitalism, it was neither entirely socialist nor centralist, nor did it have to be subscribed to wholesale. It could be adjusted to suit different tastes for it was never a closed system and never aspired to be one. It was more a habit of mind, a questioning and re-questioning of the world from the perspective of so much poverty within the potential of so much wealth. As such, it held possibilities for aiding the reflections of economists as diverse as Smart, Clark and Marshall. Ruskin’s thinking from half a century earlier still held suggestions and implications which were relevant both culturally and in terms of social justice. Ruskin, either directly or indirectly, helped influence the cultural understanding of the relationship between economic theory, social policy and socio-economic practices. Ruskin’s writing, given its creativity, carried by its rhetorical qualities, its lack of closure and system, its power to surprise and subvert, can still be a source of ideas on economic and social justice.

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1 REASON, RHETORIC AND JOHN RUSKIN 1. 2. 3. 4.

Brantwood is the rambling house which Ruskin bought in 1871 and in which he delighted. It is situated on the edge of Coniston Water with a view across the lake to the Old Man of Coniston. Ruskin had written to The Times on the subject of the Pre-Raphaelites in 1851. The letters on government would have stood some chance of being published. This view of wealth was later held by Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born United States trust baron, who felt that it was no sin to be rich but certainly a sin to die rich. Carnegie’s philanthropy reflected Ruskinian views on wealth. Of course, such a statement is complex. The ‘I’ of childhood is long gone by the time this has come to be written. The ‘I’ that is writing is that of old age. The ‘I’ in the text is a literary construction, located more in text that it is in time. This richness of possible contexts makes this statement all the more chilling.

2 WHY READ RUSKIN ON POLITICAL ECONOMY? 1. It is, for example, asked, and rightly answered, by Kenneth Clark in the following terms: ‘he was a poet’; ‘he was a character of great fascination and complexity’ and ‘for the quality of his mind’ which was such as to refuse ‘to consider any human faculty in isolation’ (Clark 1964: xv–xviii). All are relevant, but mainly to the wider concerns of literary history. Economists, alas, may need more subject-focused reasons. 2. This has given rise to a sterile discussion concerning who is and who is not to be counted as a political economist. What counts are texts. 3. Ruskin knew Maria Edgeworth’s work, both her children’s stories which he read as a child, and her adult books. He held her work in high esteem, mentioning her in the company of Scott. He makes numerous references to her including one to the utilitarian ethical tale The Purple Jar (Ethics, C&W, 18: 300). He was less well pleased with Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (Fors, C&W, 29: 362). 4. Ruskin felt uncomfortable with Darwinian thinking and satirized it in Fors Clavigera. Harrison, attacked in Fors of June 1876, challenges, in a reply also published in 1876, Ruskin’s understanding of Darwinian ideas: ‘The truth is, that you really forswear “evolution” and all its works because you find it difficult to square with the poetic and prophetic scheme of life’ (Harrison 1876: 99). 5. Even such a significant figure as Irving Fisher was prepared to see force in some of Ruskin’s concerns. 6. See Moos’s comments on the lack of ethical content in economics examination papers at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s (Moos 1945: 17–27).

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

Ruskin’s reading of economics is often identified as ‘superficial’. In this passage Ruskin illustrates the kind of test which he regularly applied to his reading. For a fuller treatment of Ruskin’s reading in economics, see Chapter 6 (this volume). It is not entirely inappropriate for Ruskin to claim to have useful knowledge based on owner-managed workshops. Small-scale workshops were a significant feature of economic life. Ruskin’s comments concerning ‘sleepless nights’ spent puzzling over economic ideas not withstanding. To suggest, however, that Ruskin had no understanding of material and structural aspects of the economy would be mistaken. But as the economy is a human product, so it can be regulated by ethical action. This construction of Smith is consistent with Ruskin’s earlier work on attacking economic man and the associated notion of ‘natural law’. Ruskin was satirized in turn, though not by Mill. His notion of ‘life availing’ value is rounded upon, according to Kacher, in the following terms in one of the reviews: ‘Mr Ruskin might just as well say that value meant the beef-steak and onions giving power of anything’ (Kacher 1974: 100). He is also, during the publication of Fors Clavigera, lampooned in Punch for his self-centred writing. Ruskin, who is often accused of nit-picking, was not alone in finding contradictions in Mill. Marx, according to Rothbard, found Mill’s attempt to accomodate Ricardo’s and Senior’s theory of profit as giving rise to ‘absurd contradictions’ (Rothbard 1995: footnote 8, 294). Interestingly, Keynes Preface to the General Theory attacks orthodox economics not on its logical superstructure but on the narrowness of its premises in a manner similar to that pursued by Ruskin in the first chapter of Unto This Last. Common concerns are with applicability and commonsense solutions based upon direct observation and experience. With respect to Frederic Bastiat, Ruskin was correct in his assumption, implied by his statement, that here was someone who strongly supported laissez-faire. Nor was Smart alone in this view. ‘But the political economy of today is the political economy of John Ruskin, and not the political economy of John Bright or even of John Stuart Mill’ (F. York Powell 1905: 4–5). There is always a need for care before picking currants out of any bun supplied by Ruskin!

3 RUSKIN ON ECONOMIC AGENCY 1. Where would this previous unity have been located? 2. According to Cook, the publication of a series of excerpts from Ruskin’s work, highlighting his pronounced literary style, helped convince the public of the validity of this idea. 3. The convention of such texts is that they be both complete and coherent. Mill’s text set the standard for a whole generation. 4. Cook identifies this as a direct reference to the builder’s strike which took place in the latter part of 1895 (Cook 1911a: 27). Notice the ‘our’ to describe the workmen. This is not simply paternalism. It also suggests a community of interest. 5. Though they be few, they are telling. True political economy includes the housewife, the singer and females in labour, i.e. engaged in life-availing work.

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6. A few years later, F. Y. Edgeworth was to use the analogy with thermodynamics as a source for the application of mathematics to the maximizing behaviour in order to refine further the abstract notion of economic man which Ruskin is here objecting too. Edgeworth’s prose has elements of Ruskin’s style and Edgeworth is aware of what he is removing as a result of such a mathematical move. 7. Other examples of unselfish behaviour are provided, e.g. the doctor who must treat the plague victim rather than seek safety. 8. This notion of course confuses an individual’s capacity to become rich and a nation’s capacity to become rich in the sense of a general and sustained increase in living standards. Ruskin is aware of both senses (see, for example, his analysis of two castaways as an example of his understanding of national well-being). If we are reading Ruskin in his own terms, then, the difference between him and technical political economy becomes less significant. If we are reading him within the framework of expectations created by a contemporary ‘Principles’ text then the matter is of significance. 9. Ruskin held this notion consistently. In a paragraph added to the end of an appraisal of his work by William Smart, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow, Ruskin says ‘I have said also that neither Mill, Fawcett nor Bastiat knew the contemptible science they professed to teach’. (A Disciple of Plato: A critical study of John Ruskin, 1883, p. 48). 10. The image of the housewife, for example, is suggested by two passages in Xenophon. First from Xenophon’s notion that ‘possessions shall be in the best condition possible’ and second from the insight that in the household ‘outgoings are controlled mostly by the wife’s dispensations’, (Oeconomicus pp. 419, 389). Xenophon also talks of ‘good builders’ and of the need for timeliness of farming work. 11. For example, ‘All professions should be liberal, and there should be less pride felt in pecularity of employment, and more in excellence of achievement’ (SV, C&W, 10: 201). 12. The implication is that the Victorian economy was riddled with bad practices and poor commercial morality. 13. Wealth for Ruskin is a relative term which can only operate through the poverty of others. 14. In The Two Paths he refers to the process of buying cheap goods as ‘Stealing’ and ‘taking from him the proper reward of his work and putting it into your own pocket’ (TP, C&W, 16: 402). 15. Morris, who was greatly influenced by Ruskin’s ideas, later came to suggest that people should have nothing in their house that was not either useful or beautiful. This is an extension of Ruskin’s notion of expenditure which is ‘availing’. 16. Once again, whilst there is little doubt that Ruskin made direct observation of the poor in his own society, and that the images he constructs are entirely his own, Xenophon talks of the ways in which agricultural labour makes men ‘valiant’ in the sense both of being healthy and willing to defend their property, whereas other work (‘indoor work’) makes them soft.

4 XENOPHON, RUSKIN AND ECONOMIC MANAGEMENT 1. Even here Ruskin may be mistaken about the source, for the phrase is found in a passage of Mill’s marked up by Ruskin in the margins of his own second edition copy

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of Mill’s Principles. See Chapter 6, this volume. Xenophon’s phrase is taken from Memorabilia. 2. This would also put Ruskin into considerable difficulties for in his work on political economy, as in his works more generally, he makes reference to and use of biblical notions of economic justice. 3. In a letter to his father (7 September 1862), Ruskin makes ironic reference to Xenophon as ‘unpractical and weak minded’. Ruskin was writing his essays for Fraser’s Magazine at the time, which became the basis for Munera Pulveris (MP, C&W, 17: 221). Xenophon is only ‘unpractical and weak minded’ as a result of his association with Ruskin’s writing for these are comments aimed, by a comment in The Times of 3 September 1862, at Ruskin himself. 4. But neither is it evidence of a well-honed grasp of philosophy, which could be seen as Russell’s main concern. Russell’s point seems to be that Xenophon recreated Socrates in his own image. As will be shown, Xenophon seems to have had a well-honed grasp of psychology. 5. Lowry, on the other hand, finds his literary craftmanship ‘undistinguished’ (Lowry 1987: 46). 6. The old English word ‘husbanding’ is close to the early sense of the word as used in Greece (see Singer 1958: 29–57). 7. Thus Robin Waterfield, who holds firmly to Finley’s views, states in his new edition of Xenophon, published by Penguin Classics, that none of Xenophon’s remarks ‘should be seen as economics or even proto-economics (Waterfield 1990: 273). 8. As with many other Greek words, the meaning is more complex than this, for setting up the management of an oikos as a form of government, then the extension from ‘estate’ (a small-scale enterprise) to ‘state’ (a large-scale enterprise) is one that can be readily made. For the relevant history, see Singer 1958: 29–57. 9. But he knew of Marx’s activities for he refers to a set of definitions that he gives concerning capital and labour as sounding ‘very radical and International’ which is to be taken, according to Cook and Wedderburn as a reference to Marx and his International Association of Working Men (Fors, C&W, 27: 381). 10. It should not be supposed that the Classical School ignored the question of managerial activity. Smith has already been referred to J.B. Say, James Mill and John Stuart Mill all commented on aspects of behaviour which would be relevant to management as an economic activity (see C. S. George 1972: 67–74).

5 PLATO AND RUSKIN: SEARCHING FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE 1. As it obscured for many years the contribution of Greek thinking to Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 2. There is a danger of reductionism in the approach taken and it has to be acknowledged that Ruskin’s writings on political economy are complex. 3. The works cited constitute Ruskin’s attempt at a theoretical economics. The values and other insights which inform his arguments are to be found throughout his writings and not simply in his theoretical works. A central concern of Ruskin’s political economy was the construction and interpretation of ‘economic man’. Ruskin demonstrates, in texts other than Unto This Last, a concern about the self-fulfilling aspects of estimates of human nature: ‘Thinking of it high, I find it always a higher thing than I thought it; while those who think it low, find it, and will always find it, always lower than they

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thought it’ (CWO, C&W, 18: 474). Political economy, according to Ruskin, predicted it too low and society behaved accordingly! 4. Ruskin tells us about his interest in Plato. He does the same for his interest in Aristotle, describing Ethics as ‘mere bog of glittering mud’ and also, in contrast, ‘What is good in the Ethics is very good’. Care has to be taken of what Ruskin says outside any particular text. (For an analysis, see Gilbert 1940: 52–62). Gilbert makes no reference to Ruskin’s political economy. Collingwood is of the opinion that Ruskin ‘never really understood Aristotle’ (Collingwood [1922] 1971: 5). 5. This is a general problem in the concern with influences. The argument that is being made here does not consist in showing that Plato is the sole influence. Rather, it is about what can be seen in the text when read through Ruskin’s sources. 6. Ruskin tells of the influence of classical Greek sources both directly in the text of his writings on political economy and in his autobiography in which Homer is referenced as a significant political influence (Praeterita, 1949, p. 13). 7. Shaw is pointing out the way in which mid-Victorian society defended itself against Ruskin’s arguments. In The Two Paths, Ruskin told them directly that they were ‘stealing’ (TP, C&W, 16: 401). 8. For the conversion of Thrasymachus’ insight, by F. Y. Edgeworth, into a brilliant aphorism, see Henderson 1995: 141. I failed, there, to spot this specific link with Plato’s Republic. Greek sources thoroughly informed Edgeworth’s economic rhetoric. 9. Whether Plato provides this kind of ‘self-fulfilment’ is open to question. He seems to allow a kind of ‘full expression’ but whether this is the same as that allowed by Ruskin is doubtful. 10. The seamstress is an example of a use, frequently encountered in Ruskin, of a figure of speech, synecdoche, in which a part, here of the economic system, is taken to stand for a whole. ‘The seamstress’ stands for the whole set of workers who earn their living from supplying the luxury items consumed by the rich. The analysis of luxury had long been a subject of interest to economic thought: mercantilists felt that luxury weakened the labour of the poor and Hume distinguished ‘innocent’ luxury from ‘vicious’ luxury. ‘Vicious’ luxury consisted in the consumption habits of a wealthy minority that realized a disproportionate amount of satisfaction (Bowman 1951). Amasa Walker’s economics textbook, published in the United States in 1866, devotes space to a consideration of luxury. The topic reappears in development economics in the 1960s as a concern with the consumption patterns of the rich in poor countries. 11. In his autobiography he describes himself as ‘a violent Tory of the old school’. Spear refers to Ruskin’s view as to the nature of old school Toryism as Platonic in the sense of ‘the willingness of governors to be guardians’ (Spear 1984: 3). The role of Platonic Guardians in Ruskin’s economic thought will be considered later. 12. And the language that he uses to discuss the problem is worth quoting: ‘Consider, whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we clearly saw at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. Luxury is indeed possible in the future – innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold’ (UTL, C&W, 17: 114). Berry identifies food, clothing, shelter and leisure as the basic elements of bodily needs which give rise to demands for luxuries (Berry 1994). In Unto This Last, Ruskin concentrates on food and clothing. 13. It may seem that the ‘guardianship’ role overstates the case. However, in Unto This

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Last Ruskin does not put the role of government regulation to the fore. There are no market wardens of the kind envisaged in the Laws. We operate with a sense of Plato. 14. This silence cannot be explained by the overarching theme of ‘household’, derived essentially from Xenophon, as a metaphor for economic life for clearly a ‘kingdom’ can be an estate and Ruskin uses kingly images elsewhere. I had thought that it could be explained by Ruskin’s rush to finish the final essay under pressure from the publisher when I discovered R. E. Kacher’s unpublished thesis. In ‘Ruskin and the Reviewers’ Kacher argues that the proposal for paternalistic government was rejected by the many reviewers of the work and that Ruskin was advised to think along individual lines if he were to retain any sort of audience. Kacher sees the modified rhetoric and modified content of Unto This Last, compared to The Political Economy of Art, as a direct response to the critics in a vain attempt to retain his readership (Kacher 1974). 15. Ruskin objects, it could be argued, to vulgar political economy in much the way that Socrates objects to the teachings of the Sophists. 16. Here it may be that Ruskin is more Aristotelian than Platonist. By ‘life’, Ruskin intends ‘the good life’. 17. Fain, who noticed the Socratic aspect of some aspects of Ruskin’s rhetoric in Unto This Last, failed to see the fundamental way in which Plato informs the entire argument. 18. Hobson, who readily acknowledges the intellectual debt he owes to Ruskin, quotes this sentence in relation to the antithesis between the cost of labour spent in producing goods and the utility to be derived from them. Hobson sees Ruskin’s contribution as that of balancing social cost with expected utility (see Fain 1954: 89). Ruskin saw that huge social costs were imposed upon workers but social benefits were retained by the middle and upper classes. It should also be noted that his aesthetical notions of value are more strongly developed in Munera Pulveris than elsewhere. 19. ‘What is due’ is, in some sense, for Plato and later thinkers naturally determined. Given the fluidity, under conditions of rising real income, of categories of ‘needs’ and ‘wants’, Plato’s notion of fixity cannot hold (see Berry 1994; 177). Nonetheless, even if it is difficult to measure how much is due, in this sense, modern-day studies, i.e. those based upon the ‘basic needs approach’, concerned with poverty eradication in developing countries call upon concepts such as minimum calorific intake for labour and health as one way of determining a biological minimum. Ruskin’s sense is greater than this for his standard is that of human potential rather than human necessity. Ruskin takes a positive view of the potential of working people to thrive under a just system. 20. Nor is he a sole example. The Spectator for 17 February 1900 published an account of George Thomson, a Ruskin disciple in Huddersfield who organized his woollen-mill of one hundred and fifty persons along lines suggested by Ruskin’s ideas. 21. Plato’s notion of ‘justice’, of course, includes the notion of security, satisfaction and happiness for everyone. 22. Here again is the powerful notion of aesthetics and economics combining to yield an understanding of the awful consequences of existing economic conditions. But Ruskin hints at this in his writings on Modern Painters: ‘No longer among the individuals of the race is there equality or likeness, a distributed fairness and fixed type visible in each; but evil diversity, and terrible stamp of various degradation: features seemed by sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty’. (ModP, C&W, 4: 178). 23. Women are, in Unto This Last, seen as being in charge of the regulation of household

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goods and expenditures. The idea is informed by Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and no doubt confirmed by Ruskin’s observation of, and participation in, mid-Victorian society. 24. Ruskin’s argument is an economic one: it concerns the working conditions of seamstresses. He is not concerned with blurring the social order by inappropriate luxury in dress but he is concerned with the relationship between classes and the distribution of income. Ruskin is not against luxury as a universal phenomenon once the distribution of income is founded upon justice. 25. The Christian significance of ‘stewardship’, found in St Paul but also in St Matthew’s gospel, may not have been lost on his intended readers. Ruskin frequently refers to St Matthew in Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris. Again, the source is a mixture of Xenophon and Christianity. Ruskin’s notion pre-dates Unto This Last as the following quotation illustrates: ‘we can, I say, make kingdoms to be like well-governed households’. (SV, C&W, 11: 261). 26. Ruskin was raised, according to Spear, in a Scottish tradition in which ‘duty towards thy Neighbor’ was seen to account as ‘governor of the final five’ commandments (Spear 1984: 253ff). A synthesis of Christian and classical insights in Ruskin’s political economy is identified but not analysed by Smart. 27. Ruskin was concerned with the impact of consumption decisions on working conditions. His point about ‘cheapness’ being purchased at ‘too dear a price’ could be illustrated, perhaps anachronistically, by factory farming and the hubris involved in the feeding of ground meat to vegetarian animals. If consumers had know the ‘true price’ they were paying for their cheapened beef, would they have chosen to pay it? He illustrated it using rotten meat and charcoal in the context of a housefire. 28. The origin of this phrase may be complex for it could also be drawing upon Gandhi’s notion of ‘trusteeship’. This may or may not have been directly influenced by Ruskin. The point that a similiar problem has generated a similar vocabulary or set of ideas remains valid. 29. The analysis presented here differs from that of Hobson and the difference is highlighted by concentrating upon Ruskin’s sources.

6 JOHN RUSKIN READING JOHN STUART MILL 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

A third edition of the Principles was published in 1852. Ruskin is likely to have bought the latest edition new. A second edition is generally in keeping with an interest in political economy dating from the mid-1840s. Irony and humour abound in Unto This Last. Thus Ruskin juxtaposes political economy and images of death and clothes the skeleton of economic man with flesh and blood. For an interesting analysis, see Hark 1986–7. A third source is Ruskin’s comments in his letters. Ruskin was in the habit of scrawling notes in the margin but also of keeping notebooks on topics relevant to his interests: thus notebooks on, for example, ‘Myths’, ‘Natural History’ and ‘Topics’ (described by C&W as ‘Price, Commerce, Production, Government, Poverty, Luxury, etc.’) (Intro. C&W, 17: xlix). The number of awkwardly located markings in the inner margin of an odd-numbered page made me wonder whether or not Ruskin was left-handed. However, a print by Collingwood of ‘Ruskin in his Study at Brantwood’ (1882), reproduced in Wheeler 1996, 5, shows Ruskin to have been right-handed.

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6. Mill’s text, at page 29, treats the effort of labour as giving rise to ‘feelings of a disagreeable kind’ to which Ruskin responds, ‘Why not feelings of an agreeable kind?’ Ruskin detects, elsewhere, such feelings in the work of artists, skilled craftsmen and artisans more generally. Unto This Last is concerned with various levels of management and institutional arrangements for work which will bring forth ‘feelings of an agreeable kind’. 7. For example, there is a brief mention of them in Jones (1972) and possibly in Fain (1956) but I have found little else. 8. Ruskin may have been stimulated by Mill’s notion of conquerors and conquered, with respect to the distribution of land, to reflect further on the nature of the contribution of rich people to society. If their income was largely from rent then the way in which the rich participated was significantly different from that of the non-rich. 9. Even if this is a rhetorical trick in Keynes to push his case, against that of his opponents, to the limit, it can be argued that this method is an essential part of Ruskin’s rhetorical purpose in Unto This Last, e.g. the reductio ad absurdum which is used elsewhere in the text. 10. Ruskin, perhaps too readily, accepted the sovereignty of the consumer (though limited in Carlyle’s words ‘to the length of sixpence’). 11. For a detailed analysis of Ruskin’s use and misuse of the ‘hardware theory’, see Fain 1951: 152. 12. This reference to capital and bread has been taken as a sign of Ruskin’s suspicion that over-investment could lead to poverty via unemployment of labourers. Nor is this an isolated example. In the marginal note on page 476, in the chapter in which Mill is discussing ‘Remedies for Low Wages’, Ruskin states ‘Thus Mill himself falls into the mistake of supposing that the employment is greater when wages are less’. Ruskin may have thought of a negative effect through reduced consumption. 13. The last word is difficult to read and my interpretation may be wrong though the first half would still hold. 14. Ruskin believed that ‘goods’ and ‘men’, including their physical and moral condition, were the product of the prevailing economic conditions. 15. For a detailed analysis of the various elements in the passage and for the significance of the notion of domestication for Ruskin’s concept of justice, see Henderson (1995: 112–130). 16. Fain holds that the comments cannot be dated. This is accepted but they can be matched textually. 17. Ultimately Ruskin locates ‘wealth’ in the people themselves. 18. Texts dealing with the ethics of hard work and ideas concerning getting on and getting rich quickly were also published in mid-Victorian Britain (see J. L. Winter 1981). 19. Ruskin’s historicism and his impact on political economy in the 1880s has not really been fully explored. 20. For a preliminary attempt to explore the implications of ‘literary economics’ see Henderson 1995. It is this blurring of genres that makes Ruskin so interesting to those engaged in literary analysis in the present day. 21. Ruskin persisted in his dislike for Mill’s arguments. Amongst those he crossed off the list of the Best Hundred Books as suggested to the Pall Mall Gazette of 1886 by Sir John Lubbock, were the names of Mill, Smith and Darwin (Arrows, C&W, 34: 582).

7 SYSTEMATIC AND ANTI-SYSTEMATIC THINKING: RUSKIN AND

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MILL REVISITED 1. These categories are not equivalents. A ‘vestigal’ metaphor is usually referred to as a dead metaphor and these are used usually as a result of habits of mind or of language. A ‘decorative’ metaphor is used as an outcome of a rhetorical choice. 2. Mill occasionally uses ‘instruments’ (e.g. ‘materials and instruments of production’). 3. Cassells rather overblown lecture, first delivered to the Ruskin Society of Glasgow and later published, is a somewhat difficult read. This is largely because of his attempts to imitate Ruskin’s style and for the ironic comments directed towards Mill. Mill is depicted throughout as a muddler. Cassells makes a number of significant points about Ruskin and Mill and is very good on Mill’s attempts to exclude morality. 4. See also ‘The expression “applying capital” is of course metaphorical: what is really applied is labour . . . Again, we often speak of the “productive powers of capital.” This expression is not literally correct’ (Mill, Principles, I, 5, 1). Metaphors mislead! 5. Individuals getting ‘the steam up’ is used slightly more readily on the same page. 6. Keynes, who enjoyed metaphors and knew how they worked, promoted animal spirits to a significant role in formal economic analysis through their impact on the level of autonomous investment.

8 WILLIAM SMART (1853–1915): ECONOMIST AND RUSKINIAN? 1. The New Palgrave uses the term ‘Ruskinite’ and the literary history literature tends to use the term ‘Ruskinian’. 2. William Smart and Mrs Wm. Smart are amongst the sixty-three members and associates of the society in a membership list issued prior to session 1884–5. The President for the session was John Morrison and the Vice-President, William Cassels. James G. Borland was a Committee member for that year. By the session 1894–5, membership stood at 144. At this time the Society was very aware members could ‘point to much in our social life that was the realization of ideas of which Mr Ruskin had been the most eloquent exponent of his generation’ (Report, p. 5). Smart’s name also appears in the membership list of the Guild of St George through the precise date of his membership is not available. 3. Hobson, in contrast, came to a study of Ruskin’s works, at a latter stage in his own academic development (Curtin 1939: 161). 4. Smart was thirty when he wrote the second paper on Ruskin. He had returned to university to further his studies for the MA. He seems to have taken the ordinary classes in 1869–71. His father then determined that he should continue in the family firm. He did not return to the university to finish his studies until 1882 (?). From 1887 to 1892 Smart was an assistant in the Department of Philosophy at Glasgow where he substituted for Professor Edward Caird, particularly in the teaching of political economy, a subject Caird was obliged to teach but for which he had no particular love. Caird was appointed Master of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1893 and held the post until 1907. I am grateful to the Business Records Centre, University Archives, University of Glasgow, for supplying some of this information. 5. This letter has not been traced nor has much else of Smart’s correspondence. Smart was, however, interested in hearing from his neighbour, William Sinclair, of his visit to Brantwood, made to deliver the 1899 Birthday Address to Ruskin. In a letter dated 14 August 1899, to William Wardle, the Secretary of the Ruskin Society of Liverpool,

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Sinclair writes: ‘Yesterday I called on Professor Smart who lives beside us here and told him of my visit to Brantwood in which he was deeply interested’ (personal correspondence from J. S. Dearden, 16 April 1997). 6. The division between writing and thinking may be hard to justify. Jones may be referring to matters of style, though style without content is not a very tenable proposition. T. Jones was, of course, one of Smart’s students. 7. Idealism is an Oxford-based philosophy and one of the leading exponents was T. H. Green. Green was influenced by Hegel and so by historicism. Collingwood categorizes Ruskin’s philosophy as historicism (Collingwood [1922] 1971: 28). As Caird was an idealist who also challenged materialism, Caird’s influence and that of idealism in general cannot be taken to mean that Ruskin’s influence on Smart was thereby necessarily expunged. 8. Smart was to work with Hill on the Poor Law Commission. Ruskin’s involvement with working-class housing was extensive and reflects his preoccupation with the role of personal ethics in social transformation and with his search for institutional contexts capable of realizing guardianship. Nottingham Place was managed by Octavia Hill (Ruskin’s interest stems from 1864). Ruskin held shares in the Artisans, Labourers and General Dwellings Co. Ltd in 1872 and made financial contributions to a number of housing projects. Hill held 800 of stock in the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company in 1880. Smart, in participating in such a scheme in Glasgow, is taking part in a wider social process for housing improvement that, by this time, went beyond simply Ruskinian thinking. However, Jones mention of it in terms of Ruskin can be presumed to stem from the ways in which Smart talked about such initiatives and the examples that he examined. I am grateful to Jennifer Tann for details of Ruskin’s and Hill’s share ownership. See also the biography of Octavia Hill (Boyd 1982). 9. Fain illustrates, using a passage from Studies in Economics, how a paragraph dealing with industrial organization uses some ‘Ruskinian stylistic devices such as word usage (‘healthy labour’), an emphatic pause at the end of the sentence, and characteristic rhetorical repetition’ (Fain 1982: 206–14). The specific example, ‘healthy labour’ is not convincing in itself as there was great concern in Glasgow in the 1880s for the health of labour. 10. Smart had argued, in 1894, with respect to the inclusion of gas-lighting in the closes of municipal houses, that ‘every gas burner is worth a policeman’ (Municipal Industries of Glasgow, p. 3). 11. Ruskin was very sensitive to landscape and to nature and used natural analogies as a basis from which to make an analysis of economic life. His sympathy for Greek sources for economic thinking may stem partly from the fact that the struggle to extract resources from nature features so prominently in Greek texts. 12. This argument is reused in Second Thoughts at pages 18–20. 13. Fain has shown, however, that Smart remained influenced by Ruskin’s formulation of the responsibility of the consumer as set out in the closing chapter of Unto This Last (Fain 1956: 147–8). 14. Such a sentiment probably merges Smart’s own values with the influence of both Ruskin and Caird. 15. According to one of his students, W. Kennedy, Smart had the ‘power of leading an audience on into his subject by stages’. His lucidity and sincerity attracted students into the economics course (see Cannan 1915: 303). T. Jones provides evidence of the nature of the relationship between students and Smart: he was called by them, their

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‘old Chief (Jones 1915: 238). 16. Smart makes use of the notion of wrestling resources from nature in a very interesting way, which makes me wonder if he was also well-versed in Greek writings on economic subjects. His fondness for Plato and references to Aristotle, read as part of his education in philosophy, suggest that this may have been the case. In heuristic terms his method of illustrating the nature of the production problem is well-thought-out and justifies his reputation as a teacher of economics. 17. If the lecture demonstrates his skill at matching examples to the medical audience, his prefaces to his translated works illustrate his skill in explaining Austrian economics to a British professional audience. His careful exposition of Austrian theories and the systematic way in which the material is exemplified and developed is further evidence of his exemplary teaching methods. 18. The first statutory meeting of shareholders was held on 11 July 1901 though the trust was probably formed earlier than this date suggests. Smart was in the familiar company of John Stewart Templeton (chairman). The argument of the trust ought to help ‘towards the diminuation of excessive drinking’ by putting into pubs frequented by working men, ‘disinterested’ landlords, in the spirit of ‘What cannot be ended may be mended’. I have no direct evidence of the success of the trust but it was still in operation in 1916. 19. Smart was a member of the Western Club, noted for its good food, cards and late-night billiards, and of the Glasgow Club, the haunt of prominent Glaswegians (Who was Who 1897–1916). Given his business contacts and his university position. Smart was well placed to influence others. 20. Cuthbertson and Gow were leading businessmen whose life was strongly marked by their Christian and philanthropic interests. For sketches, see The Bailie, nos 383 (1880) and 557 (1883) respectively. 21. This is further evidence that Ruskin believed in the power of a reformed market. 22. Again in constructing the idea of competition as co-operation. Smart is finding a basis, in a sense, for reconciling Ruskin with Mill. Ruskin saw competition as the negation of co-operation. 23. It is in his works of translation that Smart’s professional reputation was secured and where he would have been most sensitive to the judgements likely to be made by his peers. His translations of Austrian economics, first undertaken, according to Jones, at Edward Cairn’s suggestion, put him in a leading position with respect to the continued development of economic theory. His introductions to the translations are characterized by great skill in simplification and summarization of what are difficult concepts. Such skills, essential to his craft as teacher, are warmly acknowledged by Edgeworth in his reviews, published in the Economic Journal, of Smart’s translations of Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser. The translations are applauded as ‘excellent’ and, in the case of the review of Wieser’s Natural Value, the translator’s preface is recommended as saving the reader the trouble of ‘persuing even the translation’. Translators rarely get such attention today. Smart’s own work, An Introduction to the Theory of Value on the lines of Menger, Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk, is also given an appreciative, though critical, review. Edgeworth exhibited a consistent interest in Smart’s work, reviewing, for example, Smart’s essay on ‘Women’s Wages’, which Smart had published in the Proceedings of The Philosophical Society of Glasgow (1892). In addition to the quality of the work itself, Edgeworth’s attention is likely to have enhanced Smart’s reputation, and no doubt added to his chances of preferment. Smart acknowledged the limitations of his

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own development as an economist in a letter to Wicksteed dated 18 May 1894 (HM 30332, entry for William Smart, Henry E. Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, California). 24. Smart seems to have forgotten that in ‘Disciple of Plato’ he saw Ruskin’s text as a kind of response to Mill. 25. The article, entitled ‘The Economists and the Sentimentalists’ in The Nation (23 August 1888) was a response to the review of Ruskin’s contribution to economics undertaken by Stimson in the Quarterly Journal of Economics for 1888. This and Stimson’s article are to be seen as part of the reappraisal of Ruskin which took place towards the end of the century.

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INDEX

Chaucer, Geoffrey: Pardoner’s Tale, The 137 Christian Socialists 149 Cicero 64, 67 ‘Circulating Capital’, concept of 133 Clark, John Bates 28, 87, 139, 172–5 Distribution of Wealth, The 162, 163 Memorial 161, 163 Philosophy of Wealth 160–4, 164–6, 170 Clark, Kenneth 1 Classical School 24 Coase 84 Coleridge, Samuel 26, 128 Collingwood, R.G. 88, 121, 139 Conner, P. 16, 17, 18 consumption, Ruskin on 59, 60 continuations, notion of 24, 26 Cook, T.E. 5 Cornhill Magazine 7, 8, 43 Critobulus 83 Crown of Wild Olives, The 1, 12, 170, 174 Cuthbertson, Sir John Neilson 154, 155 Cyrus of Persia 79, 84

Acland, Henry 12, 30 Annas, J. 88, 90, 94, 97 anti-systematic thought 126–8 Aristotle 22, 31, 36, 68, 72, 90 Arnold, M. 22, 29 Arrow, Kenneth 104 Augustine, St 90 Bacon, Francis 30, 31, 137 New Atlantis 36 Bagehot, Walter 30, 111 Bailie, The 153, 155 Balfour, Arthur 156 Balzac, Honoré de 25 Bastiat, Frederic 36, 110, 164 Bell, Quentin 1, 13 Bentham, Jeremy 128 Birch, D. 64 Bisland, William 154 Blackie, J.S. 65 Bladen, V. 131 Blaug, M. 128 Böhm-Bawerk, K. 147, 156–7 Bradley, J.L. 14 Bright, John 153 Brougham, Henry 44 Burne-Jones, Edward 170

De Quincey, Thomas 24, 26, 59, 88, 125, 137, 142 Dialogues 87 Dewey, John 162 domestic economy 64

Cain, P. 23 Caird, Edward 145, 146, 147, 154 Cannan, E. 71 ‘captains of industry’, Carlyle’s concept of 81 Carlyle, Thomas 12, 18, 22, 24, 44, 48, 50, 55, 65, 81, 89, 128, 145, 167, 168, 173 Carnegie, A. 163 Cassels, W. 132 Cephalus 93 Chantraine, Pierre: Xenophon Economique 69

Edgeworth, F.Y. 158 Edgeworth, Maria 27, 44 Absentee, The 25 Cherry Orchard, The 24–5 education 98, 103 ‘eikasia’ 100 Eliot, George: Mill on the Floss 25 Ellis, William 44 Ethics of the Dust 1, 12 exchange value, Ruskin on 59

197

INDEX Ingram, J.K. 27, 31 Fain, J.T. 17, 31, 37, 70, 108, 119, 146, 157 Fawcett, H. 110, 128 Manual of Political Economy 125 feminization of culture 171 Finley, M.I. 68, 69 Fisher, Irving 28 Fors Clavigera 1–6, 9, 10, 13–15, 19, 32, 34, 37, 39, 89, 91, 98, 106, 138, 141 Fox, Caroline 128 Foxwell, H.S. 35, 126, 135 Fraser’s Magazine 8, 36 Froude, J.A. 8

James, John 12 Janes, G.M. 42 Jevons, W.S. 126, 142, 151, 160–1, 165, 166 Jones, E.V. 156, 157 Jones, C. R. 109 Jones, J.H. 145, 158 Jones, Richard 31 Jones, T. 145, 148 ‘Biographical Sketch’ 144, 152 Joy for Ever, A see Political Economy of Art, The justice, notion of 56, 92–5, 102

Gaffney 163 Galbraith, John Kenneth 15, 39 Gandhi 91 Geddes 15, 27 George, St 3, 19 George, Henry 163 German Historical School 31, 163 Glasgow Workmen’s Dwelling Company Ltd 147, 153, 154, 155–6 Glaucon 94 Goethe 25 Godwin 36 Gow, Leonard 154, 155 Gray, Alexander 118 Gray, Euphenia Chalmers 6 Great Men Tradition 24, 36 Guild of St George, The 9, 19, 39, 91, 102, 104, 114, 145, 171 Guyot, Yves 147

Kacher, R.E. 34, 61, 87 Keats, John 15 Kemple, T.M. 25, 26 Keynes, John Maynard 23, 27, 71, 116, 143, 173 End of Laissez-Faire, The 27 General Theory 71, 127, 171 Knies, Karl 165 Knight, Frank: Ethics of Competition 131 Kyrle Society 155 la Touch, Rose 6 laissez-faire, notion of 25, 27, 29, 35, 149, 157 ‘Lamp of Obedience, The’ 17 Laski, H. 126 Lassalle, Ferdinand 167 Lawrence, D.H. 137 Lee, A. 23, 88 LeRoy, G.C. 32 Leslie, Cliffe 27, 160–1 Locke, John 128 Logic of the Moral Sciences, The 127 Lowry, S.T. 24, 70, 71, 73, 88, 94, 96, 102, 105 Ways and Means 71 Lubbock, Sir John 36 Lyell 25

Haldane, R.B. 166, 167 Harcourts, the 10 Hark, I.R. 35, 124 Harrison, F. 128, 129 Heinzelman, K. 3 Henry, J.F. 164 Hewison, R.A.P. 15, 18 Hill, Octavia 9, 91, 147, 154, 155 Hilton, T. 7, 10, 13 Hincksea, road to 9, 10 Hobbes, Thomas 62 Hobson, J.A. 16, 27, 28, 31, 37, 38, 39, 43, 116, 126, 157, 173 Horace: Odes 64 ‘Housing of the Poor in London’ 154 Hume, David 5, 128, 135

MacMillan’s Magazine 109 Malthus, Thomas 24, 126, 128 Marcet, Jane 24, 26, 28, 44 Conversations on Political Economy 87 Marshall, Alfred 14, 24, 27, 28, 31, 37, 126, 161, 173–5 chivalry according to 169–73 ‘Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry, The’ 166–9

Inge, W.R. 88, 89, 119

198

INDEX Martineau, Harriet 10, 24–6, 28, 33, 35, 36, 40, 44, 51–3, 61, 64, 92, 126 Marx, Karl 25, 26, 33, 36, 67, 83, 122, 137, 138, 167 McCloskey, R.G. 21, 24, 33, 111, 129 McCulloch, John Ramsey 64, 92 Medawar, P. 32, 135, 136 Meier, G.M. 104 Melling, D.J. 100 Menger, Carl 126 mental health, Ruskin’s 5–6, 36 ‘merces ’ or ‘pay’, economy of 28 Mill, John Stuart 1, 3, 10–13, 15, 21, 23–4, 27, 30, 31, 45, 54, 77, 81, 82, 84, 97, 100, 150, 164, 167, 173–4 cf Ruskin 39–40 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy 127 Logic of the Moral Sciences, The 125 On Liberty 32, 128, 129, 131, 133, 135 on natural laws 25 ‘On Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy’ 99 ‘on the definition of political economy’ 46 ‘Preliminary Remarks’ 26, 111, 130, 131 Principles of Political Economy 11, 12, 22, 24, 25, 32–6, 43, 60, 107–24, 125, 128–31, 133, 134, 140, 157 Ruskin’s criticism of 34, 35, 36, 56–7, 59–60, 62, 107–24, 126 systematic writing of 128–36 Mill, James 128 Milner, Alfred 10 Milton, John 67 Modern Painters 2, 143 money, Ruskin on 136–9 More, Thomas: Utopia 50, 168, 169 Morris, William 15, 149, 172 News from Nowhere 168, 171 Mumford, Lewis 27 Munera Pulveris 1, 8, 10, 15, 27, 29, 33, 34, 37, 40, 64, 68, 88, 89, 92, 99, 120, 132, 150, 157 ‘Veins of Wealth’ 101 Municipal Housing Commission 155 Murray, J.G. 125 Myers, M.L. 18

Norton, Charles 4, 5, 8

National Trust 143 natural laws 16, 17, 25, 32, 34 New Palgrave 144 Newton, Sir Isaac 22

Sanderson, D.R. 32, 129, 133 Schumpeter, J. 66, 68, 69, 70, 76, 127 Scott, Sir Walter 68 Rob Roy 81

Oakley, A. 42, 47–8, 52, 62 oikos 72, 80 ‘On some of the Homes of the Poor in Glasgow’ 147 ‘On the Nature of the Gothic’ 17 opportunity cost 71 Oxfam 38, 104 Oxford School of Drawing 9 Pickens, D.K. 163 Pigou, A.C.: Memorials to Alfred Marshall 166 Plato 8, 16, 24, 29, 31, 53, 56, 59, 70, 77, 80, 83, 84, 86–106, 113, 117, 123, 152, 153 Laws 5, 30, 64, 65, 72, 92, 96, 101, 142 Republic 16, 30, 36, 40, 53, 64, 65, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 96, 98, 100, 142, 169 Phaedrus 86, 108 Pleonexia 116 Poetry of Architecture, The 16 Political Economy of Art, The 2, 15, 34, 35, 61, 85, 87, 88, 95, 99, 107, 108, 148, 165, 171 Polyanyi, Karl 72 Pomeroy, S.B. 67 Poor Law Commission 156 Praeterita 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13 Pre-Raphaelites 170 Presbytery of Glasgow’s ‘Commission on the Housing of the Poor’ 153 production, Ruskin on 59–60 productive/unproductive labour 56–7 Public House Trust (Glasgow District) 153 Ricardo, David 24, 33, 103, 128, 149, 164 Rockefeller, J.D. 163 Rogers, S.: Italy 12 Roscher, D.R. 165 Rossetti, D.G. 9, 10, 13 Rothbard, M.N. 23, 24, 31, 108, 122, 126 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 5 Ruskin, John James 7 Ruskin, Margaret 11 Ruskin Society 153, 155, 158 Russell, Bertrand 66, 67 Russell, J.B. 153

199

INDEX Trade Unionism 150 Tradecraft 104 ‘trickle-down’ effect 39, 105, 103–4 Turner, J.M.W. 12, 14 Two Paths, The 2, 38

Sellye, Julius 163 Senior, Nassau 44, 161 Sesame and Lilies 1, 12, 170 Seven Lamps of Architecture, The 2, 16, 17 Severn, Joan 7 Shaw, Bernard 91 Sheffield Museum 9 Sherburne, J.C. 23, 43 Singer, K. 72, 85 Smart, William 27, 33, 38, 65, 88, 89, 90, 102, 105, 108, 110, 126, 144–59, 174, 175 ‘Address on the Meaning of a Profession, An’ 148, 151 ‘John Ruskin: His Life and Work’ 144 ‘Place of Industry in the Social Organism, The’ 148 ‘Problem of Housing, The’ 155 Second Thoughts of an Economist 145, 147, 156, 157, 158, 159 ‘Women’s wages’ 158 Smith, Adam 17, 19, 24, 29, 30, 43, 69, 70, 77, 80, 82, 88, 92, 95, 128, 132, 135, 152, 167 on division of labour 25 Ruskin’s devilish images of 34–5 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The 62, 71 Wealth of Nations 66, 70 Society of the Rose 145 Socrates 67, 74, 83, 85, 90, 94, 100, 108 ‘Soldiers of the Ploughshare’, notion of 74, 81 ‘Soldiers of the Sword’, notion of 81 Solomon, King 55 Spear, J.L. 7, 13, 23, 29, 32, 33, 36, 87, 114, 154, 171, 172 Spengler, J.J. 70, 71 Stabile, D.R. 163 Stephens, Leslie 1 Stoddart, J. 19, 32 Stones of Venice, The 2, 16, 17, 108 Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The 4 structuralist approach 105, 106 Sumner, William Graham 163 systematic thought 126–8

University Settlement Association 153 Unto This Last 1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 13, 18, 19, 26, 27, 32–6, 40, 42–4, 65, 69, 80, 87–91, 94, 96–9, 103, 106–10, 112–24, 127, 137, 141, 149–52, 157, 165 ‘Ad valorem’ 56–62, 117 ‘Qui judicatis terram’ 55–6 ‘roots of honour, The’ 45–51 ‘veins of wealth, The’ 51–5, 83 ‘useful’, Mill’s notion of 82–3 value, notion of 100, 142–3, 165 Ruskin on 57–8, 62 Veblen, Thorsten 27, 28 Viljoen, H.J. 5, 11 Walker, Amasa: Science of Wealth, The 163 Watt, Francis 35 wealth, Ruskin on 58 Webb, S. 27 Weber, M. 153 Whewell, William 31 Wihl, G. 42 Wilde, Oscar 10 Picture of Dorian Gray 10 Wilenski, R.H. 8, 140 Williams, R. 24 Wilson, Woodrow 161 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5 Women’s Protective and Provident League 147 Wood, N. 67, 82 ‘Xenophon’s Theory of Leadership’ 73 Woolf, Virginia 86 Wordsworth, William 26 ‘work aversion’, Mills notion of 82 Working Men’s College 9, 17 Xenophon 8, 10, 24, 29, 32, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 64–85, 92, 94–6, 102, 113, 117, 121, 148 Anabasis 67 economic management in 72–7 Memorabilia 65, 67 Oeconomicus 25, 64, 65, 66–72, 73, 77, 81

Tarnas, R. 90, 100 Taussig, F.W. 161 Taylor, Harriet 129, 130 techné 53, 84, 95, 96, 99 Thrasymachus 93–4 Time and Tide 5, 9, 14, 37, 80, 106

200