ABSTRACT
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 John Ruskin’s ideas, though some critical theories would challenge whether his corpus can be treated as a text. 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 try to put that thinking into an economic context by focusing on Ruskin’s treatment of economic harmony and the nature of economic institutions. 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. 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 Adam Smith’s division of labour.
