ABSTRACT

During the course of the 1850s, John Ruskin’s investigations into art and architecture gradually led him towards social criticism and political economy. The first stirrings occur in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). In The Lamp of Life’, Ruskin began to evolve a new understanding of the nature of men’s work, and what it meant for society. Like Carlyle before him, Ruskin was insistent that it was through work that man fulfilled himself. For Ruskin, however, it had to be creative labour, which drew upon the workman’s intellectual and moral strengths as well as his physical powers. Such ideas were further developed in The Stones of Venice (3 volumes, 1851–53), where they are drawn together in the famous chapter entitled The Nature of Gothic’. Here Ruskin set out his belief that the architecture and art of a particular society express the values of its entire culture. According to Ruskin, architecture and its attendant arts should be judged according to the amount of freedom of expression allowed to the individual workman. He contrasted the arts and crafts of the Middle Ages and the relationships they engendered favourably with the industrial society of the nineteenth century, which seemed to him to place more restrictions on the workman than any preceding age had done. Modern society was thus indicted for having alienated and dehumanised workers, forcing them to perform monotonous and soul-destroying tasks. This led Ruskin into a critique of contemporary society, industrialisation and economic thought which culminated in the publication of four essays in August-November 1860 in the CornhillMagazine, then under the editorship of Thackeray. In these essays, published in book form in 1862 as Unto this Last: Four Essays on the Principles of Political Economy, Ruskin argued that Britain’s industrial society was morally degenerate and pernicious in 195that it drove the labouring class into cultural and material poverty. The thinking of the Political Economists, which supported the new liberal industrial order, he saw as correspondingly flawed, particularly because it lacked any credible moral element. Delivered in the sermonising tone so characteristic of Ruskin, these essays are highly coloured by the injection of a series of moral pronouncements which give them a strong ethical tone, at the expense of strictly consistent reasoning. And, while much of Unto this Last is devoted to destroying the claims of the ‘science’ of Political Economy, Ruskin goes on to offer a number of points of guidance for the business community. Though he fully accepts the need for a hierarchical society, governed by an educated élite, he encourages merchants and manufacturers to adopt a value system aimed at social harmony rather than individual profit. His writings are in essence an appeal to business leaders to behave in a socially responsible, paternalistic fashion according to his own moral prescriptions. In this way, British society might be regenerated.