The Pre-capitalist Origins of Ruskin’s Thought

It might also be useful to peer a little more behind Ruskin's own ‘Oxford' label, for what is decisively different about Ruskin was that he was looking back beyond current market society for his inspiration (Cockram 2007; Winch 2009; Hewison 2018).

In setting out how he would organise his ideal society in the present, he quite deliberately followed the lead of Plato’s Laws; and he went to the trouble, late in life, to pay for a translation into English of Xenophon’s book on the management of the Greek household economy, Oeconomicus, because he believed it had much to teach his contemporaries (Xenophon 1994). Religion also played a big role in his writings. Although his belief in God wavered as he grew older, Ruskin nonetheless remained convinced throughout his life that the Bible, the foundation document of the Christian religion, had been the key element in forming the British people’s moral and cultural values, and that it should remain so.

The market society into which Ruskin was born was based on the assumption that the production of wealth was an end in itself, an automatic bringer of utility in whatever form it was produced. The traditional soci­eties he admired and wished to emulate did not despise wealth production but they thought it should be created and distributed to support non­economic ends, whether that be the Greek city-state and the Roman Empire, or a Christian commonwealth whose chief aim was to save as many souls as possible for happiness in the afterlife. Because all these societies imposed a vision of the common good on their citizens, they thought of goods and services in terms of use values, their capacity to further the ends of society, rather than the exchange values assumed in capitalist societies.

In the ancient and Christian universes, pursuing wealth for its own sake was usually seen as a dishonourable activity. Competition was often frowned on as creating division and instability, luxury condemned as diverting men from the ‘good life' of serving the community. If the pursuit of honour was the driving force in ancient societies, in the Christian world, an ascetic ideal was frequently promoted as a means of bringing people nearer to God and to salvation - the monastic movement and priestly vows of poverty were outcomes of that approach to life. At the same time, although vast disparities in wealth between elites and the bulk of the population were regarded as inevitable in mediaeval times, something to be accepted as ordained by God, all professed Christians of whatever status were seen as children of God and therefore capable of salvation; and the rich were enjoined to help to save their own souls by supporting their poor brethren to live a life of basic sufficiency and to receive aid in sickness and old age (Backhouse 2002, chs.

Starting from this traditional approach to economic life, Ruskin developed a new perspective on what the good life should be which reflected his own vision of the world as an artist and art critic. Although he professed Christian values, including asceticism of a kind, he did not stress salvation in the afterlife but the creation of what he called ‘happy souls’ in this world. Happy souls were to be made by the leaders of society, both the traditional aristocracy and the new class of the indus­trial rich, embracing the creation of a community infused with the artistic ideals and practices that Ruskin had learned from Wordsworth and Turner. In Ruskin’s vision, these Romantic ideals would help trans­form the nature of work and of production; infuse both public and private architecture with a new Grecian grandeur in order to elevate the people; and distribute what was produced in a manner that would change the stunted and starved masses of Victorian Britain into healthy and even beautiful human beings whose own capabilities could be exercised to the full. This ideal underlies his most famous statement ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE’, where ‘Life’ is based on ‘Love and Joy and Admiration’ and devoted ‘to the creation of the greatest number of noble and happy beings'. In that world, a man was ‘rich' not because he had a huge command over commodities or money but because he had led a good life and had done his best to help others to live the same way (Ruskin XVII, 105; see previous chapter).

True to this art-based vision of community, Ruskin denied Mill's claim that wealth was whatever had exchangeable value and claimed that it was an intrinsic quality of things, including non-tradeables such as fresh air and clean water, and natural beauty. He argued with passion that very few people understood what real wealth was and that the pursuit of profit in modern society often led them to produce its opposite, ‘illth' (Ruskin XVII, 89, 168).

The answer he gave was that there was no profit to be gained by cleaning rivers because there was no understanding of their importance as wealth; and so some of that wealth was being extinguished. However, there was plenty to be gained by persuading Croydon publicans to buy iron railings which were ‘illth' intended to make their hostelries ‘more conspicuous to drunkards'. For such reasons, men were put to work in hard and dangerous conditions, dangers Ruskin underlined by reprinting a newspaper account of a horrific accident in an iron foundry. So, by inciting ignorant people to indulge their follies, capitalists robbed society of its real wealth and re­placed it with illth. The river was silently polluted; and the seller of useless iron was ‘thanked as a public benefactor, and promoter of commercial prosperity'. Having offered this riveting contrast, Ruskin then concluded that ‘the real good of all work, and of all commerce, depends on the final intrinsic worth of the thing you make, or get by it'. Yet the public, supported by economic orthodoxy, believed that ‘business is always good, whether it be busy in mischief or benefit; and that buying and selling are always salutary, whatever the intrinsic worth of what you buy or sell' (RuskinXVIII, 383-91).

Ruskin's central concerns are all here: that wealth was about life as a whole and not just what was produced by business; that much of what was produced was illth and destructive of existing wealth as well; that producing illth sometimes involved horrific and dangerous work practices for the employees; and that such work encouraged consumption patterns that were harmful not only to individuals but to the wider community. Generalised, vivid examples like this summed up to Ruskin's picture of industrial capit­alism creating an ugly, polluted world filled with workers being exploited to produce cheap commodities in nasty conditions and consumed in harmful ways. Worst of all, their employers treated the human beings they employed as just another commodity, labour, accepted no other responsibility for their welfare than to pay their wages and could dismiss them at will. Ruskin saw this as an abdication of responsibility on the part of elites whose main aim should be to produce more wealth and less illth, helping as much as possible the poor to do work of real value in decent conditions and to realise as much of their potential as they could. To do that, elites would have to economise drastically on the use of machinery. Ruskin was not entirely opposed to machine technology, but he argued that it had increased inequality, created awful working conditions for the poor and had taken the creativity out of work (Ruskin X, 189-96: XVIII, 509-12). Rather than multiplying wants, as capitalism encouraged them to do, Ruskin's elite was exhorted to extinguish them where possible and, in so doing, remove a large part of the demand for machinery and lessen the demand for servile labour (Ruskin XVII, 423-5). It was the elite's duty not only to create good work for the poor but to cut down on the production of anything that created degrading forms of labour and encouraged harmful consumption.

Besides that, as controllers of the state, elites were to be generous in the patronage of creative work and in the provision of public goods, from parks to great architectural monuments, spending on the community before they spent on themselves.

So Ruskin envisioned a world where far more work would be creative and cost less in terms of painful effort. Rather than discuss production in the context of a world of individuals, he was also suggesting an organic economic analysis of society, in which the lives of rich and poor were intimately related, one that paid as much attention to consumption as production, and where work was recognised as a key element in shaping lives. Judged in terms of the prevailing capitalist accountancy in which anything produced and exchanged was called wealth, and where the appal­ling social costs of the system were often ignored, Ruskin's elite-led econ­omy would undoubtedly have had a lower GDP than did the industrial Britain of his day. But he was implicitly arguing that in terms of welfare - in quality of life for the mass of the population - it would be a far better society than the existing one. Indeed, Ruskin claimed that, if his regime was applied, ‘in a few generations a beautiful type of face and form and a high intelligence would become all but universal, in a climate like that of England' (Ruskin XVII, 405-6) though at the expense of heavy cuts in the incomes of the privileged.

Consistent with the pre-modern origins of his thought, Ruskin had no sympathy with democracy and little with liberty. In his opinion, society should be run by the ‘wise and the kind' with the ‘unwise and unkind' rigorously controlled. Inequality should be reduced but through the benefi­cent actions of those in authority. The social costs of labour should also be reduced and its utility increased where possible: but in Ruskin's universe, there would always be many poor people and much of the work they had to do would be unskilled, hard and lacking in dignity. The rich could mitigate that by regulating their demands for goods and services that required degrading labour but they could not remove it. Social mobility was not encouraged: the lower orders should be helped to live in a more fulfilling manner but advised not to move out of the station in life in which they were born (Ruskin XVII, 248, 321, 406-7).

In sum, Ruskin's world was aristocratic at its economic base, backward­looking in terms of leadership and anti-libertarian: his notion of intrinsic value was ancient in origin and had authoritarian implications, since only those who accepted his version of what true value was would be allowed to organise the economy. Ruskin's world would have been equally backward­looking in economic structure since agriculture - which he saw as the foundation of a good life, and reflective of the natural beauty which was not only God's work but the font of artistic creation - would remain at its centre. As he grew older, Ruskin's conservatism hardened: he changed his mind about the taking of interest on loans, which he had originally thought fair, reverting to the classical and mediaeval idea that it was usury and therefore unjust.

However, though scorned when first written, Ruskin's ideas were prov­ing very influential by the late 1890s when Hobson wrote his intellectual biography (Eagles 2011). Given the origins of his own thinking there is a deep irony in the fact that Ruskin's popularity was strongest amongst skilled workers and trades unionists: when a survey was taken of the thirty­seven Labour MPs elected to the 1906 Parliament Ruskin proved to be their leading intellectual inspiration, with William Morris, who translated Ruskin's ideas into an anarchic form of socialism, also prominent in the list. Ruskin's condemnation of a system that treated workers as ‘labour' and his support for well-paid employment provided by the state could easily be translated into a vision of socialism and the backward-looking elements in his thinking put aside or forgotten. In that context, Ruskin's ideas appeared no longer archaic, as they had in the 1860s, but revolutionary. In fact, despite his revival of a Painite style of radicalism, Hobson's position looked quite conservative in comparison because of its acceptance of the market system as the basis of economic life (Matthew 1990, 16). In writing to support Ruskin's economic ideas, Hobson was trying to show that the former's critique of political economy was compatible with New Liberal welfare policies: and in doing so he was also trying to destroy the danger­ously socialist Ruskin that Morris had helped to create.

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