Until 1860 John Ruskin's writings were primarily about art and
architecture; but his belief that good art can flourish only in a
society that is sound and healthy led him inevitably to a
preoccupation with social and economic problems, the dominant
concern of his later writings. James Clark Sherburne provides in
this volume a detailed and long overdue re-examination of Ruskin's
social and economic perceptions and, for the first time,
systematically places these perceptions in their nineteenth-century
intellectual context.
Ruskin's eloquence and the strength of his moral, aesthetic, and
social convictions established him as one of the most influential
of Victorian writers. His writings, however, are not easily
categorized and many of his important insights occur as digressions
in discussions of other topics. Mr. Sherburne succeeds in ordering
and clarifying the rich chaos of Ruskin's social thought without
denying that wholeness which is, paradoxically, its salient
feature. He discovers the source of Ruskin's social criticism in
his early writings. He then follows Ruskin's interest as it shifts
from economic theory to the problems of exploitation, war,
imperialism, the means of social reform, and the construction of
the welfare state.
Ruskin's remarkably early vision of the possibility of economic
abundance, his anticipation of its social and personal
implications, his much disparaged critique of classical economics,
his pioneering attention to the role of the consumer and the
quality of consumption, his anxious portrayal of the effects of
industrialism on the environment, his critique of English
educational methods, and his farsighted proposals for public
management of industry and transport are among the many aspects of
Ruskin's thought examined by Mr. Sherburne. What emerges is an
original and exhaustive study of a dimension of Ruskin's work
which, though much neglected, is particularly relevant to
contemporary concerns.
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