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Ruskin and Political Economy Donald Winch Ruskin and Political Economy Since I was educated originally as an economist, and have spent a number of years writing the history of what Ruskin came to regard as ‘the most cretinous, speechless, paralysing plague that has yet touched the brains of mankind’, you will sense my discomfort in speaking about his relationship with political economy on this celebratory occasion, surrounded by a distinguished gathering of Ruskinians.1 What I have to say, however, depends as much on my longer second occupation as a practitioner of intellectual history as it does on my fading knowledge of economists’ ways of thinking. Intellectual history requires a measure of generosity towards past thinkers, even an enjoyment of their quiddities. But approaching Ruskin’s views on political economy without prejudice requires an effort. For example, I cannot recognise the author of the Wealth of Nations, still less the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, in Ruskin’s description of Adam Smith as that ‘half-bred and half-witted Scotchman’ who had taught the ‘deliberate blasphemy’ that ‘thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods’.2 Nor can I recognise John Stuart Mill in the hypercritical remarks that pepper Ruskin’s writings and correspondence. Supposing it to be true that Mill genuinely was ‘a poor cretinous wretch’ whose opinions on political economy were as false as Ruskin believed them to be, I still cannot believe that Mill was literally ‘the root of nearly all immediate evil among us in England’? 3 No doubt some of these pronouncements can be excused as rhetoric – in a post-modern world most things can. But when Ruskin expressed the same ideas in correspondence with friends, he assured them that he was in deadly earnest. We must take them then to be an accurate representation of his state of mind and understanding, provided one is allowed to suggest that amid the genuine 1 This lecture was written for a conference organised by John Drury at Christ Church, Oxford, to celebrate the centenary of Ruskin’s death in 2000. The quotation in the first sentence comes from a letter to Dr. J. Brown, August, 1862 cited in The Works of John Ruskin edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 volumes, London, 1902-12, volume 17, p.lxxxii. Subsequent references to this edition will be given by volume and page number alone. 2 28,764. For a sample of similar statements about Smith see also 29, 212, 134, 282; and 25, 298. 3 See letter to Henry Acland, February 10, 1877, 34, 528; and letter to Norton, September 12, 1869 in The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton edited by J. L Bradley and I. Ousby, Cambridge, 1987, p. 172. 1 differences between his own views and those he attacked there was always an element of artifice that often amounted to wilful misunderstanding. Ruskin’s opinions on Mill provide a focus for the first part of this talk because they became an important feature of the way in which he chose to articulate his relationship with political economy: his readers were being invited to make a choice of allegiance between himself and Mill.4 As we shall see, the proximate sources of Ruskin’s anger with Mill were numerous, but they may have begun more approximately with his father’s censorship of public expression of his views on political and economic subjects.5 Frustration at home was compounded by the hostility with which Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris were greeted when they first appeared in the periodical press in 1860 and 1862-3 respectively.6 The first overt signs of Ruskin’s hostility to Smith and Mill can be traced to the final part of Unto This Last, written when he had been told by Thackeray, the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, that it would have to be the last to appear. The preface he added when the articles appeared as a book is also far more belligerent.7 To answer those who said that he was ignorant in matters involving political economy he returned to Smith, Mill, and Ricardo to prove them wrong. The death of his father in 1864 removed the last restraint. Inheritance of John James’s fortune also allowed him to become his own publisher, making available to the world his every passing thought in Fors Clavigera. This work is the source of the statement about Smith, and there is more there, and in its predecessor, Time and Tide, that reveals Ruskin’s irritated preoccupation with Mill over a period of more than two decades.8 4 This was also true of his friends; see especially the letters to Norton on this subject in their correspondence (note 3 above, pp. 168, 172, 174). Norton was one of the few people who was in friendly correspondence with both Ruskin and Mill during the 1860s, a fact that was known to Ruskin. 5 JJR’s attitude was best described not so much as disapproval but in JR’s phrase as ‘a terrified complacency’. See the letters sent by JR and JJR to Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan on the Cornhill Magazine articles in V. Surtees, (ed), Reflections of a Friendship; John Ruskin’s Letters to Pauline Trevelyan, 1848-1866, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1979, pp. 150, 157, and 159. 6 A collection of contemporary reviews of these works can be found in J. L. Bradley (ed), Ruskin the Critical Heritage, 1984. It does not contain, however, the response of one of Ruskin’s most trenchant critics, Walter Bagehot; see his reviews in The Economist entitled ‘Aesthetic Twaddle versus Economic Science’ and ‘The Merchant’s Function’ in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, edtied by St John Stevas, volume IX, pp. 315-29. 7 John Tyree Fain seems to have been the first to suggest this dating in his Ruskin and the Economists, Nashville, Vanderbilt Press, 1956, p. 104. Fain’s book is still the best short treatment of its subject, and it enables me to avoid a blow-by-blow treatment of all the cases in which Ruskin seems to have deliberately misunderstood or misquoted Mill. 8 See, for example, the description of ‘the modern Liberal politico-economist of the Stuart Mill school’ as ‘essentially of the type of a flat-fish—one eyeless side of him always in the mud and one eye, on the the side that has eyes, down in the corner of his mouth, -- not a desirable guide for man or beast’. 27, 180. 2 No-one still believes, as his father did, that these post-1860 writings were an unfortunate digression from Ruskin’s career as art critic: they have a direct and organic connection with the lectures on the political economy of art he published as A Joy For Ever in 1857; and the roots are clearly visible in The Stones of Venice. John James was right, however, to fear that the economic writings would damage his son’s reputation in some contemporary circles, though they have, of course, proved far more influential with later generations of readers, some of them occupying positions of political and intellectual eminence. But while the writings that precede Unto This Last abound with condemnations of the ugliness, impermanence, adulteration, exploitation, and speculative excess that Ruskin invariably associated with urban, competitive, and technology-driven employments, there is none of the personalised animus against political economists shown later. There must have been a copy of the Wealth of Nations on his father’s bookshelves: John James was certainly told to make a careful study of it when he was a young man. It would counteract, his advisor told him, the narrow mentality associated with his chosen profession, making him ‘an honourable and distinguished merchant’ as opposed to ‘a mere trader’.9 It was to this honourable status that his son later proposed that merchants should aspire. John Ruskin himself needed no antidote to professional deformation. As he freely acknowledged, his father’s wealth, based on exploitation of the Spanish peasants who grew the grapes he sold as sherry, made it unnecessary for him to follow any profession, unless it was as lecturer and man of letters.10 As late as 1856, in a characteristic mixture of generosity and arrogance, John could write in the following terms to Henry Acland: ‘….I have reasoned out a good many principles of a 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 social principles to my own satisfaction; and as I believe those two people to have been no fools, I see no reason for concluding that I am one myself.’11 9 Letter from T. Brown to JJR, February 18, 1807 in 35, 125. 10 ??, 555. 11 Letter to Acland, April 27, 1856 in 36, 238. 3 This confirmatory style of reading served Ruskin well in A Joy For Ever when criticising a revived version of the Mandevillian argument on the beneficial employment effects of luxury expenditure: the response he gave is impeccably Smithian, though couched in the moralistic language he had made his own.12 As Ruskin tells us in the 1857 Preface, when assuring his readers that his superior insights had not entailed excessive effort, that he did not think it worth mentioning modern works. Most of his economic principles were ‘accepted by existing authorities on the science’, and the works he had seen since reading the Wealth of Nations some twenty years before were ‘encumbered with inquiries into accidental or minor commercial results’.
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