It was Ruskin who first suggested that income tax should be graduated, and that super-tax should be imposed. And there are a hundred other details in the grand scheme of his Utopia which have already been embodied in the fabric of the State, while the startling and revolutionary theories which he advanced half a century ago have become the commonplaces of our political thought. There have been many makers of Utopian schemes. Ruskin used the epithet proudly, blaming his fellow-countrymen for the ignoble sneer with which they generally uttered the word; but there are very few whose Utopias have in any detail come true, or have, like Ruskin's, remained a permanently fruitful ideal. In politics his influence has been entirely for good. — Aldous Huxley, 1919
It is, however, as an observer of politics — for he is no politician — that Mr. Ruskin is perhaps the most remarkably in antagonism with the current Englishman. He sees in the universal desire to make money exclude every other object of exertion the great and fatal evil of the times, and rebels entirely against all the complex social and political arrangements which have been constituted into a system to that end. He holds that to rely on manufactures for greatness is to lean upon a broken reed, and that England must live upon herself through agriculture if ever she would return to a healthy condition of existence. So convinced is he of this that he has given a tenth part of his fortune to found a colony in which Englishmen shall be developed, through the alternation of agricultural labour with artistic pursuits, into the better specimens of humanity which he believes can thus alone be produced. That he will ever see his opinions adopted or even seriously entertained is not to be expected; but by those who have not bowed the knee to the modern Baal he will be gratefully remembered as one preaching in the wilderness the abandonment of the grosser things of life and the realisation of the Ideal. — from caricature page in the magazine, Vanity Fair, 1872
Ruskin’s Economics and Political Economics
- Ruskin’s definition of political economics
- Ruskin’s definition of mercantile (or evil) economics
- Ruskin on the origins of riches, poverty, and economic inequality
- Fundamental neutrality of wealth
- Disgraceful modern idea of “Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest”
- “The chief value and virtue of money consists in its having power over human beings”
- Ruskin’s attack on the limitations of classical economic views of people, motivation, and work
- Ruskin on Value, Wealth, and Price — Unto This Last’s “Ad Valorem”
- Ruskin As Interpreter of Society (chapter from the Oxford Past masters Ruskin volume)
- Thirty-five Ruskinian proposals for political policy and reform
- Ruskin and the defenders of manufacturing culture
- Ruskin, “the young lieutenant of Carlyle in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism”
- Ruskin's Moral Theory of Wealth
- The Inseparability of Art, Religion, and Society in Ruskin's "Traffic"
- Ruskin Getting at the Goddess of "Getting-on"
The Classical Economists Ruskin Opposed
- Thomas Robert Malthus
- Thomas Malthus' "Essay on Population"
- David Ricardo: A Brief Biography
- David Ricardo's Economic Theories
- Adam Smith —Introduction
- Adam Smith's Laissez-Faire Policies
- A Corrective to common views of Smith's ideas of Laissez-Faire
- The Division of Labor
Victorian contexts
- From Labor to Value: Marx, Ruskin, and the Critique of Capitalism
- France vs. England: Mid-nineteenth-century trade and economic theory
- Mid-Victorian England's Industrial Dominance
- How Victorians Invested Capital
- Personal capitalism and the survival of the family firm in Victorian England
- The Victorian Invention of the Modern Company
- Bankruptcy in Victorian England — Threat or Myth?
- "For Godsake be done with railways and shares!" — the Railway Panics of the 1840s
- The Railway Mania of the 1840s
- The Bank of England and the London Money Market in the Nineteenth Century
Last modified 18 October 2024