Section 3, Chapter 8, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
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uskin began publishing Unto This Last in monthly numbers of Cornhill until public protest called a halt to the series, forcing him to conclude [200/201] his argument in a final, compressed installment. The book should therefore seem awkward in structure, yet the result is the most unified essay he ever wrote and perhaps his most ingeniously constructed. The four chapter titles signal a series of discrete topics: "The Roots of Honour" (on the social affections), "The Veins of Wealth" (on wealth), "Qui Judicatis Terram" (on economic justice), and "Ad Valorem" (on value and then, more briefly, on price, production, and consumption), but at the same time, each topic with its characteristic image pattern flows into the next, with the general effect of an argument that deepens and broadens, culminating in the concentrated grandeur of the final pages. Far from representing a change of course in his career, Ruskinian economics reaches its climax in a vision that is precisely the burden of all great art, the type of noble and perfected human life.
The first sentence of "The Roots of Honour" strikes the keynote of the book by attacking the assumption that "an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespective of the influence of social affection" (XVII, 25). On the contrary, human beings are the proper subject of economics, and the motive force of humans is the soul, "the will and spirit of the creature." Economics, in other words, is properly a dynamic, not a mechanical, science. Mechanical science is the study of means and so views humans as means to an end, that is, as tools or machine parts to be "utilized"; dynamic science, on the other hand, studies the inward principle or power of its subject considered as an end in itself. Surely no economics can be scientific that founds itself only on moral injunctions, yet Ruskin's point is that no economics can be scientific that ignores them: "Treat [the worker] kindly without any economical purpose, and all economical purposes will be answered; in this, as in all other matters, whosoever will save his life shall lose it, whoso loses it shall find it" (XVII, 31). "Observe," he writes a moment later, "I am here considering the affections wholly as a motive power; not at all as things in themselves desirable or noble, or in any other way abstractedly good. I look at them simply as an anomalous force, rendering every one of the ordinary political economist's calculations nugatory" (XVII, 30-31). Ruskin here deliberately fuses the language of facts and the language of values by serious punning, using terms that may or may not be value neutral: "law," for example, may be a prescriptive or a descriptive term; "affections" may mean "passions" or "shows of love"; "moral" may mean "psychological" or "ethical." This deliberate confusion takes advantage of ambiguities in the language of nineteenth-century empiricism but also helps drive home the serious point that no social science can be a value-neutral enterprise. (In our own time, of course, we have learned again and again how class ideology presents itself as an objective science and in particular how impulses[201/202] to organized destruction parade themselves in terms such as "realism," "options," and "problem-solving.")
Ruskin then begins to show what a human-centered economics would look like by advancing his first practical proposal. Wages and length of employment, he says, should be determined independently of the demand for labor and should be fixed. This principle (as we have already seen in The Political Economy of Art) implies that the worker and his work are valued for themselves and, conversely, that money would have meaning as a standard of value, not as a mere register of market forces. Money would no longer be a confuser of values but an affirmation of value; moreover, it would cease to drive men into competition and so become the measure of their poverty but would act rather as a token of social bonding. From this proposal follows the most notoriously "impractical" of all the ideas in Unto This Last. The modern industrial enterprise, Ruskin says, should be founded on honor and fidelity such as prevail among "domestic servants in an old family, or an esprit de corps, like that of the soldiers in a crack regiment" (XVII, 33). The merchant would deserve this loyalty because the honor attaching to the professions-those of the soldier, the physician, the pastor, the lawyer, and the merchant -- depends on an absolute duty opposed to the wish for gain, a duty that extends in extreme cases (as for the soldier) to dying for others. It follows that, since the merchant's relations to his employees should be as a father's to his sons, the merchant would in the case of a commercial crisis take as much or more of the suffering on himself than his men feel -- "as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son" (XVII, 42). By thinking of merchants, soldiers, and pastors as governors of men, Ruskin answers the complaints he launched against these men as types at the close of Modern Painters V, written a few months earlier. The difference, of course, is that the three forms of asceticism (military, commercial, monastic) are replaced by a form of wealth -- the wealth of having many sons -- and the repressed energies are channeled into social bonds, "such affection as one man owes another" (XVII, 28). Ruskin called this bonding the Law of Help in Modern Painters V. In the last two pages of the essay before us, "is bound" appears eight times. True commerce is, in fact, "the most important of all fields," since the merchant "provides." The money-hungry ascetic becomes the man who feeds others. This final image represents a dramatic reversal of the first extended simile in the essay. Ruskin's caricature of a science based on greed is a science that reduces the body to soulless bones and plays games with death's heads and humeri (that is, with machine parts), but the new science is based on affection of an extreme and even a paradigmatic kind: "as a father would . . . sacrifice himself for his son." Self-sacrifice is the absolute antithesis of self-interest conventionally so [202/203] called, yet it is really the highest form of self-interest, since whoso loses his life shall find it -- we might add, whoso would be filled shall first feed others -- and this is simply the doctrine of the faith that all the English openly profess.
Ruskin's argument baffles readers to this day. Can Ruskin believe human beings to be so benevolent by nature? Can he be as naive as he seems? The response to such questions is the conclusion of the essay, a redoubled assertion of his own practicality: "All of which sounds very strange: the only real strangeness in the matter being, nevertheless, that it should so sound. For all this is true, and that not partially nor theoretically, but everlastingly and practically: all other doctrine than this respecting matters political being false in premises, absurd in deduction, and impossible in practice, consistently with any progressive state of national life" (XVII, 42). Here is the Carlylean stance, by which the speaker dismisses his opponent's views as outlandish and unheardof while he himself simply repeats anciently accepted wisdom. And of course laissez-faire economics is new-fangled insofar as it claims to separate social philosophy from a purely empirical inquiry and then claims that a particular mode of social behavior is universal and "natural." Human beings are often selfish and base, but Ruskin's argument is not empirical; he is considering human beings from the viewpoint of their telos, or of what Marx would call the "fully human." Ruskin subtly signals this viewpoint by ingenious puns on the words "true" and "false." In phrases such as "true merchant," "true commerce," and "true science," "true" means "approximation to an ideal" but also combines the senses of "properly so called," "accurate," and "actually existing." Similarly, he says of any exclusively selfish commerce that "this which they have called commerce was not commerce at all, but cozening" (XVII, 39). Laissez-faire commerce therefore is untrue and so in a sense does not really exist. Ruskin's strategy here is of the first philosophical interest, since he is replacing an empiricist theory of meaning with an idealist theory -- or more generally, is relinquishing descriptive language, in which words denote observed entities, for what Northrop Frye has called metonymic language, in which words are "put for" intangible realities (chap. 1). Carlyle of course does the same thing in his historical philosophy when he calls present conditions "false" manifestations of eternal conditions that are "true," but more clearly than Carlyle, Ruskin challenges his opponents by implying that, for them, all metonymic language, including the language of the Christian religion, is "impractical." Like Plato in The Republic, Ruskin's aim is to show that entities such as justice are not only eternally "true" but also the only possible bases for a practical social policy.
[203/204] The central opposition of the second essay is true wealth versus false wealth, and its revelatory climax is the statement that humans are the true wealth of a nation. To prove this point he distinguishes between political economy ("the economy of a State, or of citizens") and the false, or "mercantile," economy of individual acquisitiveness. The distinction attacks a second central tenet of the Manchester school (the first being that economics can exist as a value-free science) by denying that the selfish pursuit of wealth amounts to the greatest good for the greatest number. Ruskin assumes that any system of individual exchanges is a closed system resting on scarcity (we will see later what an open system looks like), so that every penny in one person's pocket means a loss for someone else; "mercantile" economy is therefore the science of defrauding or taking from others. He then defines money as debt ("a legal or moral claim," or in other words "an acknowledgement of debt . . . represent[ing] the labour and property of the creditor, or the idleness and penury of the debtor" [XVII, 50]). The poor are by implication the class of people owing debt to the rich, while the rich are the class of people who bear the guilt of gaining at the expense of others. To support this claim, Ruskin offers a fable illustrating the beginnings of an economic system. Two shipwrecked sailors find themselves in an uninhabited region and are forced to labor by themselves. One falls ill, so that the other must labor for them both. In exchange, the sick sailor pledges his future labor in the form of written promises -- money. This fable no doubt confuses more than it clarifies, but it seems to serve Ruskin's purposes best by allegorizing the psychological reality of the money system. Somehow or other, one class of people has "legal or moral claim upon, or power over, the labour of others," so that debt and want are the fuel of the system ("The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour's pocket" [XVII, 44]). By exposing the ethical meanings implied in such standard economic terms as "debt," "owe," "earn," and "obligation," Ruskin once again implies that economics is a moral science. A just system, however, would not destroy the inequalities implied in the debtor relationship but transform them: the choice, he says, is between "melodious inequalities of concurrent power" and "the iniquitous dominances and depressions of guilt and misfortune" (XVII, 48). If Ruskin implies a link here between "dominances" and "guilt" and between "depressions" and "misfortune," then the business cycle appears to work like a cruel and capricious father, first compelling his sons and then arbitrarily punishing them without ever allowing them to work off their debt. But by offering the alternative of "concurrent powers," Ruskin suggests that there can be a good and mutually affirming system of indebtedness by which the owing of guilt can be transformed into the owing of love.
[204/205]The transformation can occur, as we have seen, only if wages are fixed (further proposals will follow in the next essays) and only if private wealth can be made to further the public wealth. But these conditions imply a wholly new conception of wealth-a conception of wealth not as the quantity of an individual's possessions but as a symbol of the exchanges of goods and labor. And so there is true and false wealth: the "real value [of a "given mass of acquired wealth"] depends on the moral sign attached to it.... Some treasures are heavy with human tears, as an ill-stored harvest with untimely rain; and some gold is brighter in sunshine than it is in substance" (XVII, 52). Ruskin proceeds to a symbolic reading of wealth, of which two brief images are charged with particular passion. The phrase "lying image of prosperity set up, on Dura plains dug into seven-times-heated furnaces" puts Nebuchadnezzar's golden idol on top, so to speak, of the factorylike furnace where the young men were to be sacrificed, reversing the proper positions of men and gold (one standing above the earth, the other buried in the earth), while "the purchase-pieces of potter's fields, wherein shall be buried together the citizen and the stranger" (XVII, 53), repeats the reversal but extends the betrayal to include the Lord of life, that is, Life itself. In the anagnorisis of the final paragraphs, however, the ironic vision (in which gold commands the servitude and deaths of men) is reversed again, and man once more becomes the measure. It may be, Ruskin says,
that the persons themselves are the wealth -- that these pieces of gold with which we are in the habit of guiding them, are, in fact, nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness or trappings, very glittering and beautiful in barbaric sight, wherewith we bridle the creatures; but that if these same living creatures could be guided without the fretting and jingling of the Byzants in their mouths and ears, they might themselves be more valuable than their bridles. In fact, it may be discovered that the true veins of wealth are purple. [XVII, 55]
Here "Byzantine," the conventional equivalent of "splendid," is analyzed into a pun, "Byzantine harness" and "Byzants," which together carry the concept of fetishism classically expounded by Marx. Value is centered on the inanimate objects by which men are devalued into beasts of burden, while the splendor or produce of the nation becomes the symbol of oppression ("bridle"): the beautiful is antithetical to the good. The emotional realities of money in a degraded system are also clarified: the jingling in the ears is a Siren's jingle, the fretting at the mouth a parody of eating, the jingling and fretting together a form of the carrot and stick, the tyranny of need and indebtedness. But in the reversal, humans become the ends instead of the means: "The final outcome and consummation of all wealth is in the producing as many [205/206] as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy hearted human creatures." Ruskin illustrates his proposal for a manufacture of "Souls of a good quality" by comparing the nation with Cordelia, whose "jewels" were in fact her sons.
The reversal transforms the problem of guilt. The act of subordinating ends to means, by which humans are perpetually a means to a fictitious end beyond themselves, parallels the experience of guilt or indebtedness, by which a person labors indefinitely in expiation of an ancient condition, and also the activity of "economizing," by which a person renounces present pleasure in favor of an indefinite future condition. The economic gospel, for both capitalist and worker, is a permanent and life-denying asceticism. Money is the emblem of all these things, the materialization of that denial and the token of the debt forever to be worked off. The Byzantine harness is the analogue, then, of TeufelsdrÖckh's iron bands of necessity, whereas the image of sons as jewels is the analogue of the golden bands of duty: the second is the emblem of freedom, since the debt has been erased in favor of the affection men "owe" each other, and the humanity of the worker is now affirmed, not perpetually to be earned.
Ruskin's utopian economics is of course paternalistic, exactly as Dickens's and Carlyle's were, but in no simple sense. In part it preserves what is best in classical economics (without Ruskin's ever saying so). In the third volume of The Stones of Venice, for example, he defines the "principle of brotherhood" in a "Gothic" rather than a republican sense: "the souls that are unlike, and the nations that are unlike, and the natures that are unlike, being bound into one noble whole by each receiving something from and of the others' gifts and the others' glory" (XI, 24). This statement is a moral version of division of labor as Adam Smith conceived it -- a guarantee of economic autonomy and efficiency by the exchange of specialized skills. In "The Nature of Gothic" Ruskin presented a good version of this system (in which the workman expresses himself and so finds freedom by participating in an organic whole) and a bad version (in which the workman is unskilled and uncreative, and so is enslaved by a mechanical system). But the word "inequality," performing the function that "imperfection" did in "The Nature of Gothic," deliberately confounds economics with politics, serving to rationalize a system of bourgeois control -- and so, of course, does the fable about the origin of money, which assumes as immutable the present relationships of power in order to reform the present uses of power. The theory of money and the dominant image of wealth as a stream (which like water only moves by flowing downward from a high source) suggest that Ruskin was unable even to conceive of a society that was not hierarchical or of social cohesion not based on some form of obligation of inequality. This failure of imagination derives, of [206/207] course, from Ruskin's class ideology -- the good fathers would be people from his own class-and also, to a limited but definite extent, from his own experience of affection. In countless published passages and private remarks and deeds, Ruskin suggests that for him friendship is inconceivable without a recognition of difference, a recognition deriving no doubt from his internalized paradigm of love, which is filial. The letter to Rossetti shows with particular clarity how the mechanism of exchange -- the exchange of money and labor and advice and praise -- simplifies some of the risks of a truly mutual intimacy, permitting the affirmation of "concurrent powers" as long as Ruskin himself could define the terms of power. Unto This Last sets up a similar conception of ideal paternity that permits the workman or son the full expression of his powers, giving to the benevolent ruling class quite remarkable power to shape the souls of those in their employ. By wishing away the very possibility of class conflict, Ruskinian paternalism denies the principle that has underlain liberal political thought since Macchiavelli -- that each class is the proper guardian of its own interests -- and this is a serious limitation indeed. Yet Ruskin's comment that the brotherhood of man is inconceivable without the sonhood of man, by suggesting that the family metaphor in libertarian thought can crucially avoid the hard questions of political power, reminds us that the difficulty is not Ruskin's alone. Even for Marx, the relationships of power in a classless society remain undefined.
Ruskin's method of thinking about economics in terms of individual affectionate relationships thus runs the danger of imposing a new form of tyranny. Yet Unto This Last shows even more powerfully the dangers of thinking about economics in any other way. It shows the same about the use of metaphor in economic thinking. Economic abstractions enact the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by taking a part of the whole -- economic "forces" -- and reifying it as a self-enclosed system (a rise in demand means a rise in "value," overproduction means a fall in wages, and so forth) governed by a law of profit and loss presumed to be ironclad. The reification is possible because economists view money and wealth only as quantities, not as signs, which in fact they are. By starting out with the crucial perception that wealth is power over labor and therefore the materialization of human relationships, Ruskin is able to draw aside the "veil" of the abstraction to show the human beneath and then to read the "moral signs" of wealth as we might read the stones of a fallen city or the emblems in a painting by Veronese. The relationship of material goods to the people who use and produce them, in other words, is like the relationship of vehicle to tenor except that in false wealth the literal meaning may be absolutely opposed to the metaphorical or human meaning: some treasures are heavy with human tears. Ruskin strengthens this point by an image structure of his [207/208] own in which people and their products are visually all but indistinguishable. In each essay the common image is a circulating system in which the elements (money, products), the forms of energy (greed or affection, need and indebtedness) and the laws of motion (justice or injustice) can be provisionally separated. Such a separation, however, is ultimately like separating the dancer from the dance (wealth flows, men are wealth, justice flows like money). As in the language of religious myth, the "true" language of economics is concrete, combining subject and object. But I am anticipating Ruskin's conception of justice, to which he devotes another essay.
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982.
Last modified December 2000