John Ruskin was an old Tory Victorian who advocated a kind of artistic right-wing socialism. Deeply paternalistic, even misogynistic, he was deeply concerned with creating a HUMAN world, one that took art and craft seriously. Early on he "de-converted" from Christianity for 20 yrs and concentrated on economic policies to help the poor, before regaining a mystical religiously in late life. His vision of a conservative socialism contrasts sharply with Marx, who, in his later years, become obsessed with productivity and industrialization, blind to the need for beauty and dignity in work. Ruskin was much moire radical, with an entirely different vision of what an economy ought to be.
Below I give excerpts from John Milbank's Social Theory, where he explores Ruskin against Marx :
“….unlike Marxist and Fabian socialism, which have proved unable to resist capitalist modernity, most nineteenth-century socialisms were ‘post- modern’, in the sense that they had absorbed some measure of a romantic, Counter-Enlightenment critique. They did not, like Marxism, locate socialism (or for Marx, ‘communism’) as the next stage in a narrative of emancipation, or the genesis of human autonomy. On the contrary, the enlightened goal of a self-regulation of the will, according to its own natural, finite desires and capacities, was seen as of one piece with the operation of political economy. The rejection of the latter could not, then, involve a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, or an immanent critique of the present ideas of freedom.”
Milbank gives Ruskin as one example, he says :
“…..capitalism appeared to Ruskin as a kind of apostasy, the most remarkable ‘instance in history of a nation’s establishing a systematic disobedience to the principles of its own religion’.
Here, capitalism is not regarded as a partial development of freedom, but instead as a contingent pseudo-progress, whose emergence was the shame of Christendom. For Ruskin, capitalism was supremely the practice of a false knowledge, which made self-interest moderate self-interest without the intervention of virtue, and secured public order without the architectonic of justice. The triumph of political economy meant the promotion of certain quasi-virtues of busyness and frugality in place of true political phronesis and Christian charity. And the displacement of the ethical in the public sphere was held to be coterminous with the triumph of secularity. After the retreat of public religion, a vacuum was created, in which a merely ‘economic’ regime could ‘manage’ a society, even without moral or religious consensus.
Although this was a strictly moral critique of capitalism, one cannot say, with Marx, that this sort of socialism is blind to history. In the last analysis, what Marx meant when he accused other socialisms of being unhistorical was that they did not accept his own deduction to utopia from supposed laws of historical immanence. Ruskin never entertained any conception of this sort, but his moral critique precisely coincides with a historical vision which attempts to penetrate the level at which capitalism has inserted a completely different logic of human action, one which seeks to displace moral with ‘amoral’ regulation, or in Ruskin’s words substitutes ‘balances of expediency’ for ‘balances of justice’.
This level of historical change was not penetrated by Marx, precisely because he read back capitalist amorality as the supposed ‘economic base’, always finally determinative in every human society. By contrast, Ruskin realizes that the ‘knowledge’ embodied in political economy, far from being the ideological dress of underlying ‘material’ processes, is but the condensation and abridgement of the system of knowledge which capitalism itself consists of.
This knowledge, for Ruskin, is actually the first historical instance of ‘nescience’ because it does not promote, directly, a maximum excellence, but instead advocates the deliberate exploitation of differences in knowledge and ability. Relative failure, weak ability, bad craftsmanship and stupidity have a definite function for capitalism in the reducing of production costs and the extension of wealth. This new mode of knowledge is also a new, amoral, ‘moral economy’ which (as we saw with Hume and Smith in chapter 2) made a sharp division between the private and consumerist sphere of ‘natural’ sympathies based on supposedly universal feeling, and the ‘artificial’ sympathies which arise in relation to the positive facts of property, possession and political power. The ‘artificial’ sympathies do not generate a genuine public virtue, but only a Machiavellian virtue, which exalts, in a new mode, a heroic, regulated discipline.
In contrast to the Scots (but in continuity with a Scottish tradition of reflection on wealth and virtue, turned critical of political economy with Thomas Carlyle), Ruskin desires an integration of wealth with genuine virtue. He notes that ‘manly character’ and ‘production and exchange’ are not easily reconciled. Yet (one could add) this commonplace is specific to a classical legacy which subordinates the productive household to political relations in the city between property-owning males: economic production is ultimately subordinate to political virtue, yet production itself is not a virtuous activity.
By contrast, it is the post-Christian tendency to merge more perfectly the conceptions of polis and oikos – to make the household with its ‘pastoral’ oversight of material well-being the basic unit of government, and to include women, children and slaves as full members of the ultimate religio-political community – which permits us to demand that production and exchange discover within themselves immanent norms of virtue and paideia.
The trouble is, Ruskin notes, that trade and manufacture have never been seen as included within a Socratic ‘discipline of death’; it has not been recognized that there are here responsibilities for subordinates, and for the quality of products, which at the limit imply the same kind of sacrifice which we recognize as involved in soldiering, teaching or medicine.
Likewise, Ruskin wanted questions of the aesthetic quality of objects produced or exchanged to be coordinated with questions of ethical goals for social subjects. Economic value, he says, is properly ‘the possession of the valuable by the valiant’.
A just exchange of goods and labour presupposes a match between the ethical capacities of persons, and the interpreted excellence of material objects. The virtuous deserve beautiful, truly useful artefacts; artefacts of fine quality deserve a good use. This concern for the cultivation of high aesthetic standards, correlated with a certain style of life, has no equivalent in Marx, whose interest in creativity extends only to subjective ‘freedom of expression’ and who can be contemptuous of ‘craft idiocy’. Ruskin wanted to abolish ‘the economic’ as a realm of indifference to objective goodness, beauty or truth, whereas Marx merely wanted to fulfil it.
Still more clearly than Hegel, Ruskin divined that capitalism was the logical management of the death of excellence, or the belief that one can discover through art and practice the ‘proper end’ of things. The clear implication is that only in the invocation of transcendence can there be a critique of capitalist order, whose ‘secularity’ is its primary character.
Moreover, Ruskin did not altogether fail to indicate how this concern to ethicize manufacture and exchange can go in an egalitarian direction. Although he stresses the all- importance of parental and pastoral roles, he wishes to remove them from their connection with wealth and privilege, and there is even a suggestion that the true character of these roles will only be secured if they are disseminated, and become as far as possible reciprocal in a kind of clerisy of all citizens.
The real point of necessity for hierarchy in Ruskin is the transitive relationship of education, where an unavoidable non-reciprocity nonetheless works towards its own cancellation. Liberalism, by contrast, tends to disguise this necessity, because it makes normative the spatial relationships between adult, autonomous subjects, a habit which received its reductio ad absurdum in William Godwin’s vision of a world of finite immortality, without sexual passion, without birth, and without death.
In this sense, because Christian socialism maintained a commitment to collective norms of justice which can only be handed down through time, it had a commitment to hierarchy.
But it was also capable of realizing that an arbitrary hierarchy, of a non self-cancelling kind, is partially responsible for the formation of the modern machine of abstract power. For example, Charles Pe ́guy later blames social hierarchies, and especially the ecclesial hierarchy, for a ‘reversal’ of the divine pedagogic mystique, such that right from the Church’s very foundation the energies of the many were recruited to maintain the securities of the few.
Likewise Ruskin does not merely celebrate the Middle Ages as a lost era of ‘true craft’. Just as importantly, he invokes this period in a purely allegorical fashion, when he wishes to bestow ‘kingly’, ‘queenly’ and ‘noble’, rather than merely mercenary, attributes upon the sphere of work and trade.
There is a double profundity here: first, Ruskin grasps that if work and trade are to be transformed into ‘virtuous’ spheres of self-realization, then the only way for us to think this is in terms of an allegorical recuperation of past ‘aristocractic’ values. But secondly, the implication of this typological appeal to medieval kingship and warfare, rather than to medieval art, is that the latter was not adequately prized and promoted as a sphere of virtue. By not sufficiently integrating poesis with ethical praxis, both antiquity and the Middle Ages were themselves gradually nurturing the horrors of modernity.
Ruskin ‘gothicizes’ in the obvious sense of favouring gothic ornamentation, but he also gothicizes in a ‘gothick’ sense of invoking the horrors perpetrated by lazy and absent aristocratic fathers, never fully true to their aristocratic role, which is to be virtuous. This ‘gothick’ plot is only to be finally resolved when aristocracy is democratized, and nurtured within the realm of labour.
Ruskin, therefore, was no mere medievalizing reactionary. Instead, he proposed something altogether new: a society where aesthetic perception of nature, and public standards of fine design, are seen as the vital keys to public virtue, together with the upholding of a sense of transcendence which goes along with a common sense of things ‘in their proper place’ and ‘rightly finished’. (Is this not a materialist religiosity?)
The example of Ruskin shows how socialism was able both to appeal to the fragmentary justice of the past – the medieval monasteries – and to connect present secular injustice with past social and ecclesial shortcomings."
"Marx," Milbank ends his thoughts with, "invented an impossible naturalistic mysticism, at once anarchic, and technocratically totalitarian."
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