Toward a Postsecular Economy: John Ruskin's Unto This Last

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Notes

For many incisive comments on earlier drafts of this essay, I am indebted to Lauren M. E. Goodlad, as well as to Yu-Ting Chen, Hina Nazar, Bruce Rosenstock, Julia Saville, and Andrew Tate. In addition to the generous feedback of the audience at the 2010 “Laws of Life: Ruskin and Cultural Value” conference at the universities of Liverpool and Lancaster, I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for Nineteenth Century Contexts.

For recent accounts, see Mahmood; Viswanathan.

Addressing the same point, Jürgen Habermas draws upon John Rawls's theory of the “public use of reason” to frame his own position that religious discourse be tolerated—and, indeed, welcomed—in the public sphere, with the understanding that it be translated into non-religious terms in the legislative one (“Religion”).

Regenia Gagnier has also described the nineteenth-century roots of Francis Fukuyama's influential neoliberal thesis in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), though she argues that it is indebted more to Charles Babbage than “the early political economists, who typically understood the structural flaws of laissez-faire” (62). While it is true that classical economists like the early J.S. Mill “may have equivocated on laissez-faire,” as Willie Henderson argues, “in places of business such as Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, and in journalistic reviews, exemplified especially by reviews of Ruskin's essays on political economy, laissez-faire was an unconditional truth” (25). For more on the complicated relationship between Victorian liberalism and modern-day neoliberalism, see Goodlad, “Character” (esp. 238–244) and Booth.

For more on Chalmers, see Goodlad, Victorian Literature 39–48; Poovey 98–115.

For an interesting reading of Ruskin's marginal notes from his copy of Mill's Principles of Political Economy, see Henderson, ch. 6. For more on the influence of Xenophon on Ruskin's thinking about economics, see Petrochilos; Birch 55–60.

In his brief biography of Ruskin, Robert Hewison describes John La Touche in further detail as “a follower of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, by whom he was … baptized as an evangelical Baptist in 1863” (78).

A description of La Touche taken from one of Ruskin's letters to the “Winnington girls,” quoted in Hilton's John Ruskin (290).

My own reading of Unto This Last diverges from Spears's, however, in that while he is keen to emphasize the disjunction between the belief and practice of Christian values in the Victorian market, he does not recognize that certain evangelical beliefs actually resonate with a laissez-faire approach to political economy. Thus, while he argues that Ruskin “rooted social action in the Christian concept of individual moral responsibility” (139), he does not account for the ways that evangelicals often interpret this responsibility in ways that lead them to be less, rather than more, charitable. My account differs from Robert Hewison's in his John Ruskin: the argument of the eye for these same reasons.

In his book John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption (2006), David Craig charts Ruskin's “movement away from a belief-centered to a practice-centered model of religions,” arguing that such an evolution led Ruskin to “view the normative offerings of religions as one more set of ethical resources—one more cultural source of moral visions of the good—to bring to the forum of public discourse” (24). In Craig's view, Ruskin's “appreciative recognition” of the formative authority “binding practices” like religion, despite the art critic's own complicated faith journey, “distinguishes his religious criticism from the secular theories of figures like Marx and Mill” (337). My argument here differs from Craig's in my reading of the tenor of Ruskin's postsecular critique of the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, and in my complicating of the view of Mill as a “secularist.” While Craig does address Ruskin's critique of the “moderate” evangelical Victorians and their embrace of laissez-faire economics, as described by Boyd Hilton, he is ultimately more concerned with portraying the author of Unto This Last as a moralist concerned with proper consumption, contrasted with the “production” which captivated J.S. Mill, rather than as a critic of the resonance between Victorian capital and Protestantism.

Russel Edward Kacher argues that this traditional narrative has been overstated by Ruskin biographers, though he concedes that Unto This Last was not well received.

Most scholars note that Mill (who was in many respects a reformer of classical economics) acknowledged the “hypothetical” nature of so-called economic man so that Ruskin's argument with Mill consists somewhat of a strawman attack.

Camlot does argue elsewhere that Ruskin's decision to publish in the Cornhill Magazine, and not in a smaller, religious publication, led to his being castigated by reviewers for bringing “biblical discourse in the domain of science” (95). Such criticism, however, didn't prevent Ruskin from castigating in very Christian terms the citizens and businessmen of Bradford when asked to offer architectural advice on their building of an Exchange in his 1864 lecture “Traffic.”

For an account of Ruskin as a “sage writer” see Landow.

Though she makes the argument that by The Queen of the Air (1869) Ruskin's new reliance on “secular tradition” was due to the “major change in his religious views” (253), Elizabeth Helsinger notes that prior to 1860 this would have been unacceptable to the art critic. She describes a debate “sometime in the late 1850s” between F. J. Furnivall, F. D. Maurice and R. C. Trench who all held in contempt literal readings of the Bible, and Ruskin, who argued that “the Bible was intended to speak directly to simply people at all times—in other words, that it should be taken as the literal word of God and not as a human text written in an historically changing language” (257).

For more on Mill and the religion of humanity, see, among others, Raeder; Wright 40–50; Cowling 77–93.

For Ruskin's own involvement in the religion of humanity, see Alexander, especially pp. 161–170.

For a productive reading of the key differences in both writing style and systems of thought, see Henderson, who concludes that “To understand mid-nineteenth-century economic representations, we need to read Ruskin and Mill against each other” (143).