John Ruskin’s Politics and Natural Law: An Intellectual Biography

✍ Scribed by Graham A. MacDonald

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 291
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book offers new perspectives on the origins and development of John Ruskin’s political thought. Graham A. MacDonald traces the influence of late medieval and pre-Enlightenment thought in Ruskin’s writing, reintroducing readers to Ruskin’s politics as shaped through his engagement with concepts of natural law, legal rights, labour and welfare organization. From Ruskin’s youthful studies of geology and chemistry to his back-to-the-land project, the Guild of St. George, he emerges as a complex political thinker, a reformer—and what we would recognize today as an environmentalist. John Ruskin’s Politics and Natural Law is a nuanced reappraisal of neglected areas of Ruskin’s thought.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-xx
Introduction (Graham A. MacDonald)....Pages 1-24
The Wine Merchant’s Son: Ruskin’s Discovery of the World (Graham A. MacDonald)....Pages 25-50
Art, Morality and the Fate of Nations: 1848–53 (Graham A. MacDonald)....Pages 51-88
On the Moral Disorder of Victorian England: From Art to Political Economy: 1853–63 (Graham A. MacDonald)....Pages 89-120
Wealth, Justice and the Medieval Poor Law: 1864–70 (Graham A. MacDonald)....Pages 121-146
Towards Pluralism: Oxford Teaching and Natural Law: 1870–77 (Graham A. MacDonald)....Pages 147-187
Easing Towards ‘A Vast Policy’: Establishing the Guild of St. George (Graham A. MacDonald)....Pages 189-220
The Condition of Political Virtue: Co-operative Individualism and Civil Association (Graham A. MacDonald)....Pages 221-257
Back Matter ....Pages 259-276

✦ Subjects

Intellectual Studies