Quality | 2009.06.27
Of skeletons and souls | Jonathan Glancey
John Ruskin\'s masterful political text is essential reading for MPs in search of a moral compass
In 1906, when the first 29 Labour MPs were elected, the book that had most affected them, they said, was John Ruskin \'s Unto This Last . Although no such survey was made of the 418 New Labour MPs elected in 1997, one can only assume it must have been a close call between Investors Chronicle, the Argos catalogue and Bridget Jones\'s Diary.
Unto This Last is one of the most far-reaching books published in Britain in the past 150 years. It inspired the foundation of the welfare state and was translated into numerous languages, including Gujarati by Mahatma Gandhi.
Ruskin began sketching the four essays that form Unto This Last in 1859. Appalled by the dishonesty of MPs and by crude, inhumane free market economics causing unspeakable suffering among those who toiled in the new industrial world, he determined to fight for justice and a form of wealth we could all believe in, and share.
A strike by ruthlessly exploited building workers prompted this lover of noble, crafted buildings to let rip. "For my own part," he railed, "I feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious commerce to be at present so irresistible, that I have seceded from the study not only of architecture, but nearly all of art, and have given myself, as I would in a besieged city, to seek the best modes of getting bread and butter for its multitudes."
Rushing to complete the last volume of his acclaimed Modern Painters that year, Ruskin agreed to write his radical essays on political economy for the Cornhill magazine, edited by William Thackeray. Conceived in 1859, these were printed in 1860 and published in book form two years later. When MPs break up for the summer recess, they should take Unto This Last with them on holiday. They will dislike it, and be disturbed by it, just as their predecessors – keen students of Ricardo, Mill and Darwin – were when Ruskin wrote this, his finest book, a polemic in favour of health, education, hope, welfare and decency and, in spirit, entirely against the crude, New Labour revival of liberal economics and our debilitating obsession with money, aspiration for aspiration\'s sake, shopping malls, PFI, PPP, destruction of craft and industry, MPs\' expenses and every other form of dismal economics and head-hanging greed.
Unto This Last demolishes this view of the world with biblical high-mindedness and coruscating wit. Political economy, Ruskin argued, is an organism, not a mechanism. "Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusions of the science, if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons." Modern political economy assumes "not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton", and, thus, "founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometric figures with death\'s-heads and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures."
Ultimately, says Ruskin, in a spirit that will be incomprehensible to most MPs today, "There is no wealth but Life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life, to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others."
A heavenly book, written by our largely forgotten national archangel, Unto This Last deserves to be read anew, by all of us, but mostly by expense-sullied politicians in search of a moral compass with practical, humane and honest bearings.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]-expenses-political-philosophy
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