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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Ruskin's constructive political economy is often thought to consist of the proposals for social regeneration made in Time and Tide and Fors Clavigera. These works, however, do not include what the late John A. Hobson regarded as Ruskin's principal contribution to constructive economic theory: the development of the concepts social utility and social cost. Because of the importance of these concepts in Hobson's own economy, Hobson might be considered—-as indeed he often said he was—Ruskin's disciple. It is perhaps more accurate to say that he was an original social economist who always admired and defended Ruskin.
1 “Ruskin's Aesthetics in Subsequent Social Reform,” Nineteenth-Century Studies, ed. Davis, Bald, and DeVane (Ithaca, 1940). Hobson's analysis is contained in John Ruskin, Social Reformer (Boston, 1898).
2 The Works of John Raskin (London, 1903-12), Unto This Last, xvn, 87, 88-89. References following quotations in my text (from this, Munera Pulveris, Fors Clavigera, etc.) are to this edition of the Works.
3 I have discussed Ruskin's controversy with his contemporaries on some of these points in “Ruskin and the Orthodox Political Economists,” Southern Economic Journal, x (July 1943), 1-13.
4 This word reads “raise” in the Library Edition.
5 London, 1933 (1st ed. 1914), p. 36.