After his conversion to socialism in 1883, William Morris expressed again and again his hope of replacing the ‘cannibalism’ and ‘stupendous organization – for the misery of life’ that characterized modern civilization with the community of liberated equals pursuing satisfying and meaningful work that he saw in socialism (CL, ii.480; CW, xxiii.279). In his own account of his political awakening to the causes and cures of poverty and inequality he described himself as a ‘practical Socialist’ with little interest in politics for politics’ sake. Indeed, he embarked on a relentless programme of propaganda and agitation for the cause: he gave speeches, founded and edited a newspaper, Commonweal, and wrote protest chants, political poems, articles and sketches as well as contributing to pamphlets and leaflets on aspects of socialism in the present and future. This chapter examines the range of Morris’s journalistic and propaganda writings and the ways they formulate and express his practical but never narrowly pragmatic socialism. His recurring emphasis on the interconnections of art, beauty, environment and communities of many kinds shapes an internationalist, revolutionary ideal of socialism founded on and arrived at through fellowship, imagination and action.

The contemporary revival of interest in political economy highlights the coexistence of different and opposed conceptions among scholars and policy makers in addressing the interface between the economy and the polity. One set of approaches focuses on individual actors in the marketplace or in the public sphere, while another set of approaches shifts the emphasis to the state as a self-contained and internally undifferentiated collective actor. This chapter outlines a conception of political economy that moves beyond this dichotomy and develops the view that individuals, markets, and states are embedded in a relational field composed of multi-level social interdependencies and institutions. The aim of the chapter is to explore the ‘constitution’ of political economy as the multi-layered and relatively persistent configuration of domains and sub-domains in which economic structures and political actions mutually reinforce or hinder one another, thereby determining the dynamics of social wealth – what we call ‘commonweal.’ The chapter conceptualises political economy as a relational field resulting from overlapping spheres of social life. It refers to the social relationships enabling the material provision of human needs and brings to the fore the political dimension of need satisfaction, which involves balancing and coordinating differentiated interests in society.