Human-Built World
Human-Built World

Author: Thomas P. Hughes

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2005-05-13

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 022612066X

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To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.

John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption
John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption

Author: David Melville Craig

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 9780813925585

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The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectual John Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin's engaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. With its reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethics concerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts established interpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, and demonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital to individual agency and social welfare. Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did not always allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, his eclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin's interdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, and economic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connections between aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied to today's debates about liberal modernity today. With the triumph of global capitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskin's model of an engaged reading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewed attention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory with a timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.

Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy

Author: John Ruskin

Publisher:

Published: 2017-02-22

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9781543263138

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This excellent collection of John Ruskin's writings contains three of his most famous essays: The Political Economy of Art, Essays on Political Economy and Unto This Last. In the Political Economy of Art, Ruskin embarks on an explanation of art as an important force in relation to a country's culture, politics and prosperity. Citing examples from history where artistic expression had made a great difference to the evolution of a country and its people, Ruskin considers how a country can go about discovering and fostering its greatest artistic talents. The latter portions of the essay discuss how the art these talented people produce can be put to greatest use, in terms of service to the country and population at large. Unto this Last is a famous discussion on economics which John Ruskin first published in 1860. Vociferously critical of what he viewed as the exploitative, free market capitalist economics which had dominated England for more than a century, Ruskin argues for a living wage and highlights the dire conditions laborers of the era endured. This essay is notable for inspiring Mahatma Gandhi, who cited the work as an inspiration for his own, non-violent resistance to the prevailing order in colonial-era India. Essays on Political Economy sees John Ruskin set out his personal interpretation of nineteenth century economic theory. He acknowledges the importance of land and natural resources, but adds books (for being useful stores of knowledge) and works of art (for heightening a society's culture, and its overall refinement) as further items vital for the development of a sophisticated, civilized economy. Ruskin also criticizes the excess concentration of wealth into few hands, terming the phenomena a 'disease of desire', and discusses the role of governments and law. Although primarily famous as a leading art critic, John Ruskin had great interest in the economy and the workings of the society in which he lived. Ruskin witnessed a period that saw his country, the United Kingdom, industrialize at a rapid pace. While great machines and wealth were created as never before, the poor (for whom Ruskin had great sympathy) suffered in abject poverty.

A/moral Economics
A/moral Economics

Author: Claudia C. Klaver

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780814209448

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A/Moral Economics is an interdisciplinary historical study that examines the ways which social "science" of economics emerged through the discourse of the literary, namely the dominant moral and fictional narrative genres of early and mid-Victorian England. In particular, this book argues that the classical economic theory of early-nineteenth-century England gained its broad cultural authority not directly, through the well- known texts of such canonical economic theorists as David Ricardo, but indirectly through the narratives constructed by Ricardo's popularizers John Ramsey McCulloch and Harriet Martineau. By reexamining the rhetorical and institutional contexts of classical political economy in the nineteenth century, A/Moral Economics repositions the popular writings of both supporters and detractors of political economy as central to early political economists' bids for a cultural voice. The now marginalized economic writings of McCulloch, Martineau, Henry Mayhew, and John Ruskin, as well as the texts of Charles Dickens and J. S. Mill, must be read as constituting in part the entities they have been read as merely criticizing. It is this repressed moral logic that resurfaces in a range of textual contradictions--not only in the writings of Ricardo's supporters, but, ironically, in those of his critics as well.

John Ruskin's Political Economy
John Ruskin's Political Economy

Author: William Henderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1134636547

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This volume offers an exciting new reading of John Ruskin's economic and social criticism, based on recent research into rhetoric in economics. Willie Henderson uses notions derived from literary criticism, the rhetorical turn in economics and more conventional approaches to historical economic texts to reevaluate Ruskins economic and social criticism. By identifying Ruskin's rhetoric, and by reading his work through that of Plato, Xenophon, and John Stuart Mill, Willie Henderson reveals how Ruskin manipulated a knowledge base. Moreover in analysis of the writings of William Smart, John Bates Clark and Alfred Marshall, the author shows that John Ruskin's influence on the cultural significance of economics and on notions of economic well-being has been considerable.

John Ruskin's Political Economy
John Ruskin's Political Economy

Author: William Henderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-12

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1134636555

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This volume offers an exciting new reading of John Ruskin's economic and social criticism, based on recent research into rhetoric in economics. Willie Henderson uses notions derived from literary criticism, the rhetorical turn in economics and more conventional approaches to historical economic texts to reevaluate Ruskins economic and social criticism. By identifying Ruskin's rhetoric, and by reading his work through that of Plato, Xenophon, and John Stuart Mill, Willie Henderson reveals how Ruskin manipulated a knowledge base. Moreover in analysis of the writings of William Smart, John Bates Clark and Alfred Marshall, the author shows that John Ruskin's influence on the cultural significance of economics and on notions of economic well-being has been considerable.

"Unto this Last"

Author: John Ruskin

Publisher:

Published: 1862

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13:

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Unto This Last is an essay on economy by John Ruskin, first published in December 1860 in the monthly journal Cornhill Magazine in four articles. Ruskin says himself that these articles were "very violently criticized", forcing the publisher to stop the publication after four months. Subscribers sent protest letters. But Ruskin countered the attack and published the four articles in a book in May 1862. This essay is very critical of capitalist economists of the 18th and 19th century. In this sense, Ruskin is a precursor of social economy.