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.
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.
Volume 1-35, works. Volume 36-37, letters. Volume 38 provides an extensive bibliography of Ruskin's writings and a catalogue of his drawings, with corrections to earlier volumes in George Allen's Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin. Volume 39, general index.
This important work in Ruskin studies provides for the first time an authoritative study of Ruskin’s Guild of St George. It introduces new material that is important in its own right as a significant piece of social history, and as a means to re-examine Ruskin’s Guild idea of self-sufficient, co-operative agrarian communities founded on principles of artisanal (non-mechanised) labour, creativity and environmental sustainability. The remarkable story of William Graham and other Companions lost to Guild history provides a means to fundamentally transform our understanding of Ruskin’s utopianism.
Volume 1-35, works. Volume 36-37, letters. Volume 38 provides an extensive bibliography of Ruskin's writings and a catalogue of his drawings, with corrections to earlier volumes in George Allen's Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin. Volume 39, general index.
Includes two of John Ruskin's famous essays: "The Nature of the Gothic" and "The Work of Iron" from his book The Stones of Venice. Ruskin's insights into the need for individual artistic freedom, and his disdain for the mass-production art of the Victorian era, radically altered society's perception of creative design and remain powerfully relevant to our ideas of beauty today.
