John Ruskin Social Reformer Author:J. A. Hobson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE INDICTMENT OF CURRENT POLITICAL ECONOMY § 1. Qualifications for Political Economy—A trained specialist in fine work and its products. § 2. ... more »A master of words and their meanings. § 3. Sincerity of sight and speech. § 4. A great analytic genius. § 5. Two beads of the indictment. § 6. False assumption of an " economic man." § 7. The mechanical treatment of an organic problem. § 8. Attempted human- isation of the "economic man " theory. § 9. Can there be a science of "getting and spending"?—§ 10. Political versus Mercantile Economy. § II. Wealth rightly includes "all useful or pleasurable things." § 12. Wealth measured by life not by money. § 13. True utility, not passing desires, the standard of wealth. § 14. Organic conception of society essential to " Political " Economy. § 15. Production of " souls of a good quality" the economic goal. § 16. The higher Utilitarianism of Mr. Ruskin. § 17. His pioneer-work in social economics. § 1. There is a curious notion still widely prevalent, that Mr. Ruskin abandoned his proper work as an art-teacher in order rashly to embark in Political Economy, for which he had neither natural aptitude nor the requisite training and knowledge. In order to show how ill founded such a notion is, it may be well to enumerate some of the special qualifications he possessed for this work of social and economic criticism. Political Economy, even in that narrow connotation of industrial science from which Mr. Ruskin sought to release it, takes for its subject-matter the work which men put into the raw material supplied by Nature in order to furnish necessaries or conveniences for human consumption. Now Mr. Ruskin's first qualification is that of being a skilled specialist in the finer qualities of work on the one hand, and of enjoyment or...« less