John Ruskin or the Ambiguities of Abundance

Until 1860 John Ruskin's writings were primarily about art and architecture; but his belief that good art can flourish only in a society that is sound and healthy led him inevitably to a preoccupation with social and economic problems, the dominant concern of his later writings. Sherburne provides in this volume a detailed and long overdue re-examination of Ruskin's social and economic perceptions and, for the first time, systematically places these perceptions in their nineteenth-century intellectual context.