The Communism of John Ruskin

This book comprises the teachings of John Ruskin. Ruskin was an inspiration for many Christian socialists, and his ideas informed the work of economists such as William Smart and J. A. Hobson, and the positivist, Frederic Harrison. Ruskin was discussed in university extension classes, and in reading circles and societies formed in his name. He helped to inspire the settlement movement in Britain and the United States. Resident workers at Toynbee Hall such as the later civil servants Hubert Llewellyn Smith and William Beveridge (author of the Report ... on Social Insurance and Allied Services), and the future Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged their debt to Ruskin as they helped to found the British welfare state. More of the British Labour Party's earliest members acknowledged his significance than mentioned Karl Marx or the Bible. More recently, Ruskin's works have also influenced Phillip Blond and the Red Tory movement.

The production of a true social form has been the supreme task given to the nineteenth century. What is
Ruskin's place ; what his message ; what his contribution to the century? Ruskin is first and foremost a Teacher. He is not the originator of a new system, of a new order, even of a new philosophy. He says somewhere of himself: " I have never applied myself to discover anything, being content to praise what had already been discovered, so that no true disciple of mine will ever be a Ruskinian." He will be something better, his disciples add; he will be one of God's men, with truer, deeper, joy, seeing higher, diviner beauty in the world because Ruskin has shown it to him. Ruskin' s Gospel, says one of those whom Ruskin has clung to, is a gospel not of a "news", but "like that of Jesus, a gospel of glad tidings."

And let us not think it a disparagement to Ruskin that he was not an originator. Was Jesus Christ an originator? Did Christ establish a new order? Was Christianity aught but the simple flowering of old Jewish faith ? Did Christ come to destroy or to fulfill ? Fulfillment is the higher task. Many a man can see a truth, who cannot live it. Jesus Christ lived the truth. His new commandment was more literally a new command, the reissuing of old orders. Before Christ came men who knew that they should love one another. The secret of Jesus was that he led men in the loving of their neighbors. Is not this the secret too of John Ruskin, not so much that he created Beauty, but that he leads men to love it, helps them to live it—true life, the beauty of
Truth, the grace of Sincerity, the Gospel of Noble Things? In this high function of the Teacher, Ruskin, in his line, stands unapproached.