Editing John Ruskin (section)

===Critique of political economy===
Ruskin wielded a [[critique of political economy]] of orthodox, 19th-century [[political economy]] principally on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge complexities of human desires and motivations (broadly, "social affections"). He began to express such ideas in ''The Stones of Venice'', and increasingly in works of the later 1850s, such as ''The Political Economy of Art'' (''A Joy for Ever''), but he gave them full expression in the influential and at the time of publication, very controversial essays, ''Unto This Last''.

{{Quote|text=... the art of becoming "rich," in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In accurate terms, it is "the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour."|author=Ruskin|title=''Unto This Last''}}
{{Quote box |width=380px |align=right |quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=right
|quote=Nay, but I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work. By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be "chosen." The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.|source=<small>Cook and Wedderburn, 17.V.34 (1860).</small> }}

At the root of his theory, was Ruskin's dissatisfaction with the role and position of the worker, and especially the artisan or craftsman, in modern [[capitalism|industrial capitalist]] society. Ruskin believed that the economic theories of [[Adam Smith]], expressed in ''[[The Wealth of Nations]]'' had led, through the [[division of labour]] to the alienation of the worker not merely from the process of work itself, but from his fellow workmen and other classes, causing increasing resentment.

Ruskin argued that one remedy would be to pay work at a fixed rate of wages, because human need is consistent and a given quantity of work justly demands a certain return. The best workmen would remain in employment because of the quality of their work (a focus on quality growing out of his writings on art and architecture). The best workmen could not, in a fixed-wage economy, be undercut by an inferior worker or product.

In the preface to ''Unto This Last'' (1862), Ruskin recommended that the state should underwrite standards of service and production to guarantee social justice. This included the recommendation of government youth-training schools promoting employment, health, and 'gentleness and justice'; government manufactories and workshops; government schools for the employment at fixed wages of the unemployed, with idlers compelled to toil; and pensions provided for the elderly and the destitute, as a matter of right, received honourably and not in shame.{{sfn|Cook and Wedderburn|loc=17.17–24}} Many of these ideas were later incorporated into the [[welfare state]].<ref>Jose Harris, "Ruskin and Social Reform", in Dinah Birch (ed.), ''Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern'' (Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 7–33, specifically p. 8.</ref>