John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption

David M. Craig

432 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Cloth 978-0-8139-2558-5 • $60.00

Studies in Religion and Culture

Available October 2006

“David Craig’s great book on the perennial wisdom of John Ruskin reignites a much-needed dialogue between this sad genius and twenty-first-century cultural critics. This is a Ruskin for—and against—our time!”
— Cornel West, Princeton University

The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectual John Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin's engaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. With its reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethics concerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts established interpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, and demonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital to individual agency and social welfare.

Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did not always allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, his eclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin's interdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, and economic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connections between aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied to todayís debates about liberal modernity today.

With the triumph of global capitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskinís model of an engaged reading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewed attention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory with a timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.

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David M. Craig is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.