Synopses & Reviews
The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectualJohn Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin'sengaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. Withits reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethicsconcerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts establishedinterpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, anddemonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital toindividual agency and social welfare. Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did notalways allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, hiseclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin'sinterdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, andeconomic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connectionsbetween aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied totoday's debates about liberal modernity today. With the triumph of globalcapitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskin's model of an engagedreading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewedattention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory witha timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.