Following Marx, the left has tended to vilify Ruskin’s kind of anticapitalism as “petty-bourgeois” fantasy. There is more than a little truth to this charge. Ruskin was at his best when playing the roles of critic, provocateur, and visionary; he failed utterly when he tried to be the architect of a fundamentally new economics, and that blend of genius and ineptitude augured more moderation than radicalism. Even in Unto This Last, Ruskin conceded too much to the realities of mammon-service: his proposal of equal wages, for instance, still assumed both wage labor and a competitive labor market.
