Upcycling Antiquity in Unto This Last
Abstract
Ruskin’s re-purposing of the Classics pervades Unto This Last. On the surface his classical allusions are bombastic and rhetorical. At the structural level of his argument, however, the classical influences run deeper and have gone largely unnoticed. Ruskin’s engagement with the Classics is not perfunctory or mere window dressing to his prose. Rather it represents a creative “upcycling” of the past to address contemporary concerns. Ruskin, himself a resourceful artist of considerable talent, scours the scrap heap of history to construct a newly useful and morally beautiful economic worldview out of the detritus of antiquity. This chapter focuses on Ruskin’s debt to Aristotle’s critique of money in the Politics (1257a-1258b), his indebtedness to Plato’s arguments in the Republic, a close congruence with Hesiod’s poem Works and Days, and his allusion to a story about the brothers Gracchi, reformers for fair distribution of wealth in Republican Rome.
Submitted: Sept. 17, 2024 | Accepted: Nov. 12, 2024 | Published March 7, 2025 | Language: en
Keywords Horace • Aristotle • Classical influences • Communism • Hesiod • Xenophon • Political economy • Plato
Copyright © 2024 Mark Usher. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2024/11/002