Upcycling Antiquity in <i>Unto This Last</i>

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.