“Form Against Force”

Abstract

This essay considers art critic, environmental reformer, and heterodox political economist John Ruskin as an early sustainability theorist through an examination of his commitment to organicism. That commitment manifests in Ruskin’s struggle to differentiate the living from the non-living, most evident in his writings on crystals, leaves, and iron: “The Work of Iron, In Nature, Art, and Policy” (1858) and The Ethics of Dust (1866). This struggle is discussed in the context of his heterdox political economy as an early demand theorist, and his idiosyncratic writings on economic value as inhering in anything that avails “toward life.” By arguing that Ruskin is an important precursor to contemporary ecocritical discourse, it complicates recent critical readings of Ruskin’s anthropocentrism and instrumental aesthetics.