Alastair's Adversaria - Ruskin's Heroic Merchant

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following reflection is entitled Ruskin's Heroic Merchant. It was first published on the Anchored Argosy. I was recently reminded of a passage of John Ruskin's The Roots of Honor, one of the four essays that comprised his remarkable unto this last. Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed. Three exist necessarily in every civilized nation. The soldier's profession is to defend. it, the pastors to teach it, the physicians to keep it in health, the lawyers to enforce justice in it,

Starting point is 00:00:37 the merchants to provide for it. And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it. On due occasion, namely, the soldier rather than leave his post in battle, the physician rather than leave his post in plague, the pastor rather than teach falsehood, the lawyer rather than countenance injustice. The merchant. What is his due occasion of death? It is the main question for the merchant as for all of us, for truly, the man who does not know when to die does not know how to live. Ruskin, who lived from 1819 to 1900, was an influential Victorian writer, a quixotic thinker in many respects. Some might too quickly dismiss him on this account. However, I have found much benefit and sympathetically terroring with his thought and reflecting upon it,

Starting point is 00:01:32 even when I might part ways with him in various respects in the final analysis, especially when it comes to the selection of prudent policy proposals. Within the essay from which this quotation is taken, Ruskin is considering the breach between the principles of economic action and the exercise of social affection that had occurred in the thinking of many of the leading minds of his day. This breach was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the conceptualisation, of the figure of the merchant, theoretically animated chiefly by private avarice, a vice transmuted into virtuous economic policy through the invisible alchemical hand of the market.

Starting point is 00:02:09 As Adam Smith famously claimed, it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Whether Smith is fairly charged with so radical a breach as many have imputed to him is quite debatable, especially when interpreted charitably and harmonised with his account of sympathy in the theory of moral sentiments. Smith's approach may not be the rationalisation of selfishness imagined by his detractors. Rather, when each person pursues his own livelihood and the well-being of his family, self-interest, with a lively sympathy for and with just dealings with his neighbour,

Starting point is 00:02:48 even in the absence of active benevolence, the market can harmonise his interests and ends with those of strangers beyond the limited horizons of his sympathetic awareness. Unfortunately, in both theory and practice, accounts such as Smiths have often been employed to valorise cupidity, not least as the hand of the market has too often worked contrary to moral men pursuing their own livelihoods. It can sometimes privilege those who lack or reject sympathy and who pray upon or subdue the livelihood of others to the service of their own ambitions.

Starting point is 00:03:21 It is not always a healthy self-interest that the market favours. Too often it is a destructive selfishness. Ruskin, it seems to me, is wrestling with this reality and with the theories that rationalise its injustices. At several points he is dealing with an extreme caricature, but the caricature exaggerates features that are recognisable. One of his central concerns is with the extreme descriptive inadequacy of the homo-economicus in.

Starting point is 00:03:51 in terms of which so many contemporary theories of economics proceeded, the foil for Ruskin's argument here, as at various points elsewhere, seems to be John Stuart Mill, with his suggestion that, for the purposes of political economy, as an abstract science using an a priori method, human beings can be modelled, abstracting from their broader social formation and life, as individuals who are rational wealth maximizes. Mill writes, Political economy considers mankind as occupied,

Starting point is 00:04:21 solely in acquiring and consuming wealth, and aims at showing what is the course of action into which mankind, living in a state of society, would be impelled if that motive, except in the degree in which it is checked by the two perpetual countermoves above adverted to, were the absolute ruler of all their actions. He writes further, now no one who is conversant with systematic treatises on political economy will question that whenever a political economist has shown that by acting in a particular manner, a labourer may obviously obtain higher wages, a capitalist larger profits, or a landlord higher rent, he concludes, as a matter of course, that they will certainly act in that manner. Now, Mill is certainly not making the claim that human beings are actually

Starting point is 00:05:08 like this. Rather, homo-economicus is an abstract model for the purposes of political economy. While Ruskin can grant that Mills' homo-economicus is understood as an abstraction, his contention is that it is a deeply ill-suited abstraction, analogous to modeling man as a skeleton-less creature for the purposes of gymnastics, with the skeleton being conceived of as if some accidental feature that complicates the theory. Mills' rational wealth-maximizing homo-economicus is essentially akin to modelling human beings as soulless creatures without social affections, obscuring from the economist's vision so much that is essential to human action. Even were milled to follow airtight logic from his models to some conclusions,

Starting point is 00:05:55 the ill-fittingness of his models to reality would render the conclusions worthless. In unto this last, more generally, Ruskin is attacking the ways that economic theories bracket out humanity, and in so doing, produce a society and encourage people to act in ways that suppress humanity. He considers how wealth can be abstracted from those things that actually serve men's wheel, the casino owner producing wealth interchangeably with the farmer. He challenges the abstraction of value from the variability of human capacities. For Ruskin, wealth involves the possession of the valuable by the valiant. He rejects the notion the truest form of value.

Starting point is 00:06:38 is the abstract exchange value of dollar amounts on a spreadsheet, rather than the fullness and concreteness of life flourishing in a particular setting. He is also interrogating the economic theories by which the merchant is conceptualized as operating principally in terms of narrow self-interest. This, Ruskin insists, is untrue to reality. Considering the examples of a master and servant or a manufacturer and his workman, he suggests that the harmonization of interests, as each part of the person, party seeks to render good to the other, the cultivation of human sympathy, will typically be more

Starting point is 00:07:13 fruitful for both parties than their antagonistic narrow self-interest could be. In the section of Ruskin's essay from which the quotation with which I began comes, he turns to consider the figure of the merchant. Commenting on the manner in which the liberal professions, soldiers, lawyers, physicians and clergymen are generally held in honour, he asks why the merchant or businessman is often not so esteemed. He suggests that this is because the businessman is so often presumed to be acting selfishly. In the quotation with which I began, Ruskin considers the extreme situation in which the grounds for the honour in which these professions are held are most clearly manifest. The soldier will defend his society to the point of laying down his life for its survival.

Starting point is 00:08:00 The pastor will teach and uphold the truth to the point of dying as a martyr for it. The physician will commit himself to the health of his neighbour to the point of risking his own health in plague. The lawyer seeks to serve the law and will suffer radical loss rather than be complicit in injustice. Whether or not focusing upon these heroic extremes is the most effective way to highlight the honour at the heart of each of these professions is somewhat besides the point, which is to consider whether and how the merchant or businessman might be regarded similarly. Ruskin suggests that at the heart of the merchant's profession is the task of provisioning his society. Clergymen receive stipends or honoraria, but the satisfaction and success of their work is not linked to that remuneration, welcome as it might be. The success of their work is the care of souls and the careful preaching of God's word and administering of the sacraments.

Starting point is 00:08:57 A teacher is paid, but we would not call a teacher unsuccessful if he were not paid, but if he did not manage to form his students into wise and knowledgeable people. And of course, an artist is considered to have been admirable and successful if he makes beautiful and skillful paintings. He may well die in poverty. These vocations are not fundamentally ordered towards the earning of money. In the case of the merchant, the relationship between their labour and their income is much closer, and it would seem to most that maximising their income is their primary end. A bankrupt merchant is a failed merchant, in a way that a bankrupt artist is not necessarily a failed artist. Ruskin, however, maintains that this is not the case.

Starting point is 00:09:40 Rather, although getting sufficient income is an important and worthy concern for the merchant, it should by no means be his central and overriding concern. The proper central and overriding concern of the merchant is to provide for his society and to advance the well-being of his workers. The merchant is, for Ruskin, not merely to be faithful to contracts, but to cultivate and operate in terms of an appropriate sympathy for his clientele, providential regard for and moral responsibility to the society he serves, and generous care for those in his employ.

Starting point is 00:10:15 The true merchant comes to enjoy a sort of distinctly paternal authority and responsibility relative to his workers. Like the captain of a ship, for instance, he should be prepared to assume the greatest measure of suffering in the case of disaster. The risk undertaken by the merchant then is not merely to be a narrowly self-interested chancing upon the fickle winds of fortune, like a gambler in a casino, but the assumption of the chief burdens of misfortune for all others included in his ventures, for whom he feels a keen sense of providential responsibility.

Starting point is 00:10:50 Considered thus the honourable and potentially heroic character of the merchant should be evident. Here I would add to Ruskin's argument that such an account of the merchant, which does not abstract the merchant's economic activity from human sympathy, but sees the latter as integral to the former, is not uncommonly truer to reality than the model of the avaricious businessman, not merely ideally, but actually. Further, in so conceptualising the merchant, we are much better equipped to praise the many virtuous business people that exist,

Starting point is 00:11:22 not merely challenging, as Ruskin effectively does, the many ways in which the practice of business and the theories of economists can stunt people's humanity. If you'd like to read other reflections like this, you can do so at the anchored argosy, the substack that I share with my wife Susanna. If you'd like to support my work there, here or elsewhere, you can do so using the links to my PayPal or Patreon accounts

Starting point is 00:11:48 in the show notes below. Thank you very much for listening. God bless.

Alastair's Adversaria - Ruskin's Heroic Merchant

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