Unto This Last
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Unto This Last is an essay on economy by John Ruskin, first published in December 1860 in the monthly journal Cornhill Magazine in four articles. Ruskin says himself that these articles were "very violently criticized", forcing the publisher to stop the publication after four months. Subscribers sent protest letters. But Ruskin countered the attack and published the four articles in a book in May 1862.
This essay is very critical of capitalist economists of the 18th and 19th century. In this sense, Ruskin is a precursor of social economy.
[edit] Gandhi's paraphrase
Unto This Last had a very important impact on Gandhi's philosophy. He discovered the book in March 1904 through Henry Polack, who he had met in a vegetarian restaurant in South Africa. Polack was chief editor of the Johannesburg paper The Critic. Gandhi decided immediately not only to change his own life according to Ruskin's teaching, but also to publish his own newspaper, Indian Opinion, in a farm where everybody would get the same salary, without distinction of function, race or nationality, which for that time, was quite revolutionary. Thus Gandhi created Phoenix Settlement.
Gandhi adapted Unto This Last in Gujarati in 1908 under the title of Sarvodaya ("well being of all"). It is also the name he gave to his philosophy. Valji Govindji Desai translated it back to English in 1951 under the title of Unto This Last: A Paraphrase.
In Unto This Last, Gandhi found an important part of his social and economic ideas. Ruskin was concerned with the same problems and proposed the same solutions as Gandhi's own.
