CONCEPT
There Is No Wealth But Life
Ruskin's 1860 redefinition of wealth in
Unto This Last — the insistence that genuine wealth consists not in accumulation but in the full development of human capacities, and that a system which grows its output while degrading its producers has destroyed wealth in the only currency that matters.
The sentence is Ruskin's most famous and most misunderstood. He is not saying life is like wealth, or more important than wealth, or that we should value life in addition to wealth. He is saying life is wealth — that the word, properly defined, refers to nothing other than the fullness of human vitality. Every other use of the word is a category error. A chest of gold in a dead man's house is not wealth. A warehouse of food in a starving city is not wealth. A civilization's accumulated output is not wealth if the accumulation required the degradation of the human beings who produced it. The sentence was published in
Unto This Last in 1860 and dismissed as sentimental nonsense by the economists of the day. Within forty years it had reshaped the
moral imagination of
Gandhi, Tolstoy, Morris, and the