Unto This Last
Unto This Last is an essay on economy by John Ruskin, critical of the 18th and 19th century capitalist economists. When first published as four magazine articles in 1860 they were, in the words of Ruskin himself, "very violently criticized" and the publisher was force to halt publication. But Ruskin persevered and released the four articles in this book form in 1862. Gandhi read Unto This Last in 1904 and it had a huge impact on his social and economic philosophy, with Gandhi making an immediate decision to live according to Ruskin's teachings.
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- It always makes me a little sad that no discussion of Ruskin can occur without at least some mention of his first wife's pubic hair (allegedly, no doubt apocryphally, the discovery of which on Ruskin's part led to their marriage never being consummated) or the wretched story of Rose La Touche. Unto This Last is probably one of the more important books I've ever read (and I wish I'd thought more deeply and more often about the words "There is no wealth but life" during the fifteen years or so since I first read it), but it seems impossible to advocate or encourage reading him when the more prurient aspects of Ruskin are all anyone seems to care about now.
If you're ever up in the Lake District in the north west of England, Ruskin's house, Brantwood, is well worth a visit.
- Butler's essay can be seen as building off earlier work, perhaps Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, and inspiring others, including Alan Turing's "Computer Machinery and Intelligence" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intell... and full text: https://academic.oup.com/mind/article-pdf/LIX/236/433/986611... (PDF)) and possibly as the inspiration for Frank Herbert's notion of the Butlerian Jihad, within the Dune series, though that connection is unclear. Wikipedia lists further inspired or similar works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines#Late...
Butler also wrote the book Erewhon, online at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1906
For some reason the essay and Butler both evoke John Rushkin and Unto This Last to me, though that may be spurious on my part.
- John Ruskin's "Unto this Last" influenced Gandhi deeply.
