Footnote 12, Chapter 8, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Ruskin's discussion of catallactics, or mercantile exchange, has puzzled commentators. He writes, "Profit, or material gain, is attributable only by construction or by discovery; not by exchange. Whenever material gain follows exchange, for every plus there is a precisely equal minus" (XVII, 91). Why does Ruskin insist on the peculiar distinction between advantage and profit? and why does he not seem to allow for mutual advantage in an exchange? My suggestion is that by this time he has wholeheartedly given himself to the organic metaphor, which dictates that a system can only grow or decay. Exchange seems to belong to a mechanical system, where there is no growth and the quantity of available goods is fixed. His aim, obviously, is to stress production instead of the more traditional concerns of the orthodox economists, and this emphasis leads to a confusing quibble.
Last modified December 2000