The Political Economy of Utopia: On William Morris’s News from Nowhere
William Morris (1834 - 1896) was an influential late Victorian artist, craftsman and entrepreneur, playing a prominent role in the ‘Arts & Crafts’ movement. He was also an important contributor to British socialism, developing an original socio-economic critique of industrial capitalism. Morris diverse literary output includes some novels through which his ‘social’ thought finds expression, the most relevant of these being News from Nowhere. News from Nowhere or an Epoch of Rest (henceforward NfN), originally published in 1890, displays Morris’s utopian vision of a future ‘eco-socialist’ Britain. In a sense NfN can be seen as a critical reply to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) which foresees a future of world-scale state socialism. In contradistinction, Morris proclaims a decentralized, community-based socialism. After some over viewing and contextualization of the author and particularly of NfN, the paper focus is on the politico-economical dimensions of Morris’s utopia. The discussion revolves around three major issues: a) the place and character of work; b) the (absent) role of money and markets, which leads to questions related to consumption and alternative exchange forms; c) the relation between the economy and nature, and its implications in terms of economic activity. In line with E.P.Thompson, who in his authoritative biography of Morris depicts his thought as a kind of fusion between John Ruskin and Karl Marx, we argue that the political economy of NfN can be understood as an original synthesis of ideas advanced by Ruskin and Marx, both in their criticism of ‘classical’ political economy and industrial capitalism, and in their (scattered) blueprints for future ‘post-capitalist’ societies. More generally the paper intends to show that we can find relevant ‘economic’ ideas and proposals in William Morris’s work, so that it can be part of accounts of ‘utopian socialism’ in the history of economic thought, from which Morris has been hitherto excluded.
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Keywords: William Morris, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, Socialism, Work, Market, Environment
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