Robin George Collingwood

From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have long sought to demonstrate how a sufficient life—one without constant, environmentally damaging growth—might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sufficiency has been largely forgotten. Green Victorians tells the story of a circle of men and women in the English Lake District who attempted to create a new kind of economy, turning their backs on Victorian consumer society in order to live a life dependent not on material abundance and social prestige but on artful simplicity and the bonds of community.
         
At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.

Christopher Otter, Ohio State University
"This highly original, absorbing, and beautifully written work rethinks Ruskin by anchoring his thought, and that of his friends and associates, in their daily routines, showing how a style of thought we might call “ecological” emerged through prosaic practices. But it also shows the difficulties inherent in creating such a style of thought, and the complexities and compromises that emerged alongside ecological thinking. The issues raised in this book, vital today, will become only more significant in the future."

Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth
"Green Victorians provides a welcome exploration of an important but overlooked aspect of British environmental history. A valuable addition to the recent upsurge of interest in Ruskin's sociocultural work and legacies, it also brilliantly revises the history of environmentalism, making a powerful case for tracing the roots of modern ideas on sustainability, low growth, and artisanship to John Ruskin and his lakeland disciples. This is a Victorian book for the Anthropocene."

Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
"Green Victorians traces the critique of consumer society and the fossil fuel economy to John Ruskin’s circle in England’s Lake District.  There among the hills, the erratic, brilliant art historian and an idiosyncratic band of visionaries including London barrister Albert Fleming, the charismatic Coniston gardener Susanna Beever, and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley tried to revive handicraft production and simpler modes of life divorced from consumerism.  This bracing story, eloquently told, traces the allure of the ‘culture of sufficiency’ and its downfall.  A joy to read as well as an edgy political challenge, Green Victorians looks at the past with an eye to our future."

Mark Fiege, Colorado State University
“Here is a remarkable and prescient recovery of a forgotten moment when a group of people tried to reenvision what it means to be modern. Their struggles to achieve what the authors call a ‘culture of sufficiency’ remind us of the enduring need for all people to live fulfilling lives without laying waste to the planet. Thoughtful, beautifully written, and profoundly unsettling, this is a model history suited to the new epoch in which we find ourselves.”

This work addresses the question of the relationships between philosophy and the history of philosophy, the latter understood as a philosophical discipline in the strict sense. Indeed, unlike what happened some fifty years ago, the debate between the history of philosophy and philosophy seems to be taking place today as an internal debate on the history of philosophy. From this point of view, it is no longer a "quarrel" (in which two opposing positions face: "history or phi-losophy" vs. "philosophy iff history"), but rather a reflection of those who practice this discipline about our own work, insofar as our work is at the same time historical and philosophical. In this regard, the problem raised in this work focuses on the method, and inextricably linked to the method, on the object and purpose of the historiographic work in (or for) philosophy. In the present work, I propose to defend the positions of archeological philosophy regarding these points (method, object and purpose), against the history of philosophy of analytical tendency.

El libro pretende recorrer, de la mano de textos tutelares, el debate sobre la cultura de masas en su momento inaugural y sin duda más apasionado: el periodo de entreguerras del siglo pasado. Fue en ese momento cuando el fenómeno “de las multitudes”, como decían Le Bon, Poe o Baudelaire, o “de las aglomeraciones” como decía Ortega, en tanto mera agregación física de individuos que comparten un mismo espacio y tiempo, fue desbordado y empequeñecido por el que reunía en torno a una cierta “cultura” (libros, filmes, programas de radio, discos, revistas ilustradas) a masas que conformaban agrupaciones psíquicas, mentales, aunque deslocalizadas. En otras palabras, cuando las masas ya no fueron abarcables de un vistazo (como desde una atalaya superior y a salvo de ellas), y alcanzaron masa crítica precisamente por compartir, entre otras cosas, una cultura tanto material como simbólica, por acceder a los mismos medios de información y de entretenimiento.