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The community of leaves, made up of households or families, operated in Ruskin’s mind as an ideal society, in which harmonious relations were dependent upon sense of place, belonging, and duty. As Ruskin’s account continued, political analogies became more elaborate: A tree is born without a head. It has got to make its own head. It is born like a little family from which a great nation is to spring; and at a certain time under peculiar external circumstances, this nation, every individual of which remains the same in nature and temper, yet gives itself a new political constitution, and sends out branch colonies, which enforce forms of law and life entirely different from those of the parent state. That is the history of the state. It is also the history of a tree (7. 73). A society that builds itself from its most humble constituents shares little with a society based on rule and hierarchy. There is, perhaps, something anarchistic about the idea of a nation that makes its own ‘head’ and which provides for itself a constitution. Despite the anti-democratic tone of much of Ruskin’s later work, the society conceived in Ruskin’s tree narrative was built from below, empowered by creative acts of building. Rather than a passive society, submitting to environment, this one strived against external imperatives, and in doing so, came to define itself. The ruling authority was not an embodied authority (a ruler), but a shared conviction. When, in the 1870s and 1880s, Ruskin attempted to put his social ideas into practice, he was unable to reproduce the harmonious order he discerned in the realm of trees. Instead of an unreflexive adherence to shared principles of co-operation, Ruskin’s St. George’s Guild, conceived as a series of environmentally-sustainable communities of co-operative artisans, inflicted a top-down structure on its members, in which ‘a hierarchy raging from the supreme ‘Master’ through provincial ‘Marshals’, ‘Landlords’, and ‘Labourers’, was drawn up’ (Armytage, 1961, 291). The breakdown of the Guild amidst recrimination and failure was in part a result of a failure by Ruskin to effectively pursue the Carlylean leadership role he envisaged for himself. That he eschewed the more open and libertarian model of trees was perhaps also a marker of the impossibility of putting into practice the social organicism articulated there, but it is clear that in practice he diverged from the vision he had celebrated in ‘Of Leaf Beauty’. IX.
Afterword: Unto This Last
Despite his later difficulties, the social order that Ruskin had described in tree communities had substantial echoes in the economic work that emerged in the same year as ‘Of Leaf Beauty’. The co-operative principles at the heart of Unto This Last shared much with the vision articulated in his botany. Unto This Last rejected the tenets of laissez-faire liberalism on a number of issues. One of these was its failure to recognise that human beings, like leaf buds, were living organisms engaged in organic relations with those around them. The fundamental error of economists, Ruskin contended, was their belief ‘that an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection’ (17. 25). In ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, Ruskin claimed that the beauty and strength of the tree society was based upon a sense of ‘fellowship’, but mainstream economics, according to Ruskin, believed that ‘the social affections […] are accidental and disturbing elements in human nature’, whilst ‘avarice and the desire for progress are constant elements’ (17. 25). By reducing the human being to ‘a covetous machine’, such economists aimed to ‘examine by what laws of labour, purchase, and sale, the greatest accumulative result in wealth is obtainable’ (17. 25). To do so was to claim that political economy was a discrete discipline, entirely