Because of the association falsely ascribed to Ruskin in some quarters, and in case the title of this chapter is misleading, it is necessary to assert, once again, that Ruskin was not a socialist. Indeed, one of the outcomes of present tendencies that he most desperately wanted to avert was socialism. He saw it as continuing, even exaggerating the worst characteristics of contemporary capitalism and as emerging as a result of the inexorable development of capitalism. In this sense, again, Ruskin's analysis is akin to that of Marx. But whereas Marx sees socialism as a welcome and inevitable consequence of capitalism, almost as its consummation, Ruskin sees it as a disaster. Socialism ‘is simply chaos – a chaos towards which the believers in modern political economy are fast tending and from which I am trying to save them’.

And yet Ruskin came to take an attitude that was at best equivocal about the prospect of revolution, and there is more than a hint of populism, even anarchism, in his later opinions. One of the reasons for his equivocation and uncertainty was that he could not accept the facile conclusion (for which so many other radicals have been praised in terms of their ‘realism’) that change must be assured by political action. Political discussion was useless partly because of an absence of definition of terms. There is no opposition between liberals and conservatives. ‘There is opposition between Liberals and Illiberals. I am a violent Illiberal; but it does not follow that I must be a Conservative.’