William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics, and: John Paul Cooper: Designer and Craftsman of the Arts and Crafts Movement (review)

William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics, by Bradley J. Macdonald; pp. xix + 175. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Lexington Books, 1999, $45.00, £32.14.

John Paul Cooper: Designer and Craftsman of the Arts and Crafts Movement, by N. Natasha Kuzmanovic; pp. xxviii + 188. Phoenix Mill and New York: Sutton, 1999, £25.00, $42.95.

I asked to review William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics because I liked the title: it sounded like the kind of book that, true to the practice of its titular subject William Morris, refused to subscribe to the disciplinary divisions that have rigidified in modern academia. It turns out that not only is Macdonald true to the undivided consciousness (or, inverting T. S. Eliot, the associated sensibility) of his subject, he is also one of those Marxists, like David McNally or the editors of Rethinking Marxism (where Macdonald also publishes), who believes that the views of his predecessors about the great anthropological categories ("lifeworlds") of production, consumption, community, and so forth deserve more than consignment to the dustbin of history. Macdonald believes and, believing, argues that Morris has something to contribute to a "materialist aestheticist position" in political theory, and that is that "what is important is not necessarily to create another great work of art, [but] to infuse everyday life with the pleasure, creativity, and revitalization of desire that is intimated by all good art"; or, in terms that he traces from Morris through the Situationists in his Conclusion, "that the aestheticization of aspects of everyday life entails a flourishing of desire and pleasure" (153). "What Morris initiates," Macdonald claims, "is a conceptualization of a politics of desire and pleasure" (153). Just stating this interpretation, which most readers of Morris would recognize as broadly accurate, shows the limitations of Macdonald's own discipline of politics, especially the number-crunching of contemporary political science. It also shows the limitations of mine, contemporary aesthetics, in both the effete form of the so-called new aesthetics (literary formalism) and of (mass) cultural studies. In fact, I feel about Macdonald's book rather like Samuel Johnson felt about the dog walking on two legs: the wonder is not that he argues the point well or badly but that, today, he argues it at all. In a world in which most have settled for a division between work and leisure or pleasure, and in which the latter are typically reduced to the commodity form, readers will appreciate the faithful interpretation of a noble view--that real art is the expression of pleasure in labor--that might otherwise be lost.

Before turning to Morris, Macdonald has chapters on John Ruskin as Morris's somewhat contradictory predecessor in promoting a labor theory of the value of art, and the Great Exhibition, which Macdonald argues solidified class consciousness and demonstrated conclusively the relation of labor to art and design. He then patiently records how Morris's romantic medievalism was not just an escape but had the necessary function of countering the dominant Whig view of progress; how from the image of a romanticized medieval craftsperson Morris developed an uncompromising socialist position that pleasure in labor had to be for all or there could be no art or pleasure; and how his vision of art as pleasure in labor was shared by lesser-known working-class poets and artists, like "Bandiera" of the 1850s Red Republican and Ernest Jones. Morris said he wanted to teach discontent with the status quo and desire for pleasurable, fulfilling labor. Macdonald faithfully defends pleasure and desire as political ideals as well as Morris's eco-socialism. (Morris wrote in News from Nowhere [1890] that "the spirit of the new days was to be [. . .] intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells...