William Morris is known for many things. As a writer and a medievalist, he inspired Tolkien to pen The Lord of the Rings. As a socialist and a craftsman, he dreamed of a post-capitalist world where all labor would provide the gratification assigned, in his lifetime, to art.
Alain de Botton considers him one of the great philosophers:
The 19th-century designer, poet and entrepreneur William Morris is one of the best guides we have to the modern economy – despite the fact that he died in 1896 (while Queen Victoria was still on the throne), never made a telephone call and would have found the very idea of television utterly baffling.
Morris was the first person to understand two issues which have become decisive for our times. Firstly: the role of pleasure in work. And, secondly: the nature of consumer demand. The preferences of consumers – what we collectively appreciate and covet and are willing to pay for – are crucial drivers of the economy and hence of the kind of society we end up living in. Until we have better collective taste, we will struggle to have a better economy and society.
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The experience of building and fitting out his house taught Morris his first big lesson about the economy. It would have been simpler (and maybe cheaper) to have ordered everything from a factory outlet. But Morris wasn’t trying to find the quickest or simplest way to set up home. He wanted to find the way that would give him – and everyone involved in the project – maximum satisfaction. And it fired Morris with an enthusiasm for the medieval idea of craft. The worker would develop sensitivity and skill; and enjoy the labour. It wasn’t mechanical or humiliating.
He spotted that craft offers important clues to what we actually want from work. We want to know we’ve done something good with the day. That our efforts have counted towards tangible outcomes that we actually see and feel are worthwhile. And Morris was already noticing that when people really like their work, the issue of exactly how much you get paid becomes less critical. (Though Morris always believed, in addition, that people deserved honourable pay for honest work.) The point is you can absolutely say you are not doing it purely for the money.
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The [décor] firm [he established] soon encountered a very instructive problem. If you make high quality goods and pay your workers a fair and decent wage, then the cost of the product is going to be higher. It will always be possible for competitors to undercut the price and offer inferior goods, produced in less humane ways, for less money.
If you ask a comparatively high price – to ensure the dignity of work and quality of materials and so make something that will last – you really risk losing customers.
The factories and machines of the Industrial Revolution had brought mass production. Prices were lower, but there was a loss of quality and a dependence on routine, deadening labour in depressing circumstances.
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For Morris the key factor is, therefore, whether customers are willing to pay the just price. If they are, then work can be honourable. If they are not, then work is necessarily going to be – on the whole – degrading and miserable.
So, Morris concluded that the lynchpin of a good economy is the education of the consumer. We collectively need to get clearer about what we really want in our lives and why, and how much certain things are worth to us (and therefore how much we are prepared to pay for them).
An important clue to good consumption, Morris insisted, is that you ‘should have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’.
Morris believed that a good economy should pass the following tests:
- How much do people enjoy working?
- Does everyone live within walking distance of woods and meadows?
- How healthy is the average diet?
- How long are consumer goods expected to last?
- Are the cities beautiful (generally, not just in a few privileged parts)?
I hope somebody smart here can explain this to me, because I’m really confused. Morris’ precepts sound like something Dagny would have heard from a resident of Galt’s Gulch. Where does Morris turn socialist?
Every honest, sane socialist sounds like Morris, Letters. Morris uses logic instead of feels.
Morris described himself as Socialist and laid out his own notion of a Socialist utopia in News from Nowhere:
After burrowing through Wikipedia, I see that Morris was a fan of “libertarian socialism”, which I now understand to be some kind of voluntary immanentization of the eschaton. Morris was apparently completely opposed to coercive “state socialism”.
So I guess he was just a dreamer, who didn’t see the inevitable slide from one kind of socialism to the other.