Chapter 22 - Morris in the Twenty-First Century

Summary

William Morris anticipated a number of our present concerns about the economy, the environment, and labour; defended the value of handmade, quality products against the growing proliferation of cheap, factory-made products; envisioned a peaceful, communal society that would value beauty, practise useful and stimulating work, and achieve equality of condition; and believed in the possibility of creating a better world by rejecting corrupt institutions and ideologies. Many of the most critical challenges we now face – accelerating climate change, social and economic inequity, political division, the ever-widening reach of the market into our lives – are outgrowths of nineteenth-century issues. This essay explores the way in which both Morris’s aesthetic principles and his progressive social initiatives continue to resonate. Today, as civility, social justice, and ecological integrity erode under the pressure of divisive politics, short-sighted policy, war, nationalism, pandemic, and social unrest, Morris’s ideas and practice are especially suggestive, both about where we might go and where we have gone wrong.