‘Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of “making a living”; such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in 1958. For Nikolaus Pevsner, a contemporary of Arendt, design was undoubtedly a profession in which one should refuse to engage in anything merely for the sake of ‘making a living’.

In observing the inevitable consequences of the worldly desire to have a ‘better’ lifestyle on artists who had come, ‘during the centuries since the Renaissance, and especially during the years since the Industrial Revolution’, to ‘despise utility and the public’ and create art for art’s sake and art for the artist’s sake, Pevsner defined ‘the designer’ as a professional ‘who invents and draws objects for use’, not for making a living for himself or herself, but to make the lives of others ‘fuller, happier and more intense’. It was thus natural for Pevsner to idealise an age like the Middle Ages, when ‘nothing exist[ed] in the world which does not come from God’, a time when the artist, rather than being dominated by worldly desires and trivial preoccupations, was able to live a life liberated from the necessity of ‘making a living’.

This paper intends to explore what underpinned Pevsner’s idealization of the Middle Ages in his own age, the age of mass production, and ultimately led him to assert that ‘[…] the question of design is a social question, it is an integral part of the social question of our time. To fight against the shoddy design of those goods by which most of our fellow-men are surrounded becomes a moral duty.’