Abstract
Thompson discusses the political economy of R.H. Tawney, one of the most important British socialist historians and theorists of the twentieth century. This chapter considers Tawney’s time at LSE, his relationship with colleagues, his methodology and work as an economic and social historian, his critique of capitalism, and his contribution as to the thinking and policy of the British Labour Party. While recent commentators have suggested that Tawney’s work has a purely historical significance, Thompson argues for the relevance of key aspects of his political economy to some of our contemporary challenges.
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Notes
- 1.
As well as Rugby School, also noted for its tradition of social activism.
- 2.
Established by Samuel Barnett, the Warden of Toynbee Hall.
- 3.
Established by Albert Mansbridge.
- 4.
Initially at Rochdale in Lancashire and Longton in the Potteries and then at a number of locations, including Chesterfield and Wrexham.
- 5.
He was President of the WEA from 1924 to 1944.
- 6.
Namely, The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Tailoring Industry Under the Trade Boards Act of 1909 and The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Chain-making Industry, Under the Trade Boards Act of 1909.
- 7.
Until 1929 and again from 1940 to 1945.
- 8.
‘He was a founder of the Economic History Society in 1926 and of its journal the Economic History Review, which he co-edited between 1927 and 1934. His postgraduate seminar “Economic and social England, 1558–1640” attracted and trained some of the best historians of the future’ (Goldman 2016).
- 9.
For this, see Goldman (2013: 4).
- 10.
Tawney’s engagement with Marx and Marxism was consistently, if sympathetically, critical. But as Terrill has rightly said, he was ‘unmoved by the brittle Marxism of the thirties’ (Terrill 1973: 236).
- 11.
The Commonplace Book was a private journal of moral, religious, social and political reflections kept by Tawney in the period 1912–1914.
- 12.
On Strachey’s concerns, see Thompson (1993: 184–202).
- 13.
As Wright has stated: ‘[F]unction belonged to a vocabulary of service, duty and obligation’ (Wright 1987: 59). As to the concept of function, ‘it seems likely that Tawney was influenced in this respect by the Guild Socialist circles with which he had associated’ (Greenleaf 1988: 454), though as Jackson has made clear, ‘function’ was a concept variously interpreted on the Left (Jackson 2007: 41).
- 14.
For a more extended discussion of the impact of the Great War on Tawney’s thinking, see Winter (1974: 166–173).
- 15.
In terms of Tawney’s desire to extend the principle of democracy into the economic sphere, there is the possible influence of Harold Laski (see Greenleaf 1988: 457). But, as noted, Tawney was also undoubtedly influenced by the ideas of the guild socialists.
- 16.
Though the Tawney of the Commonplace Book had believed that to argue for freedom on grounds of efficiency was ‘to sell the things of God for Gold’ (Tawney in Winter and Joslin 1972: 85).
- 17.
- 18.
For one discussion of the evidence, see Layard (2011). There are also strong parallels here with those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures whose condemnation of an emerging society, with the acquisition of material riches as its primary motivation, Tawney had discussed at length in his historical writing.
- 19.
For a more extended discussion of the place of education in Tawney’s life and social philosophy, see Goldman (2013: 199–216).
- 20.
‘Tawney found persistently for high-minded austerity against a false evaluation of material welfare’ (Dennis and Halsey 1988: 219).
- 21.
‘He is perhaps the only man who can be saluted by Fabians, Marxists, Guild Socialists, trade unionists, co-operators and Christian Socialists alike’ (Dennis and Halsey 1988: 251).
- 22.
To take just one example from a recent study of ‘equality’ as a concept in the thinking of the British Left: ‘Tawney’s work on equality…exert[ed] a substantial influence on revisionist thought, both directly and in its dissemination into the Labour Party’s conventional wisdom’ (Jackson 2007: 168).
- 23.
For a short review of some of this literature, see Thompson (2015: 174–178).
- 24.
The influences here were those of Ruskin and, more often acknowledged by Tawney, of William Morris.
- 25.
‘The socialist tradition is best approached through the economic historian and cultural critic R.H. Tawney’ (Marquand 2014: 204). For another example, see Sandel (2012: 202–203; italics added) who sees ‘the era of market triumphalism’ as having ‘coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance’, a remark which could have come straight from Tawney.
References
Main Works by R.H. Tawney
Tawney, R.H. (1912) [1967]. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Harper.
Tawney, R.H. (ed.) (1916) [1953]. The Attack and Other Papers. New York: Books for Libraries Press.
Tawney, R.H. (1918) [1964]. ‘The Conditions of Economic Liberty’. Chapter 8 in R. Hinden (ed.) The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education and Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 101–122.
Tawney, R.H. (1919) [1964]. ‘John Ruskin’. Chapter 3 in R. Hinden (ed.) The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education and Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 42–46.
Tawney, R.H. (1921) [1945]. The Acquisitive Society. London: Bell.
Tawney, R.H. (1925). ‘Historical Introduction’. In T. Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury (1572). London: Cass: 1–172.
Tawney, R.H. (1926) [1972]. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Harmondsworth: Pelican.
Tawney, R.H. (1930) [1978]. ‘Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism’. Chapter 5 in J. Winter (ed.) History and Society: Essays by R.H. Tawney. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 189–197.
Tawney, R.H. (1933) [1978]. ‘The Study of Economic History’. Chapter 1 in J.M. Winter (ed.) History and Society: Essays by R.H. Tawney. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 47–65.
Tawney, R.H. (1934) [1971]. ‘The Choice Before the Labour Party’. Chapter 5 in R.H. Tawney (ed.) The Attack and Other Papers. New York: Books for Libraries Press: 52–70.
Tawney, R.H. (1937) [1972]. ‘Preface to the 1937 Edition’. In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. London: Penguin: vii–xiii.
Tawney, R.H. (1942) [1979]. ‘The American Labour Movement’. Chapters 1–4 in J. Winter (ed.) The American Labour Movement and Other Essays. Brighton: Harvester: 1–110.
Tawney, R.H. (1949a) [1964]. ‘Social History and Literature’. Chapter 12 in R. Hinden (ed.) The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education and Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 191–219.
Tawney, R.H. (1949b) [1964]. ‘Social Democracy in Britain’. Chapter 10 in R. Hinden (ed.) The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education and Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 144–175.
Tawney, R.H. (1950) [1978]. ‘A History of Capitalism’. Chapter 7 in J. Winter (ed.) History and Society: Essays by R.H. Tawney. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 202–214.
Tawney, R.H. (1952) [1964]. ‘British Socialism Today’. Chapter 11 in R. Hinden (ed.) The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education and Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 176–188.
Tawney, R.H. (1952) [1979]. Equality. With an introduction by Richard Titmuss. Fifth edition. London: Allen & Unwin.
Other Works Referred To
Armstrong, G. and T. Gray (2011). The Authentic Tawney. Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Arnold, M. (1869) [1983]. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Viking.
Dennis, N. and A. Halsey (1988). English Ethical Socialism: Thomas More to R.H. Tawney. Oxford: Clarendon.
Durbin, E. (1985). New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and the Economics of Democratic Socialism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Goldman, L. (2013). The Life of R.H. Tawney: Socialism and History. London: Bloomsbury.
Goldman, L. (2016). ‘Tawney, Richard Henry (1880–1962)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36425.
Greenleaf, W. (1988). The Ideological Inheritance. Volume 2 of The British Political Tradition. Four volumes. London: Methuen.
Jackson, B. (2007). Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–64. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Jones, P. (1968). The Christian Socialist Revival: Religion, Class and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England, 1877–1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Keynes, J.M. (1930) [1972]. ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’. In Essays in Persuasion. Volume IX of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. London: Macmillan: 321–332.
Layard, R. (2011). Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. New edition. London: Penguin.
MacIntyre, A. (1971). ‘The Socialism of R.H. Tawney’. Chapter 4 in Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy. London: Duckworth: 38–42.
Marquand, D. (2014). Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain Now. London: Allen Lane.
Marx, K. (1852) [2001]. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. London: ElecBook Classics.
McCloskey, D. (2016). Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sandel, M. (2012). What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Strachey, J. (1956). Contemporary Capitalism. London: Gollancz.
Terrill, R. (1973). R.H. Tawney and His Times, Socialism and Fellowship. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Thompson, N. (1993). John Strachey: An Intellectual Biography. London: Macmillan.
Thompson, N. (2015). Social Opulence and Private Restraint: The Consumer in British Socialist Thought Since 1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winter, J. (1974). Socialism and the Challenge of War: Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912–18. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Winter, J.M. and D.M. Joslin (1972). ‘Introduction’. In J.M. Winter and D.M. Joslin (eds) R.H. Tawney’s Commonplace Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: xiii–xxiv.
Wright, A. (1987). R.H. Tawney. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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Thompson, N. (2019). R.H. Tawney (1880–1962). In: Cord, R.A. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to LSE Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58274-4_10
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