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R.H. Tawney was an economic historian and socialist philosopher whose Anglican beliefs lay at the heart of his influential studies of the enduring problem of the ethics of wealth distribution. As Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics from 1921 to 1958, he became the doyen of a school of thought which defined the subject as the exploration of the resistance of groups and individuals in the past to the imposition on them of capitalist modes of thought and behaviour.

In his first book, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912) – written to provide an appropriate text for his pioneering tutorial classes for the Workers’ Educational Association – he examined patterns of rural development, protest and litigation surrounding the enclosure of land in Tudor England. After service in the British Army during the First World War – he was severely wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme – Tawney returned to his scholarship and developed the arguments which appeared in perhaps his best-known work, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Here he showed how alien to the teachings of the Reformation was the assumption that religious thought had no bearing on economic behaviour. Tawney captured in classical prose the clash within religious opinion that preceded that abnegation of the social responsibility of the churches and suggested that ‘religious indifferentism’ was but a phase in the history of Christian thought.

In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Tawney crystallized a number of ideas he had begun to consider in the pre-1914 period. In a commonplace book he kept from 1912 to 1914, Tawney jotted down notes on many of his religious and historical preoccupations. Among them is the simple query, ‘I wonder if Puritanism produced any special attitude toward economic matters’. Over the following decade, he gathered evidence on this subject, and presented preliminary statements in the Scott Holland Memorial Lectures at King’s College, London, in 1922, and in the lengthy introduction he wrote for a 1925 edition of Thomas Wilson’s Discourse on Usury of 1569.

In the notes Tawney left concerning this facet of his historical research, there is no evidence whatsoever that he drew on the celebrated essay of Max Weber, originally published in 1905, on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Indeed, a full appreciation of Tawney’s Anglican concerns requires a divorce between the two partners of the so-called ‘Tawney–Weber’ thesis.

It is true that both men believed that (in Tawney’s words) ‘The fundamental question to be asked, after all, is not what kind of rules a faith enjoins, but what kind of character it values and cultivates.’ They agreed as well that there was in Calvinism a corrosive force which undermined traditional doctrines of social morality in ways which would have shocked the early reformers. And they shared the view that in Protestant teaching there was an important emphasis in religious terms on the ‘inner isolation of the individual’ which reinforced a more general individualism of social and economic behaviour.

But what differentiates their work is the uses to which they put their interpretations of Protestantism. Weber’s essay was but one part of a comprehensive study of the sociology of religion. It reflects his overriding concern with the development of what he termed the rational bureaucratic character of modern society. In both these facets of his work he charted the progressive, relentless, and irreversible demystification of the world.

Weber’s essay helped foster a belief in the bleak permanence of the spirit of capitalism which Tawney laboured to refute throughout his work. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was written precisely to counter the view that social indifferentism in religious thought and individualism in economic thought were unchangeable features of modern life. If Weber’s purpose was to describe the demystification of the world, Tawney’s was to help in the demystification of capitalism, by stripping it of some of its most powerful ideological supports, derived from one reading of the Protestant tradition.

Anglicanism is, of course, a house of many mansions, in which there is room for reactionaries and socialists alike. The view that capitalism is unchristian because it stultifies the common fellowship of men of different means and occupations has never been more than a minority view. But, at precisely the same time as he was writing Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Tawney joined a number of other influential Anglicans who spoke out against capitalism as a way of life which violated the moral precepts of their faith.

This position was as evident in his essays in political philosophy as it was in his scholarship in economic history. In The Acquisitive Society (1921) and in Equality (1931), Tawney argued that capitalism was an irreligious system of individual and collective behaviour, since it was based on the institutionalization of distinctions between men based on inherited or acquired wealth. For a Christian, such divisions manifested a denial of the truth that all men are equally children of sin and equally insignificant in the eyes of the Lord. What Matthew Arnold had called the ‘religion of inequality’ was really the obverse of a Christian way of looking at the world.

Tawney’s legacy has been particularly pervasive, because his voice had a resonance which appealed to many who did not share his religious outlook. This was in part because he wrote with the moral outrage of Marx and with the grace and eloquence of Milton. His strength lay too in the fact that his was a distinctively English voice. This did not prevent his advocacy of the comparative method in the study of economic history, best evidenced in his book Land and Labour in China (1932), written after an eight-month mission to China as an educational adviser to the League of Nations, and in a history of the American labour movement he wrote while adviser to Lord Halifax, British Ambassador to Washington during the Second World War.

But Tawney’s influence lies more centrally in his writings on the moral issues posed by capitalist economic development in Britain. His call for an alternative to the cash nexus – firmly within the tradition of Owen, Ruskin and Morris – has continued to strike a chord among many people not of religious temperament who have sought indigenous answers to the problems of a society crippled by the injuries of class.

See Also

Selected Works

  • 1912. The Agrarian problem in the sixteenth century. London: Longmans.

  • 1914. (ed., with A.E. Bland and P.A. Brown.) English economic history: Selected documents. London: Bell.

  • 1921. The acquisitive society. London: Bell.

  • 1924. (ed., with E. Power.) Tudor economic documents. London: Longmans.

  • 1926. Religion and the rise of capitalism. London: Murray.

  • 1927. ed. Economic history: The collected papers of George Unwin. London: Macmillan.

  • 1931. Equality. London: Allen & Unwin.

  • 1932. Land and labour in China. London: Allen & Unwin.

  • 1953. The attack and other essays. London: Allen & Unwin.

  • 1958. Business and politics under James I: Lionel Cranfield as merchant and minister. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • 1964. The radical tradition. London: Allen & Unwin.

  • 1972. R.H. Tawney’s commonplace book, ed. D.M. Joslin and J.M. Winter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • 1978. History and society. Essays by R.H. Tawney, ed. J.M. Winter. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

  • 1979. The American labour movement and other essays, ed. J.M. Winter. Brighton: Harvester Press.