Education
Balliol College, Oxford.
Balliol College, Oxford.
1913-1915, Director of the Ratan Tata Foundation, London School of Economics. 1915-1916, served in the ranks of the infantry. 1918-1931, Reader in Economic History, London School of Economics.
1931-1949, Professor of Economic History, London School of Economics.
Main publications:
(1912) The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century London: Longman’s. Green & Company
(1921) The Acquisitive Society, London: G. Bell & Sons.
(1925) (ed.) Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury, London: G. Bell & Sons.
(1926) Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, London: John Murray.
(1931) Equality, London: George Allen & Unwin. (1953) The Attack and Other Papers, London: George Allen & Unwin.
(1964) The Radical Tradition, ed. G. Hinder.
London: George Allen & Unwin.
(1978) History and Society: Essays by R. H. Tawney, ed. J. M. Winter, London: Routledge & Regan Paul.
Secondary literature:
Hasley, A. H. (1976) ‘R. H. Tawney’, in Traditions of Social Policy, Oxford: Blackwell.
MacIntyre. A. (1971) ‘The socialism of R. H. Tawney’, in Against The Self-Images of the Age, London: Duckworth.
Winter, J. M. (1972) ‘A bibliography of the published
writings of R. H. Tawney’, Economic History
Review.
A reformer and social philosopher. Tawney was concerned to describe the structure of a just economic order and to advocate the changes of British institutional life which reconstruction in accordance with his principles would require. The driving impulses behind his work were a radical Christian socialism, a concern for social injustice and a deep-seated hatred of capitalism. His ideas have greatly influenced socialist thought in Britain throughout the twentieth-century. In writing of him: ‘A scholar, a saint, a social reformer. R. H. Tawney is loved and respected by all who know him’, Beatrice Webb spoke for many later writers. According to R. H. S. Wright
(1987) Tawney’s work was ‘Crossman’s bible’
for Tony Benn there is ‘none greater’ in the socialist tradition.
A reformer and social philosopher. Tawney was concerned to describe the structure of a just economic order and to advocate the changes of British institutional life which reconstruction in accordance with his principles would require. The driving impulses behind his work were a radical Christian socialism, a concern for social injustice and a deep-seated hatred of capitalism.
His ideas have greatly influenced socialist thought in Britain throughout the twentieth-century. In writing of him: ‘A scholar, a saint, a social reformer. R. H. Tawney is loved and respected by all who know him’, Beatrice Webb spoke for many later writers.
According to R. H. S. Wright(1987) Tawney’s work was ‘Crossman’s bible’. For Tony Benn there is ‘none greater’ in the socialist tradition.
Tawney is notable for his stress on the importance of values. An emphasis which distinguished him from many of his socialist contemporaries.
He did not question the importance of a scientific understanding of society but he rejected a socialism premised on deterministic laws of social change. He did not deny the relevance of data-collecting to policy but he accused the Webbs of failing to see the limitations of such an approach. Marxists and the social policy school had failed, alike, to see the crucial importance of values to the socialist vision.
To the task of describing those values he devoted himself. Modern society, he argued, ’was sick through the absence of a moral idea’.
The imagery of social sickness and health was central to his work: it occupied a central place in The Acquisitive Society (1921). Influenced by the idealist derivation of rights from functions he argued that the central defect of capitalism was that it creates an acquisitive society in which economic relations are defined by reference to the absolute rights of individuals, irrespective of the function which those rights serve.
Such a society corrupts those whom it benefits economically and destroys the dignity of those who suffer under it. By contrast, a functional society links rights to social purposes. Industry, therefore, ceases to serve the exclusive interests of owners and promotes instead the interests of all who labour in it.
Equality, which Tawney (1931) viewed as being centrally concerned with fellowship and social integration, played a central role in his socialism.
His approach to liberty differs, therefore, from that of traditional liberals who saw equality merely as part of a theory of distributive justice. Tawney argued that equality before the law, equality of opportunity and even equality of wealth and income were worthless unless accompanied by a transformation of social context. For this reason he argued that equality must be grounded in the equal worth of every person and the social unity which stems from recognition of mutual solidarity.
Nor did he see equality as inimical to freedom: freedom, he argued, involves an expansion of human capacities rather than a removal of restrictions. In a reconstituted society, therefore, equality would not necessarily entail identity of treatment. Although Tawney’s work continues to inspire Fabian socialists, Hasley's (1976) cautious remarks about the ‘precarious position’ of ‘the Tawney heritage’ aptly define his philosophical standing.