Rereads R.H. Tawney's The Acquisitive Society

...Attempting to reduce inequality, attempting to control rather than being controlled by global markets, attempting to make non-economic values tell in public debate—these aims seem to me admirable and urgent, and recognizably connected to the values cherished by Tawney and his peers...

...For Tawney, industrialism signifies "the confusion of one minor department of life with the whole of life...

...For the book offers something that is more general, and yet also more limited, than any of these descriptions might suggest...

...The acquisitive society" is, therefore, an extremely recent and, he implies, temporary aberration in a longer history of societies that have subordinated the production of wealth to larger social purposes...

...DISSENT / Summer 1998 • 99...

...The left needs intellectuals in the way sports fans need heroes...

...Underlying the arguments and proposals of The Acquisitive Society and Tawney's other political writings, there is a simple, massive assertion that the teaching of morality points toward the politics of socialism...

...Until the final chapter, the more general case is only passingly alluded to...

...But I persist in thinking that the tone of generalized moral uplift with which he surrounded these proposals is bad for the mind...

...Tawney was an economic and social historian of standing, and he wrote widely admired works of social criticism...

...Setting up a binary polarity between "self-interest" and "morality" is in itself an unhelpful oversimplification, and one particularly likely to lead to self-deception...

...It is not even—as those who know nothing of it other than its title and reputation tend to suppose—primarily an indictment of the advertising and consumerism integral to a mass-market economy...

...In my case, the experience of reading The Acquisitive Society (first published in 1921) at the end of the twentieth century is chiefly governed by my formation as an intellectual historian, especially of modern British social and political thought...

...It is not a work of philosophy, nor even, in the strict sense, of political theory...

...94 DISSENT / Summer 1998 This historical account is tacitly underpinned by a considerable idealization of the economic system that preceded the Industrial Revolution: like the Hammonds, whose "catastrophist" interpretation of the rise of industrialism he endorsed, he is for the most part silent about the forms of oppression and exploitation inherent in the economic relationships of early modern England...

...Indeed, the central conception of "the Functional Society" strikes me as not just unpersuasive, but also as potentially coercive...

...And at a time when print journalism was the undisputedly dominant medium for shaping opinion, Tawney had ready access to some influential publications, and he had what it takes to make a mark: he was not afraid to repeat himself, he wrote forcefully, and he wrote a lot...

...F, IRST OF ALL, there is the extent to which Tawney depicts the situation he criticizes as a recent and contingent development, brought about by erroneous or inappropriate ideas...

...The past has shown no more excellent order than that in which the mass of the people were the masters of the holdings which they ploughed and the tools with which they worked...

...For example, he grants that capital may be allowed to earn a certain return, but suggests that this could take the form of a fixed rate, in the manner of a debenture or mortgage, rather than an open-ended claim on the profits of an enterprise...

...It is nearer in spirit to that kind of essay in social criticism that surrounds certain practical proposals with an appeal to a general moral vision...

...It is difficult, on closer inspection, to say quite what part an active form of Christianity would play in moving to "the functional society," since Tawney does not identify any relevant content in Christian teaching...

...In the body of the book, Tawney explores several means of bringing function and reward into some more direct relation, not all of them involving nationalization, still less expropriation of the owners of capital...

...It may be said that the function of utopian thinking is precisely to jolt us out of what we think "realistic" by painting a beguiling picture of life within an utterly different social order...

...I would like to think that a book by someone so transparently serious and warmhearted as Tawney would be one place to look for help in developing such a language...

...But the terms in which I have stated them deliberately suggest a much more modest and realistic (and thereby, perhaps, more liberal) political idiom than that used by Tawney, and this may help explain some of the ambivalence which I (but not, I think, I alone) cannot help feeling about The Acquisitive Society...

...But this is precisely, in my view, the weakest feature of the book...

...Tms is recognizably the idiom of the Christian Social Union, which Tawney joined while an undergraduate at Balliol in the late 1890s...

...I N THE 1960s the Young Turks on the New Left Review complained that this tradition had not issued in any conceptually sophisticated analysis of the nature and functioning of society, economy, and the state in Britain: it had, they charged, contented itself with the untheoretical, even antitheoretical, task of the moral criticism of capitalism...

...But, from this distance, The Acquisitive Society seems remote at least as much on account of the conditions its writing presupposed as for any outdatedness in its proposals, and in this reconsideration I primarily want to focus on why that might be so...

...I feel no such inclination in reconsidering Tawney, in part, perhaps, because I am not old enough, or perhaps just not politically responsive enough, ever to have come under his spell in the first place...

...And yet as, the service being over, we return to the lower temperature of our daily lives, stubborn doubts and even antipathies start to creep back in...

...The shared commitment to selflessness that he takes for granted can seem not just unrealistic but even in some ways unattractive...

...Similarly, he would sever the automatic link between ownership and control, depriving the mere providers of capital of any say in policy or management...

...For Tawney, and perhaps for the first couple of generations of his readers in Britain, "morality" had talismanic power, warding off demons of all kinds...

...Tawney simply ducks the hard questions about the authoritarianism involved in deciding which activities constitute desirable "functions" and which do not, and he deludes himself that there could be any kind of modified market mechanism, short of decision by central authority, by which the appropriate level of "reward" for such functions could be determined...

...Two years after Tawney's death, Alasdair Maclntyre lodged a memorable dissenting judgment along somewhat similar lines, complaining of his "cliché-ridden high-mindedness," and concluding that in a political theorist "goodness alone is not enough...

...Or as the final paragraph of The Acquisitive Society confidently has it, once society has "learned to see industry itself in the right perspective" it will be able to "persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service...

...Nonetheless, to leave the matter there involves a certain intellectual laziness as well as a rather cheap kind of self-congratulation—it is not difficult, after all, to establish oneself as being more hardheaded than Tawney...

...Within the international history of socialism, and still more within the history of the labor movement in Britain, Tawney has a secure place in the pantheon of influential thinkers...

...Much the greater part of the book is devoted to an analysis of the different forms of relationship between ownership and control in industry, focusing on the need for incomes to be restricted to rewarding the performance of social functions...

...But it is hard not to feel that he was drawn to "social Christianity" because it provided a language with which to censure the unfettered pursuit of material gain...

...it is implicit in Tawney's idiom and moral passion, but it is not argued for in any extended way...

...Such a starting point also tends to require people to act out of unrealistically strenuous or heroic motives, and involves an unwarranted disdain for 96 DISSENT / Summer 1998 simple, common wants, such as the desire for ease spiced with excitement...

...One does not have to be an enthusiast for the high Althusserian or Gramscian theorizing then offered as the alternative to recognize some truth in this account...

...his sharpest barbs are reserved for absentee shareholders in public companies, the undeserving financial beneficiaries of the notion of unlimited property rights...

...The establishment of shares and dividends as the standard form of financial property was only achieved "less than two generations ago...

...Perhaps no purposeful large-scale changes in society are brought about unless preceded and accompanied by a considerable amount of what may properly be called moral emotion...

...But more than all this, he gave pointed and relevant expression in the interwar period to attitudes that were deep-seated and of long standing in British culture...

...It has to be said, however, that the book does not really seem to recognize its own identity in these terms, above all because it claims to offer a serious and feasible view of how a sophisticated modern economy might be organized in terms of the rewards necessary to the fulfillment of "functions...

...It is the individualist idea of property, developed from the late seventeenth century onward, that is at the root of present ills...

...in the nineteenth "they acquiesced in the popular assumption that the acquisition of riches was the main end of man, and confined themselves to preaching such personal virtues as did not conflict with its achievement...

...It is the organized assertion of an alternative standard of values that he seeks, values to which the calculations of economic reasoning would be subordinate, and in the light of which proximate goals and purposes could be identified in moral, non-economic terms...

...But that being so, it is perhaps otiose to single out Tawney for special criticism...

...It is not just that Tawney is too sanguine about the possibility of arriving at some agreed sense of "social purpose" from which more specific "goals" and "functions" could be deduced...

...Luke's Gospel that had also been used as a chapter heading by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy...

...But whereas Arnold had gently mocked the modern Puritan's conviction of finding in the Bible the one necessary truth— "so fatal is the notion of possessing, even in the most precious words or standards, the one thing needful, of having in them, once and for all, a full and sufficient measure of light to guide us"—Tawney's use of the phrase is quite without ironic intent: the one thing needful is that "society must rearrange its scale of values," and for this to happen the church must resume its historic task...

...He assumes that others would share his (rather puritan) convictions about what is "worth" doing and what level of "reward" one should legitimately expect: my skepticism about the likelihood of such agreement being reached is only exceeded by my alarm at the consequences it if were...

...The book rests on markedly intellectualist assumptions about social change...

...That eloquence can still, intermittently, do its work, and even the politically skeptical or agnostic modern reader can be seduced into a sense of belonging, if not quite of belief...

...It deals alDISSENT / Summer 1998...

...It does not, therefore, really belong in the company of such works as, say, Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness or Rawls's A Theory of Justice...

...There is, of course, nothing original in remarking Tawney's datedness: even during his lifetime he was recognized as having a somewhat archaic quality, part Victorian moralist, part Old Testament prophet...

...And yet the book is not in any obvious sense a general manifesto for socialism, nor an outright condemnation of private property and the market —indeed, he dismisses "the idea of some socialists that private property in land or capital is necessarily mischievous" as "a piece of scholastic pedantry...

...He is one of the few secular figures to whom the label "saint" gets applied unironically...

...With Tawney taking the service, the incense of earnestness stirs memories of unfulfilled good resolutions, the pleasing cadences of the liturgy offer reassurance that this is no vulgar evangelical sect, and the urge to go forward and take one's place at the communion rail starts to be felt...

...Moreover, he was revered for his personality and example as much as for his writings, above all for his unaffected manner, his unworldly asceticism, and his deep sympathy with the efforts of working people to improve their lot, especially through adult education, to which he devoted a great deal of his own time and energy...

...Tawney seemed to correspond to one idealized DISSENT / Summer 1998 97 notion of the intellectual, the figure who achieves distinction in some scholarly or creative field while at the same time "applying" his ideas in active political engagement...

...THOUGH NEEDLESSLY dismissive, Maclntyre's judgment was in some ways a healthy corrective...

...the impact of the midcentury legislation on joint stock and limitedliability companies had only been fully felt "within the last twenty years," and so on...

...Any "reconsideration" of The Acquisitive Society must, at the outset, acknowledge the kind of book it is...

...THIS FINAL chapter of the book is entitled Porro unum necessarium, a phrase (generally translated as "but one thing is needful") from the Latin Vulgate version of St...

...The accompanying assumption was that once the authority of this selfless ethic was properly acknowledged, it would not be difficult for men of good will to reach agreement on otherwise divisive matters like the distribution of wealth...

...93 most entirely with production rather than consumption...

...We certainly still need—perhaps more than ever before—a publicly effective language with which to combat the relentless pseudorealism of "the return upon capital" and the priority of "the bottom line...

...But this characterization implies that if the prevailing ideas could be changed, the problem would be solved—hence his confident conclusion that this "obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing...

...This makes any kind of reappraisal difficult...

...At the more general, it is a plea that the goals of economic gain, increased productivity, and individual self-interest should be subordinated to some "higher" set of values...

...Where a saint is concerned, anything short of hagiography is bound to seem debunking or merely negative, even to be taking pleasure in toppling an icon from his pedestal...

...No modern reader, I imagine, can fail to be struck by the period flavor the book now gives off, but I find myself instinctively moving on to "place" the work in historical and political context, to identify its informing intellectual traditions and its distinguishing cultural affinities...

...His work is associated with the belief in equality and fellowship, with the commitment to strive for the creation of a just social order to replace capitalism, and with the obligation of the educated and the privileged to put their talents at the service of the working class...

...Its leaders, such as Canon Scott Holland, Bishop Charles Gore, and Archbishop William Temple, were prominent among the influences and associates that shaped Tawney's thinking...

...The "condition of England" question, that hotchpotch of concerns about the human consequences of the Industrial Revolution, remained a central and recurring theme in public debate, and Tawney was a "condition of England" writer par excellence...

...But I would also point out that The Acquisitive Society was not offered as such...

...Perhaps quite a lot of English "socialism" has been like this: sometimes the appeal has been to the overriding values represented by "culture" or "art," sometimes to the ideals incarnated in Ancient Greece, sometimes to the standards of Christian ethics, but the common element has been the desire to invoke some cherished and powerful realm of value to set over against the world of commercial and financial activity that is thereby condemned as much for its vulgarity as for its injustice...

...References to the need "to admit that there is a principle superior to the mechanical play of economic forces" and to recognize that society must be based on "some moral principles which command general acceptance" accompany his more substantial discussion like a figured bass repeatedly making itself heard through the main melody...

...And the virtues of this direct engagement in productive activity were complemented by the acknowledgment of a larger moral framework...

...What still seems to me so problematic in Tawney—and the milieu that enabled him to write with such untroubled confidence—is the combination of a sweeping conception of "the functional society" with an assumption of a high degree of moral consensus...

...Indeed, although he sees the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the vital transition to a historically unprecedented form of society, Tawney is at pains to stress how very recent several of the key features of the acquisitive society actually are...

...But now, given the intricate interdependence of the elements in the financial structure of contemporary capitalism, there looks to be something slightly foolish in deliberately avoiding share-ownership while happily accepting the benefits of a pension fund...

...The writing is marked more by a kind of biblical eloquence than by analytical finesse, and the book's origins in an article and a pamphlet that Tawney published in 1919 remain visible...

...The Acquisitive Society operates at two levels...

...Tawney clearly intended the book to be severely practical, with concrete proposals for the better as well as fairer management of specific industries, such as coal and building, in 1920s Britain...

...His new book English Pasts is forthcoming in 1999...

...But one is left feeling that for Tawney as for many other proponents of "social Christianity" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the idea of the moral glory of the Sermon on the Mount that mattered...

...He was notable for his consistent advocacy of and counsel to working-class groups of all kinds during a period when the organized working class was a major player in British political and economic life...

...In saying this, I do not at all mean to suggest that the ideals at the heart of those commonplaces were so purely a matter of that time and place that, appropriately reformulated, they can no longer move us...

...it is historical without being genuinely scholarly and it is topical without being merely journalistic...

...I recognize that I am not the most responsive reader of such utopian critiques...

...The opening sentence of the book signals this concern with changing prevailing ideas: "It is a commonplace that the characteristic virtue of Englishmen is their power of sustained practical activity, and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles...

...This in turn tends to encourage a certain self-righteousness and ultimately brings discredit on the critical case against unfettered capitalism, a case which, in more measured and realistic terms, needs to be made as pressingly as ever...

...Tawney was a virtuoso of moral emotion...

...Richard Grossman, left intellectual turned Labor cabinet minister, may stand in for many others with his declaration that "Tawney's The Acquisitive Society is my socialist bible," while a whole generation of historians has concurred with Margaret Cole's judgment of it as "perhaps the most powerful of all post-war appeals for socialism...

...That one's response is ambivalent rather than merely critical is also in part due to the force of Tawney's style—the barbed ironies at the expense of the rich, the almost Miltonic cadences of his Latinate sentence structures, the fine preacherly fire...

...His biographer observed that "he would frequently but not regularly go to DISSENT / Summer 1998 • 95 church, often taking his dog, less frequently his wife...

...Not only may the destination now look more uncertain and the logic of the connection more disputable, but few of those likely to read Tawney today can easily share his unargued conviction about the nature and force of something called "morality...

...Part of the explanation may be structural as much as personal...

...He remained a cherished figure in English radical and working-class circles long after his death in 1962 at the age of eighty-two...

...it can still come as something of a surprise to find that a book with such a title makes no reference to shopping...

...The more demanding question is why, if his work now seems to invite such damaging criticism, he exercised such influence and achieved such standing— and why, for that matter, various prominent political and intellectual figures in Britain and elsewhere still profess to draw inspiration from his writings...

...However, this bald summary of the book's central argument needs to be supplemented by an account of several of its less-noticed features...

...Various figures on the British left in the middle of the century testified to the way Tawney's arguments had permanently inoculated them against the temptation of personally owning shares and receiving dividends...

...Such rituals of identification and solidarity, even if conducted in the privacy of one's mind, have a 98 DISSENT / Summer 1998 necessary part to play...

...Structurally (and, one cannot help suspecting, psychologically), the overriding importance of Christianity for Tawney at this point is simply that it out-trumps economic criteria...

...Moreover, high-mindedness is constantly rendered inconsistent by shifts in circumstance...

...Rather, we should recognize that he owed much of his standing to the eloquent expression (and authoritative historical illustration) he gave to the moral commonplaces of the "progressive" educated class in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

...Not the least of the ways in which we are conscious of inhabiting a different world from Tawney's may lie in our grudging recognition that the demons have most of the best tunes...

...The biographical evidence leaves the nature of Tawney's own religious beliefs opaque: he appears to have participated in Anglican social organizations and economic discussion groups with more commitment and regularity than he showed in his devotions...

...This is where the more general moral argument of the book and its interpretation of British history intersect most interestingly...

...At the more specific level, Tawney concentrates on the organization of industry: he argues that with the growth of capitalism has come a divorce between ownership and the actual running of businesses, that the greater part of the income derived from ownership in such circumstances is "functionless wealth," and that society could be beneficially reorganized on the basis of rewarding "functions" rather than of allowing the largely passive owners of capital to accumulate wealth created by others...

...STEFAN COLLINI' S books include Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850- 1930 and Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait...

...But to my mind the most damning of the criticisms that can be leveled against Tawney's writings in general, and against The Acquisitive Society in particular, is that they are all too likely to encourage high-mindedness for its own sake...

...But at the risk of seeming willfully to court paradox, I would even suggest that it is the general attitude or tone of the book that has dated more than its concrete proposals...

...one doesn't get the sense that it was his belief in Christian principles that led him to become such a severe critic of economic selfinterest...

...Revealingly, he uses the term "industrialism" to refer not to a socioeconomic system itself, but to an attitude, "a particular estimate of the importance of industry," which results in all other goals becoming secondary to the pursuit of material gain...

...But throughout these apparently practical discussions, the idea of absolute, purchasable property rights is the target...

...Even if these principles are not given much content, as for the most part they are not in this book, the suggestion is that we range ourselves on the side of the angels by repeating, frequently and with feeling, that moral principle must override unbridled self-interest...

...It is, rather, that he constantly seems to suggest that the invocation of the idea of "higher principles" is a good in itself...

...It can no longer be confidently expected to play this role, nor do we really feel we would want it to...

...Enlightenment rationalism prepared the ground for the individualism unleashed by the Industrial Revolution...

...Tawney can sound surprisingly indulgent to the much-pilloried owner-managers of the early days of industrialism, because they were at least actively involved in running their businesses...

...In the course of the eighteenth century the Anglican clergy became "the servile clients of a half-pagan aristocracy...

...THE BOOK has long been regarded as one of the classics of socialist political thinking...

...Perhaps the moral criticism of capitalism flourished in no other country as it did in Britain between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries...

...Indeed, some of its practical suggestions are among the more persuasive parts of the book...

...as so often in this vein of criticism, the Utilitarians and early political economists are singled out for particular opprobrium...

...The notion of absolute property rights, valuable in the struggle against feudalism and absolutism, has become a curse in the very different conditions of large-scale industry...

...Its closest kinship seems to me rather with works like Ruskin's Unto This Last or Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society...

...But this issues in a tone and a stance that are always in danger of becoming merely moralistic...

...It is, of course, one sign that the heroic phase of socialism is over that few of the terms in this sentence can now be used confidently and without qualification...

...I fear, however, it is more likely to encourage certain bad habits all too common on the left, above all that of finding consolation for constant defeat in the comforting assurance of one's own greater moral seriousness...

...Instead, the yeoman and the craftsman of a vaguely specified past are lauded at the expense of the alltoovisible rentier in the present...

...Richard Titmuss, one of Tawney's warmest admirers, was perhaps indirectly acknowledging this tendency when, with fond irony, he remarked that "the severest criticism" to be made of Tawney's social theory "is that it would be easier to realize in practice if all men were Tawneys...

...But only when we reach the final chapter is it suddenly revealed that the propagation of such principles was formerly the function of the church, and that it is the "abdication" of this role by the church in Britain from the late seventeenth century onward that allowed economic activity to appear to be an end in itself (Tawney was to develop this theme on a broader canvas in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, published five years later...

...at the same time, he was tirelessly active in various left-wing or, more accurately, working-class, causes, and he was directly influential in the shaping and expression of Labour Party policy (he played a large part in drafting the party's manifesto for the 1929 election, for example...