HUMANISTIC SOCIALISM AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION
Terrill, Ross
R. H. Tawney (1880-1962) is one of the most interesting socialists of Britain or any country. Hugh Gaitskell called him "the Democratic Socialist par excellence." In his forthcoming book, R. H....
...Socialist governments will not be able to accomplish great things by flicking a legisHUMANISTIC SOCIALISM AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION lative or administrative switch...
...The "end of ideology" theorists aborted the cut and thrust of democratic politics by positing a frozen condition of political consensus...
...Tawney also held that ultimately a good society could not exist without good people...
...For the same reason he doubted that economic planning of the welfare state variety would itself deliver answers to all the problems and aspirations socialism had arisen to meet...
...Tawney saw the industrial revolution as a continuing process, not an event in history...
...If it means anything, there must be concrete political steps which can be taken toward it...
...Ironically, Bell's proc lamation of the end of ideology has all the marks of a frozen utopianism...
...During the 1920s, stress was placed, by Tawney and others, on the "growth of a social mind" and the "growth of new social tissue...
...So Tawney's socialism of right relationships had a moral root...
...retrospect it seems a key to Tawney's achieve Tawney's socialism wears well because ment in sustaining an effective socialist appeal it is humanistic, which in the first place means over half a century...
...Tawney urged advance on two fronts at the same time: the shape of socialism was to be legislated...
...Instead, demands for participation, decentralization, the protection of diversity, preservation of humane intercourse amidst organizational and technical intricacies, all address afresh to socialist thought the demo cratic question it hitherto often found em barrassing or even a liability...
...Nevertheless he did not think that poverty (short of destitution) need be degrading unless it was cheek by jowl with affluence...
...The man who sees an ideal state ahead asks, with St...
...And if Marxism evaporates to an impossible ideal, democratic socialism is reduced "to the modest dimensions of an essay in economic planning...
...Although England was not yet socialist, for example, socialists could bear witness to socialism by declining "Honours" offered by a capitalist Establishment...
...Tawney's socialism neither leaps out of history to a fixed utopia, nor remains a mere essay in economic planning...
...Poverty, a matter of conditions, hinders culture...
...Peter Sedgwick summed up a parallel point about "Croslandism...
...They foreclosed political creativity, because they did not allow for (much less call for) the dialectic that ought to take place in a democracy between fundamental moral concerns and political policies...
...At first sight it seems that Crosland has Tawney's kind of open-endedness in his view of socialism and history...
...This was true of socialism seemed to lie in its rationality, Fabian collectivists and of Communists, and as against the irrationality of capitalism which also of utopian socialists who projected a had led Europe into World War I; and dur comprehensive ideal society...
...Yet if Tawney was not "a democrat by virtue of not being a Communist," he had no time for the British Communist party be cause of its readiness to abandon persuasion for coercion when necessary...
...Socialism as the triumph of rationality may be exposed as a chimera, because it is no more rational for men to treat others as equals than to treat them as pawns, and because it is not certain that state officials will be more tightly guided by rational canons than private citizens...
...He was also moderate because he saw socialism as a way as well as a goal...
...The organism or Not only at the hand of Communists but also machine was thought to be directed to a of Fabians like Shaw and Labour party in certain destination by a self-propelling force...
...R. H. Tawney (1880-1962) is one of the most interesting socialists of Britain or any country...
...The shape of socialism is structural...
...But in the the streamlined socialist locomotive...
...Face to face with Marxism which, to follow Lichtheim for a moment, turned utopian because of disillusionment with Stalinism, Tawney asserted that socialism is for ordinary people here and now...
...Unlike Tawney, but like their Marxist adversaries, they discussed socialism in terms of the movement of history rather than in terms of the nature of man...
...He never became an anti-Communist out of the need to be safe and respectable, because he was a non-Communist out of a conviction that the Communist party did not respect the views and wishes of ordinary people...
...The triumph of state power which came with the ideologies smothered this concern...
...Yet in 1970s, rationality is at a discount and plan 340 ROSS TERRILL ping is no longer the special badge of so cialism...
...He did not think that once a Communist government industrialized a country it had, HUMANISTIC SOCIALISM AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION 341 by that act, created a new and finished type of society with its own values and its own solutions to the great questions of how men should arrange their common life...
...Since he thought mankind a speckled breed, he did not waste his breath appealing for naked altruism...
...Inequality, on the other hand, was always degrading because it precluded human communication...
...how can we know the way...
...He got his views on war from his fellow soldiers, and his views on labor politics in large part from the people around Toynbee Hall and in Manchester, and the weavers, miners, and potters in his tutorial classes...
...His socialism of right relationships among free and equal citizens keeps history openended and keeps men within history...
...Both sets of experiences made him the kind of moderate he was in political methods...
...It was a more characteristic mark of capitalism...
...R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship, copyright © 1973 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, will be published this fall by Harvard University Press...
...Tawney said that the nature of socialism had to be discovered by taking steps along the socialist way...
...344 ROSS TERRILL...
...Does humanistic socialism mean simply principles of social morality...
...Mental enlargement...
...Socialism as the rule of the proletariat may disappoint, because workingmen are no greater natural socialists than other men, and no matter how high they sit (to adapt Montaigne) they sit on the behind of their own human imperfection...
...Tawney was a democratic it eschews historicism...
...He was not one who would have liked to have been a conspiratorial revolutionary socialist, if only the need to oppose communism had not removed that option...
...Marxist, Fabian collectivist, utopian (as in William Morris's vision of the disappearance of politics...
...In some ways Tawney does not seem a moralist...
...Here is the point of his notion that only with good people can society itself be good...
...If so, Tawney's humanistic socialism offers clues...
...Himself shot through the stomach during the advance on the Somme, Tawney was unimpressed by leftists who praised violent revolution but did not understand violence, and therefore, he felt, had no right to urge it on workingmen...
...When I read now the babble of journalists about `the sporting spirit of our soldiers' it makes me almost sick...
...How shake them...
...We print here, with the publisher's kind permission, a portion of the final chapter, "Tawney's Importance," which sketches the general traits of Tawney's humanistic socialism...
...In a word, the appeal of socialism in industrialized countries today (unlike for many decades) may depend on whether it can prove itself more democratic than alternative systems...
...Tawney was moderate because he claimed only what he knew could be delivered...
...the dynamics of socialism were to be cultivated...
...All three major streams of socialism in Britain, other than Tawney's own humanistic stream, seem to envisage a resting place for history when socialism is attained...
...One key to Tawney's humanism is the idea of history as an open-ended process...
...The difficulty of changing societies from the top alone is widely apparent...
...In terms of the varieties of socialist thought, Tawney's open-ended, humanistic emphasis can be located this way...
...His socialism was not predicated on saintly conduct from the citi zenry...
...It would be hard to find a stronger foe of poverty in his generation than Tawney...
...One's like a merry, mischievous ape tearing up the image of God," he recounted of the Great War...
...Tawney saw that the neglect of moral factors was ultimately weakening to a polity, and that a socialist theory built on a dialectic between moral and structural factors was the best kind...
...Against the high priests of planning, especially "future-planning," Tawney spells out a never ending moral challenge to better social relationships, and to the creation by the people of their own patterns of social life by cooperative activity...
...Tawney viewed socialism as "principles" rather than "ideals," a conception probably derived from his Christianity...
...Socialism as an ideal, spun from the imagination, defiant of history and politics alike, may evoke cynicism by the enormity of the abyss between its glistening shores and the muddy ground on which we presently stand...
...Socialism as the ineluctable product of historical laws may become a casualty of 20thcentury disillusion (and of the rebellion of free spirits), and seem a piece of intellectual imperialism no more to be honored than Adam Smith's idea of an invisible hand bringing wealth and harmony from the operation of the free market...
...That did not mean that people had to be good before society could be good...
...He complained in "The New Leviathan" It is a commonplace that the democratic that not only conservatives and individualists, component of socialist theories which claimed but collectivists too, envisaged society as an to be democratic has had an uncertain career...
...Bell and Crosland, deeply engaged in debating Marxism, came to seem enclosed in their own ideological straitjacket...
...Tawney's genuine moral concern was a factor in his political realism...
...Socialism that is not democratic, that does not have "a human face," has little appeal in the industrialized countries...
...Tawney eventually enquired evenly: "Now is that a good thing or a bad thing...
...Though Tawney was socialist because his socialism was humanis a historian and believed a sense of history es tic, not because democracy seemed a good sential to socialist politics, he saw socialism tactic, or a way of carving out a socialist as a matter not of the movement of history position midway between communism and but of the will of men...
...But now we see that Tawney's moderation on questions of political method was not an uneasy compromise between competing extremes, but a direct result of a humanistic aspect of his socialism: respect for "Henry Dubb" as the man whom socialism is all about...
...organism or a machine...
...Poverty was no greater under capitalism than it had been before...
...But today it is arguable The measure of a society's health and success that the democratic character of socialism was the degree of perfection of the organism has become crucial...
...He scorned moral exhortation directed at poor people and workers caught in the web of capitalist industry...
...but St...
...Real foe to be overcome [is] fact that large section of public like pluto cratic government, and are easily gullible...
...Yet looking back on what Crosland wrote in the 1950s (and on what Daniel Bell and other "end of ideology" prophets wrote in that decade) it appears that Crosland and Bell, eager to revise socialism, particularly to shear off what Bell called its "apocalyptic" trimmings, foreclosed political creativity by proclaiming the arrival of Western societies at a fixed postideological destination...
...Yet these are not the only alternatives...
...Thomas, "We know not whither Thou goest...
...There was no socialist destination qualitatively richer than the life of socialism which the labor movement could begin to create through concrete first steps toward socialist practices...
...I prefer only to say that the basis of Tawney's socialism was moral...
...That has been proved in China and the Soviet Union and must be truer of democratic socialist governments...
...At the same time, given the current degree of disillusion with democratic forms, socialism that can achieve democracy at the basic levels of factory and neighborhood may have increased appeal among people who are not attracted by socialism as a metaphysic or as a gospel of economic planning...
...In his forthcoming book, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship, Ross Terrill recounts Tawney's life and sets out five key ideas in his political thought: equality, social function, citizenship, dispersion of power, fellowship...
...Fifteen years later it seems notable for its "sweeping rationalism" and for its "utopian vision of a world controlled...
...Yet today the omnicompetence of political will is again severely in question...
...Tawney thought inequality a profounder problem than poverty...
...or mechanism, rather than the wishes and In Tawney's youth the natural appeal of values of real-life people...
...Dreadful respect for superiors...
...Again, Tawney was integrating a moral factor into the overall framework of his socialism...
...Some have puzzled about the fact that Tawney was radical in analysis yet moderate in strategy...
...Inequality, a matter of social relationships, hinders the spirit...
...It was this which enabled them to imply that the valley of politics, with its twists and turns, conflicts, moral issues, will somehow be left behind and a smooth administrative plateau attained...
...On the contrary, Tawney said it was unreasonable to expect people to be good when, as under capitalism, they were treated not as ends but as means...
...capitalism...
...In a fragmentary note about democracy Tawney wrote that "Democracy [is] a society where ordinary men exercise initiative...
...The colleague, an anti-Communist, was resistant and said several times: "But he's a Communist, you know, he's a Communist...
...But the possibility of socialism as fellowship remains a moral option at all points of history, in scarcity or abundance, town or country, so long as men's common humanity seems a sufficiently overriding concern for the institutions and incentives of society to be ordered so that people are within social reach of each other...
...Viewed across the surge of political rebellion and theorizing of the late-1960s, Bell's "exhaustion of utopia" looks merely like the exhaustion of a "seduced" generation of ex-Marxists...
...There were times when Tawney's human-ing the 1930s in its magic key of planning, ism seemed to some fellow socialists an to escape the disorder of capitalism which awkward piece of baggage to carry aboard had produced the Depression...
...The root of his caution about violent methods is a clue to the character of his political moderation...
...Should we say that Tawney was more of a Christian humanist than a socialist...
...Thomas got from Jesus the answer: "I am the Way...
...On the other hand, the overall rationale of Tawney's socialism had to do with the quality of social relationships, and consideration of relationships brings us to morality...
...It was the moderation of respect for the rank and file...
...it does not require especially heroic types to make it work...
...Tawney discovered on the fields of France that war was an awful thing, hated by the ROSS TERRILL 342 ordinary soldier...
...tellectuals like Laski...
...Discussing with a colleague the work of a young Marxist historian, Tawney urged on his colleague that here was a fine scholar of Tudor and Stuart England...
...George Lichtheim concluded that "Marx's humanism comes to appear utopian, while his political program is travestied by totalitarian regimes in the pre-industrial hinterland of the modern world...
...The problems this raises come less from Tawney's theories concerning structures and conduct than from the largeness of the assumptions he made about the degree to which his own high standards were understood and accepted in society at large...
Vol. 20 • July 1973 • No. 3
