FROM R. H. TAWNEY'S COMMONPLACE BOOK
Walzer, Michael
Introduction In the early 1970s, I taught a course at Harvard on the moral arguments for capitalism and socialism. It was easy to find readings in defense of capitalism. The rights of...
...What is needed for the improvement of society is not so much that men should have profound information as to the possible result of their actions, but that they should have a keen sense of right and wrong, that they should realize that the conceptions "right and wrong" apply to all relations of life, including those where their application is most inconvenient, such as those of business, and that they should act on their knowledge...
...But I had real difficulty finding any serious philosophical defenses of even statements of socialist values...
...For what produces our social divisions is not mere poverty, but the consciousness of a moral wrong, an outrage on what is sacred in man...
...We know it to be wrong for one man to deceive another in order that thereby he may obtain pecuniary advantage...
...Anyone may wield it who can command sufficient capital...
...What I do want to drive home is that our conduct in particular cases is, and must always be, very largely independent of it, and that therefore the first step towards an improvement in social life is to judge our social conduct by strict moral standards...
...The reason for the abolition of slavery was certainly not that after calculation the advocates of the change arrived at the conclusion that its abolition was more profitable than its maintenance...
...They are certainly what the working classes mean by socialism...
...What is noble in the Labour movement is precisely this, that when a man does sacrifice personal success—as many workmen do—to a cause, they do not think him a quixotic fool...
...But that the new facts are largely useless so far as conduct is concerned, because they are not grouped under the established principles by [which] most men admit that their conduct should be controlled...
...It is no use devising relief schemes for a community where the normal relationships are felt to be unjust...
...We see no wrong in taking dividends which are wrung out of the oppression of other people...
...What I mean is (a) the municipalization of urban land and the regular purchase of land by the state (b) the purchase of coal-mines and railways and licensed houses (c) the creation of a really democratic system of higher education (d) heavy taxes on incomes from property...
...Now one need not point out that though this sentiment is very ancient, its application is quite modern—in 1800 there were a great many people who saw no wrong in slavery...
...Now this policy increases the well-being of the classes who are protected, and I have no positive objection to it...
...What is happening is that there is great activity in investigation both inductive and deductive (—to use bad words...
...see Russell L. Jones, "The Invasion of a University," Highway, III, no...
...Very well then— what is the task of the sociologist...
...Everyone at the present day knows a large number of persons are paid wages which make it extremely difficult to live virtuous lives...
...Now I do not complain of all this intellectual activity being applied to tracing out social actions and reactions...
...Why should not the same sentiment grow up towards the most characteristic immoralities of modern industry...
...All decent people are against a creed which tries such things by the standard of "utility" as though there were any end of life except life itself...
...But we will let you have more of it...
...More knowledge [?we'll] certainly need...
...It is all of us...
...I do not see how that can be attacked except by a large transference of property rights, by the adoption of the principle that economic "rent" is not to be left in private hands, and that there shall be sufficient equality of opportunity to prevent the maintenance of "plum" posts where payments are high because entrants are artificially made and kept scarce...
...In Anglo-American political life, moral argument survived most clearly among the Christian socialists, the greatest of whom was R. H. Tawney...
...It is in fact analogous to the business of a jurist...
...same moral abhorrence of the latter as we do of the former...
...However kind a slave owner might be—and he might be much kinder than many English businesses—he is condemned because he is outraging the deepest human sentiment, the sentiment which forbids a human being to be treated as a thing in law...
...What I don't see is any sign of a force making for these changes...
...490...
...and the employer tries to make up for the absence of other incentives by close supervision...
...The rights of entrepreneurs, contractual freedom, contribution and "desert" as the basis of reward: these were topics that had long interested philosophers and philosophically inclined economists...
...But there is no provision that our employers shall understand the language of the people they govern, and as for manners...
...They have seen human souls sacrificed so often to money that they have ceased to believe in any other motive except personal gain...
...On one level, Marxism was a science...
...In practice the vices of slave labour tend to appear among them...
...1911), p. 173: "Birkenhead, Birmingham and Swindon, Belfast, London and Longton, are at the moment grappling with R. H. Tawney upon the need for a unifying center for ethical precept...
...Marxist historicism long ago replaced moral philosophy among committed socialists...
...It is difficult, however, to find in them a clear statement of basic principles...
...It is a deeply personal account of the moral meaning of socialism, but it can serve equally well as a public statement, and it is as relevant today as it was 70 years ago...
...How far is it possible for us to approach it in the same spirit...
...Everyone in England would feel that a man who got his income from slaves was doing something disgraceful...
...But it is not the social problem, and it is not the policy which would ever commend itself to the working classes...
...They acted as they did because they believed slavery to be wrong, and believing it to be wrong determined to get rid of it irrespective of whether the result would diminish or increased [sic]—it actually increased—the productive capacity of the slave or the profits of the quondam slave-owner...
...It is no use giving opiates or stimulants to men whose daily regimen is unhealthy...
...They were, I suppose, that a body of opinion which arose [and] which held that the employment of one man by another as a tool was immoral, and that this body of opinion became sufficiently powerful to convert the majority of persons, who had never realized that slavery implied this, and those who, if they realized it, had never made in their minds the connection between this fact and any accepted principle of morality, in such a way as to reveal to 489 them that the fact and the principle were inconsistent...
...Today independence is an expensive luxury...
...They want the state to 488 step in and put down these lawless vandals who judge human affection[s] by their effect on the money-market...
...If an average decent Englishman feels that it is a disgraceful thing to buy and sell human beings or to hold them as his property, why should he not feel that it is a disgraceful thing to exploit the labour of children, to take advantage of unorganized labour to beat down wages, to take large profits himself while his employers are housed like cattle...
...but he might, nonetheless, be independent, in the sense of controlling the fundamental conditions of his own life...
...We insist on our civil servants having certain qualifications...
...And in the next two years, before he enlisted in the British army in 1914, he outlined the major books he was to write in the '20s and '30s...
...He has power, not of pit and gallows, and infantheof [infangthief] and outfantheof [outfangthief], but of overtime and short time, full bellies and empty bellies, health and sickness...
...They are tempted to neglect their duties to their families because it's so hopeless to discharge them, or to be mean for fear of neglecting them, or to be quite casual because they will not be mean, according to their temperament...
...But it is not only the employer who is to blame...
...of the opportunity for self-direction: and for controlling the material conditions of a man's life...
...They feel they are treated unjustly: they have no prospects...
...35 (Aug...
...I have no special knowledge on this point and must look it up...
...A sociologist ought to build up his science by bringing new economic cases under some of the rules of conduct generally accepted by civilized men...
...They recognize that his creed is really their creed—and yet, how tragic is the cynicism which one often finds among them, cynicism expressed in the question "What are you getting out of it...
...And this feeling against slavery, be it noted, is quite independent of whether a man treats his slaves kindly or not...
...This is why thousands of men strike in order that justice may be done to a few, when they have everything to lose, and nothing to gain by striking...
...on another level, it was a tactics...
...And in the (connected) worlds of scientists and tacticians, any sort of moral reflectiveness became an object of disdain...
...The line which intellectual socialism has hitherto followed in England has been collectivist, not communist...
...We are, in fact, as I am inclined to say, faced with a problem analogous to, though different from, that which confronted the Abolitionists...
...To the mass of the people poverty means that the conditions of your work, and therefore of your life, are settled by someone else...
...Above all—and it comes back to this—we see no wrong in using other people not as human personalities, but as tools, not as ends but as means...
...Everyone in England today condemns slavery...
...We will still measure success by the old standards...
...The fact is that what we want is a restatement of principles...
...They do not believe that progress consists in "changes which can be expressed in statistics...
...ONE WHOLE WING of social reformers has gone, it seems to me, altogether astray...
...It has concentrated on state regulation— the policy of the national minimum...
...MICHAEL WALZER q 487 The industrial problem is a moral problem, a problem of learning as a community to reprobate certain courses of conduct and to approve others.* This, it may be said, is moonshine...
...I venture to say—though it sounds a heresy—that there [are] certain sorts of behaviour which we know to be right, and certain others which we know to be wrong...
...What I want to drive home is this, that the man who employs, governs, to the extent of the number of men employed...
...If it is asked, on what it is based, I answer that it is based on the experience of life in all the principal nations of Western Europe, and that its validity is shown by the fact that when these propositions are stated in a general form, nobody in practice would venture to deny them...
...A jurist builds up the body of laws, by bringing new cases, as they arise, under some of the general principles of his science...
...That is the lesson of the industrial revolution and of the enclosures...
...This produces poverty, because it produces hopelessness, irresponsibility, recklessness...
...But what we need still more is the disposition to act on the knowledge which we possess...
...Tawney did produce such a statement, but only for himself—in a remarkable private diary and commonplace book that he kept in the years just before the First World War...
...and I am disposed to complain with regard to sociologists generally that they concentrate attention on remote consequences instead of on immediate duties, that they substitute inexpediency for sin and social welfare for conscience, and that then the world instead of feeling that it is a miserable sinner, flying from the city of Destruction, escapes its responsibilities today by speculating on the probabilities of the future...
...Finely argued, with the rich irony that was Tawney's hallmark, they remain immensely moving and powerful tracts...
...He had just finished his first book, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, and was thinking not only about what to do next, but about his life's work...
...No political creed will ever capture their hearts which begins by saying simply "We will give you a little more money...
...Now let us turn from this example to another...
...A year earlier, he had given a similar course at Oxford...
...But this of course is the essence of slavery...
...He occupies what is really a public office...
...Published a decade ago by Cambridge University Press, the diary was largely ignored...
...Is it not possible therefore for us to widen our conception of slavery from legal rightlessness to practical helplessness, from property in human beings to property in the labour of human beings, and to feel the * Tawney taught a summer course at Leeds in June 1912 on "Some Strands of Modern Political Thought," which may have inspired these remarks...
...But then 9/ 10 of them have not got to the point of realizing that our present (though not all) inequalities are the creation of man not of God...
...It is the absence of liberty, i.e...
...In the 16th century a man might be—according to modern standards—poor...
...We know it to be wrong for a man to live as though the effects of his actions upon his neighbours did not concern him...
...This does not appear to me to be done at the present time...
...By the time I finished putting my reading list together, I had decided that Tawney was also the most important socialist moralist of the 20th century...
...We know it to be wrong for one man to take advantage of the weakness of another in order to wring out of him terms to which he would not submit if he were a free agent...
...ALL DECENT PEOPLE are at heart conservatives, in the sense of desiring to conserve the human associations, loyalties, affections, pious bonds between man and man which express a man's personality and become at once a sheltering nest for his spirit and a kind of watchtower from which he may see visions of a more spacious and bountiful land...
...And this power is at present possessed and exercised quite at haphazard...
...Let us act on what we know...
...Even when out of sight of civilization, a man would feel that to make money by trading in slaves or by employing slave labour, was a thing he could not do and hold up his head again...
...It has almost surrendered the policy of communal ownership and use, except with regard to certain local services which offer, when in private hands, special opportunities of fleecing the consumer...
...The supreme evil of modern industrial society is not poverty...
...To give men the will not to be poor, we must first of all give them the control of the material conditions on which their lives depend, that is set them free...
...But let us take a concrete example...
...What makes the working classes revolutionary is that modern economic conditions are constantly passing a steam roller over these immaterial graces and pieties, breaking up homes, casting venerable men on to the scrap heap because they are "no good," using up children "for their immediate commercial utility," and all in the name of material progress, that cotton may be cheap...
...They are preoccupied with relieving distress, patching up failures, reclaiming the broken down...
...It is [I] submit to show how these universally accepted principles may be applied to particular sets of social conditions...
...The question who has this power, how is he qualified to use [it], how does the state control his liberties, how far it makes the kings' writ run inside his franchise, this is the question which really matters to the plain man today...
...He has jurisdiction over them...
...There is this difference between modern poverty and that of earlier ages...
...When he began the diary, in 1912, Tawney was thirty-two years old, living in Manchester, teaching for the Workers' Educational Association...
...This it seems to me is the fundamental question of the day...
...Diplomatists must have good manners and understand French...
...But Tawney was not a systematic philosopher, and his two best books, The Acquisitive The excerpts, in the following pages, from R. H. Tawney's Commonplace Book, edited and with an introduction by J. M. Winter and D. M. Joslin, © copyright Economic Society 1972 and published by the Cambridge University Press in 1972, appear here with the kind permission of the publisher...
...But it does not touch the problem of inequality based on economic privilege which is, I think, even more than poverty, the great blot on modern society...
...All this is good and necessary...
...Here he worked out his ideas (as the editors of the diary have written) with "a clarity and simplicity of style seldom equalled in his later work...
...The ideas of a lifetime crystallized in these pages, from which we here present a few excerpts...
...But it deserves close attention...
...Not only so, nobody, in practice, would think it necessary to appeal to the consequences of neglecting them in order to prove their validity, though it is, I suppose, on the consequences of neglecting them that their validity ultimately rests...
...It suggested a lack of confidence in historical development or an unwillingness to do what had to be done to help that development along...
...The middle-class reformer is either (a) moved by pity of the poor and merely anxious to relieve their sufferings (b) interested in "tidying up" regulations, organization etc (c) convinced that principles are valueless and only a fool looks more than 12 months ahead...
...Let me take one or two examples: What were the reasons for the abolition of slavery...
...This knowledge is, I would urge, the common property of Christian nations...
...What they want is security and opportunity, not assistance in the exceptional misfortunes of life, but a fair chance of leading an independent, fairly prosperous life, if they are not exceptionally unfortunate...
...They want to "conserve" the home, the property, the family of the worker...
...Society (1921) and Equality (1931) are so full of historical and contemporary reference, so wary of abstraction, that they have today a certain dated quality...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
