R. H. Tawney’s Christian Idealism and Social Reform
By Paul Crook
R. H. Tawney’s biographers, and most serious students of his thought, agree that his socialist and social reform ideas were founded upon a Christian moral basis. Recently, however, there have been some revisionist attempts to qualify this and to give a more secular, or humanistic, reading of him, especially in his later writings. I will here give some context that may be of use to those interested in this debate.
There seems pretty general agreement that Tawney was greatly influenced by the Christian ethics he absorbed growing up, including 1850s Christian Socialism and Charles Gore’s social Christianity; and also by other currents of thought that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They included Ruskin’s ethical economics (in one sense he was merely elaborating Ruskin’s dictum that “there is no wealth but life”, redefining rather than redistributing wealth). Another key force upon him was British Idealism (a philosophy that he encountered from his Oxford teacher Edward Caird). Lawrence Goldman’s fine recent biography of Tawney vividly describes the “quasi-religious” milieu that spawned the organised Labour movement from the 1880s. Tawney was a product of this milieu. He was to become something of a lone wolf in continuing this tradition well into the next century. Goldman recognises the undoctrinaire religious foundation of Tawney’s thought (a fact commented upon by his friends and contemporaries. Beatrice Webb found it very puzzling). Goldman himself is revisionist on one key theme: he shows how Tawney’s early idealistic and radical personal socialism evolved into a more instrumentalist, less original, variety – consistent with the twentieth century Labour policy of state socialism. However Goldman feels, with reason, that the “authentic” Tawney – who kept re-appearing to the end – was the Christian egalitarian rather than the secular state socialist. Christian ethics continued to be fundamental to him, even though he was more cautious in publicly espousing it in an increasingly secular age.[1]
Tawney quite early on justified his social democratic ideals on absolutist Christian values, rejecting ethical philosophies based on relativistic, cultural or utilitarian grounds. In a diary not published until 1972, ten years after his death, under the title Commonplace Book, we can find key guides to his mainstream thought. He saw the issue of reform of society as a moral issue, not some expedient or politically practical solution to grievances and problems within society. For example: “The industrial problem is a moral problem, a problem of learning as a community to reprobate certain courses of conduct and to approve others… The rule is clear, no convenience can justify any oppression … One may not do evil that good should come… The essence of all morality is this: to believe that every human being is of infinite importance, and therefore that no consideration of expediency can justify the oppression of one by another. But to believe this it is necessary to believe in God… The social order is judged and condemned by a power transcending it.”[2]
As Alistair Duff remarks, from a basis of Christian socialism, and under the influence of people such as Charles Gore and the Anglican prelate and his lifetime friend William Temple, “Tawney diligently extracted a reformist politics comprising a potent blend of the core left-wing values of freedom, equality and fraternity” (Duff, p.406). Tawney attacked the amoral profiteering basis of classical capitalism in books such as The Acquisitive Society (1921), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) and Equality (1931) – iconic twentieth century books. He put forward an older alternative of communal service, a morally-based voluntarist and free socialism, which, in Goldman’s words, called for a reform of the economy to meet collective needs and for a re-ordering of human values that would make economic activity a means to life rather than an end in itself. There are echoes here of Ruskin of course, and other thinkers – such as G. K. Chesterton – agreed, sharing a touch of romantic nostalgia for a lost medieval past.
Tawney’s egalitarianism was frankly based, as seen above, on the model of early Christianity, on Christ’s teaching of the essential equality of all humans. As Goldman indicates, as late as 1953 (in The Attack) and 1954 (Christian Politics), Tawney reiterated his youthful faith that human equality derived from the divine: “Here he returned to the argument of the Commonplace Book that man’s humanity is God-given and shared with the deity, and that compared with this, all social, national and racial differences are simply trivial and by their nature ‘anti-Christian’ because they are a denial of God’s intent and purpose” (Goldman, p.195).
Tawney wrote in Christian Politics:
The necessary corollary, therefore, of the Christian conception of man is a strong sense of equality. Equality does not mean that all men are equally clever or equally virtuous, any more than they are equally tall or equally fat. It means that all men, because they are men, are of equal value…The essential point – the essence of equality – is that such diversities must be based, not on accidents of class, income, sex, colour or nationality, but on the real requirements of the different members of the human family (p.13).
His educational reforms were based on the same assumptions. Equality “denoted neither equality of opportunity nor equality of outcome but an equality of status and respect. Since we are all equal in the sight of God, argued Tawney, we should be equal in each other’s valuations and behaviour. All should be treated justly, all respected equally and have their needs met; but because we differ, our needs must be met in different ways…. Arguably this is the authentic Tawney, the Christian egalitarian rather than the secular state socialist” (Goldman, p.196).
You could argue that Tawney’s critique of capitalism was essentially ethical rather than – or, better, as well as – structuralist. The Marxist critique was of course basically structuralist. Although the Marxists used ethical language to deplore the injustices and exploitation of capitalism, they ultimately saw moral systems as cultural superstructures build upon the fundamental reality of the class structure of society. Remove class distinctions through the revolution, they believed, and an ethical society would automatically emerge. Tawney disagreed. He embraced much of the Marxist criticism of capitalism, but he wanted first and foremost a spiritual or moral regeneration, from which would follow fairer social outcomes. His deepest outrage about the existing industrialist society was that it was “a moral labyrinth”, a new version of slavery, treating human beings as property, as cogs in a colossal machine “which grinds wealth out of immortal spirits” (as he wrote in an article of 1914). As Duff aptly says: “For Tawney… even Marxists were ‘not revolutionary enough’, since all they seemed to want was a volte-face in the class distribution of resources, the restoration of the booty, rather than a spiritual emancipation from enslavement to physical wealth… This moralist was seeking not just a community of freedom and equality but also a new overall social consciousness, a post-materialist society” (p.407).
Duff goes on to admit the serious weaknesses in Tawney’s brand of guild socialism - which was popular at the time and a reaction against the more mechanistic brands of socialism around - but a return to handcraft industries and small scale local economies was hardly a practical option in an increasingly globalised system. Tawney also tended to demonise private enterprise, markets and the profit motive. However the important dimension to his thought was the pre-eminence of the ethical category: “Tawney was always clear that public ownership or control was only a means to an end, only half the story of social justice. The other half was egalitarianism… In this latter regard, Tawney represents the high watermark of Christian socialism, perhaps even the ‘crowning figure’ of ethical socialism generally…At one level, Tawney articulated equality as a logical extension of political democracy… However, egalitarianism for Tawney went far beyond legal or democratic categories, to express a ‘spiritual relation’[to strengthen the common humanity that united people rather than the class difference that divided them]….When viewed in such a searing light, class divisions are anathema, shallow man-made appearances militating against a divinely instituted order of things. This is egalitarianism not only as economic justice, nor merely as ethical idealism, but as metaphysics… This Christian-inspired vision of brotherhood is at the heart of Tawney’s position: it is indeed ‘socialism as fellowship’” (Duff, p.410).
Tawney’s biographers show his religious belief changing from youthful interest in theology to a more generalised, non-doctrinaire, socially-oriented stance. Ross Terrill says this in his penetrating life and times of 1973:
“During the 1920s he was a discriminating satellite in the outer orbit of the Church of England. When he wrote on religion his topic was the church and the social order, no longer doctrine, religious feelings, and the ultimate grounds of Christianity, as in his pre-war diary [the Commonplace Book]. The basic issues were for him already settled… His beliefs were uncomplicated… From 1917, he and Temple were active in the ‘Life and Liberty Movement’, a campaign to revitalize the church for new social tasks. At the end of the war, he drafted, with Bishop E. S. Talbot and others, the report on ‘Christianity & Industrial Problems’ of the fifth of the archbishops of Canterbury’s committees of inquiry… In 1924 he took part, also with vigour and some impact, in the important Conferences on Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC). Tawney was a religious man and a social moralist more than he was a churchman, even at this time. His intimacy with Temple no doubt kept him nearer to the organized church than he would otherwise have been. Both of them figures in the WEA [Workers Educational Association – Tawney was extremely influential in the history of the WEA], both concerned with the church and the social order, they often talked to each other about things that mattered most to them… [Temple would sometimes talk the night away at Tawney’s house at Mecklenburgh Square]. Thus the informality of the tie between these two quite different Rugby old boys. The mutual influence was great. Intellectually, perhaps Tawney was an even greater influence upon Temple than Temple upon him, partly because Temple was more eager and able to rummage in Tawney’s field of social questions than Tawney was to tackle Temple’s discipline of theology”.[3]
Some Anglican historians have described Tawney’s behind- the- scenes influence, in conjunction with the powerful William Temple, as a major force and dynamic in Anglican developments at this time. He continued to be active for a long time in committee and conference work in English Christian affairs. In 1937, for example, he took part in the Oxford Conference on Church and Society. More research needs to be done on the Tawney-Temple collaboration. Hopefully the opening of new archives will shine light on all this.
Although his Christian values saturated his social analysis, Tawney could be vitriolic about the actual failure of the church in Britain (and elsewhere) to do anything significant about social reform. The churchmen talked, but at the highest level they did little. The revitalization he and Temple worked for did not eventuate. That was his judgment. As Terrill says, works such as his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) attacked capitalism historically, and deplored its undermining of Christian ethics by its emphasis on profiteering, “and it dared the churches to recover the proper concern of Christianity with the whole range of social and economic life. The challenge to historians produced rich fruit; that to the churches came to little. Tawney’s religious themes made more impact on his secular readers than his economic views did on his religious readers” (p.60).
Many socialist and reformist readers simply accepted his historical reading. They read the book as a call to arms against the industrial system, but ignored his call for a present day religious or spiritual revival. Terrill also makes the point that many of his historical critics missed the point that Tawney was as much an enemy of communism, certainly of the totalitarian Soviet Union, as of capitalism. He attacked the “servile cult of the inevitable”, historical determinism, and championed individual freedom – especially that of grass roots democracy emancipated from the shackles and materialism of global capitalism. Meanwhile the church did little.[4] Beatrice Webb noted in her diary that Tawney “profoundly dislikes and denounces the worldliness of the Anglican church and its toleration of capitalist exploitation” (entry in 1937).
Tawney wrote relatively little during the 1930s, no major book for twenty years after Land and Labour in China in 1932: “It is a curiosity of Tawney’s career that he faded somewhat from the scene during the 1930s, the decade supposed to constitute a peak of influence for socialist intellectuals… Tawney was depressed, and intellectually a bit paralyzed, by the intensifying concentration of irresponsible governmental power and the rise of totalitarian ideologies all over Europe” (Terrill, p. 139). As a parallel we might notice that Aldous Huxley, the novelist and environmentalist, felt much the same, as he too favoured small government and localised democracy, and warned against the power of monoliths of the right and left.[5]
Why had totalitarianism arisen? One historical reason, according to Tawney, was the moral vacuum left by the decline of religion in the west: “The alternative to religion is rarely irreligion; it is a counter-religion”. Fascism and Soviet Communism were such counter-religions; and so also was the materialist greed of capitalism: “The apostasies waiting to succeed [religion] are legion; but the most popular claimants to the political throne have commonly been two. They are the worship of riches, and the worship of power”. [6] Keynes said famously that capitalism was absolutely irreligious. Tawney had put a similar, if more restrained, thesis with great originality in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.