R. H. Tawney

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Richard Henry Tawney (R.H. Tawney) (1880 - 1962) was an English writer, economist, historian, social critic and university professor and a leading advocate of Christian Socialism.

Born in Calcutta, India, Tawney was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford where he studied modern history.

He joined the executive of the Workers' Educational Association in 1905 serving as the WEA's president in the 1920s and remaining with the organisation until 1947. He lectured at the University of Glasgow in the years leading to World War I and became a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1917 where he remained for the rest of his career becoming professor of economic history in 1931. In 1926 he helped found The Economic History Society with Sir William Ashley, amongst others.

During World War One, Tawney served as a Sergeant in the 22nd Manchester Regiment. He turned down an offer of a commiission as an officer due to his political beliefs. He served at the Battle of the Somme (the worst day and battle in British history, with some 60 000 casualties in one day), where he was wounded twice on the first day and had to lie in a field until the next day for evacuation. He was transported to a French field hospital and later evacuated to England.

He was professor at the University of London from 1931 to 1949. A leading socialist, Tawney helped to formulate the economic and ethical views of the British Labour party through his many essays and books, and he participated in numerous government bodies concerned with education, trade, and industry.

He supported the Republic during the Spanish Civil War among other political causes.

Among his books are The Acquisitive Society (1921), Secondary Education for All (1922), Education: the Socialist Policy (1924), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Equality (1931) and Land and Labour in China (1932).

He twice ran for a seat in the House of Commons for the Labour Party without success.

R. H Tawney lends his name to the Tawney society at Rugby School.

[edit] Quotes

In Equality (1931):

"Freedom for the pike is death to the minnows"

In Keeping Left (1950):

"Democracy is unstable as a political system as long as it remains a political system and nothing more, instead of being, as it should be, not only a form of government but a type of society, and a manner of life which is in harmony with that type. To make it a type of society requires an advance along two lines. It involves, in the first place, the resolute elimination of all forms of special privilege which favour some groups and depress other, whether their source be differences of environment, of education, or of pecuniary income. It involves, in the second place, the conversion of economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant, into a servant of society, working within clearly defined limits and accountable for its actions to a public authority"

Interpreting Adam Smith in Religion and the rise of Capitalism

If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, trade is one thing and religion is another, they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan… The existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the [18th] century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope:

Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,

And bade self-love and social be the same.

Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct. (Religion and the rise of Capitalism, page 195)