R.H. Tawney and the Acquisitive Society
Discussion
Peter Critchley:
"This view can also be found in the work of Christian Socialist and economic historian R.H. Tawney, for whom industry is to be organized to express most perfectly the principle of purpose. As he writes in The Acquisitive Society:
‘A function may be defined as an activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose. The essence of it is that the agent does not perform it merely for personal gain or to gratify himself, but recognizes that he is responsible for its discharge to some higher authority. The purpose of industry is obvious. It is to supply man with things which are necessary, useful, or beautiful, and thus to bring life to body or spirit. In so far as it is governed by this end, it is among the most important of human activities.’
‘When men have gone so far in imbecility as to talk as though their idols have come to life, it is time that some one broke them. Labour consists of persons, capital of things. The only use of things is to be applied to the service of persons. The business of persons is to see that they are there to use, and that no more than need be is paid for using them.’ (Tawney 1982 ch 7).
‘So the organization of society on the basis of functions, instead of on that of rights, implies three things. It means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are accompanied by the performance of service and abolished when they are not. It means, second, that the producers shall stand in a direct relation to the community for whom production is carried on, so that their responsibility to it may be obvious and unmistakable, not lost, as at present, through their immediate subordination to shareholders whose interest is not service but gain. It means, in the third place, that the obligation for the maintenance of the service shall rest upon the professional, organizations of those who perform it, and that, subject to the, supervision and criticism of the consumer, those organizations shall exercise so much voice in the government of industry as may be needed to secure that the obligation is discharged.
It is obvious, indeed, that no change of system or machinery can avert those causes of social malaise which consist in the egotism, greed, or quarrelsomeness of human nature. What it can do is to create an environment in which those are not the qualities which are encouraged. It cannot secure that men live up to their principles. What it can do is to establish their social order upon principles to which, if they please, they can live up and not live down. It cannot control their actions. It can offer them an end on which to fix their minds. And, as their minds are, so in the long run and with exceptions, their practical activity will be.’ (Tawney 1982 ch 11).
Importantly, in arguing for the functional society in which human activities are organised in accordance with purpose, Tawney emphasises that ‘The first condition of the right organization of industry is, then, the intellectual conversion which, in their distrust of principles, Englishmen are disposed to place last or to omit altogether.’ (Tawney 1982 176).
Tawney’s ‘first condition’ is Schumacher’s ‘first task’ – a mental, moral and metaphysical reconstruction, the creation of a standpoint or viewpoint through which to organise practical activities and common affairs. That’s the bit people are more likely to ignore, because it is the most difficult bit, the most intractable. It is easier to go to the physical tools and start acting. But the problem of common living is not an engineering problem, it is a social and moral one. Ignore that fact, and we just get more of the same, an endless technological fixing that generates problems as it solves them.
‘If the conditions which produce that unnatural tension are to be removed, it can only be effected by the growth of a habit of mind which will approach questions of economic organization from the standpoint of the purpose which it exists to serve, and which will apply to it something of the spirit expressed by Bacon when he said that the work of men ought to be carried on “for the glory of God and the relief of men's estate."’ (Tawney 1982
Anyone who is inclined to dismiss such a view as utopian and idealist needs to consider the alternative:
‘The alternative is war; and continuous war must, sooner or later, mean something like the destruction of civilization. The havoc which the assertion of the right to unlimited economic expansion has made of the world of States needs no emphasis. Those who have lived from 1914 to 1921 will not ask why mankind has not progressed more swiftly; they will be inclined to wonder that it has progressed at all.’
We are still wondering.
Ultimately, it is the principles upon which society is founded, the values which persons hold, the purposes by which people live, and the visions they pursue that matter the most. The principle which Tawney advanced, and which Schumacher was to reaffirm decades later, is that industry, property and economic activity should be arranged and scaled in terms of functions related to a social purpose. ‘Such a political philosophy implies that society is not an economic mechanism, but a community of wills which are often discordant, but which are capable of being inspired by devotion to common ends.’
Conservatives may not like talk of class struggle. Tawney didn’t like it either, and he opposed Marxism. But, asserting a Christian social ethics, he drew attention to the origins of such struggle in a divided and atomistic society bereft of true social purpose. ‘That attempt to conduct human affairs in the light of no end other than the temporary appetites of individuals has as its natural consequences oppression, the unreasoning and morbid pursuit of pecuniary gain of which the proper name is the sin of avarice, and civil war.’
It is of some significance that when Tawney seeks to describe his functional society, he finds inspiration in the words of Dante Alighieri concerning the power of love and the respect for boundaries, ‘through which our wills become a single will’, the peace of the blessed life.
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Tawney’s conclusion is worth quoting and pondering at length:
‘Such a combination of unity and diversity is possible only to a society which subordinates its activities to the principle of purpose. For what that principle offers is not merely a standard for determining the relations of different classes and groups of producers, but a scale of moral values. Above all, it assigns to economic activity itself its proper place as the servant, not the master, of society. The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired.
That obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears today; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames every wound and turns every trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society will not solve the particular problems of industry which afflict it until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see industry itself in the right perspective. If it is to do that, it must rearrange its scale of values. It must regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life. It must persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in a fever. It must so organize its industry that the instrumental character of economic activity is emphasized by its subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on.’ (Tawney 1982 ch 11)."