Richard Henry Tawney

Richard Henry Tawney was an English economic historian and one of the most influential social critics and reformers of his time. He was also noted for his scholarly contributions to the economic history of England from 1540 to 1640.

Tawney was educated at Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford. After doing social work in London at Toynbee Hall, he became an active member of the Workers’ Educational Association in Rochdale, Lancashire, serving as its president from 1928 to 1944. He taught tutorial classes (for working-class students) at Oxford, where he wrote his first major work, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912). That study of the use of land in an underdeveloped economy that was simultaneously in the midst of a population explosion and a price revolution (caused by the influx of New World gold and silver) opened a new avenue of research for historians. The next year he began teaching at the London School of Economics, becoming professor of economic history in 1931 and professor emeritus in 1949.

Tawney was an ardent socialist who helped formulate the economic and moral viewpoint of Britain’s Labour Party in the 1920s and ’30s by his influential publications. He served on numerous economic committees and as an adviser to governmental bodies, and he campaigned vigorously for social reforms. Many of them—raising of the school-leaving age, extension of workers’ education, fixing of minimum wages—were adopted.

In probably his most provocative and influential book, The Acquisitive Society (1920), he held that the acquisitiveness of capitalist society was a morally wrong motivating principle. Acquisitiveness, he said, corrupted both rich and poor. He argued that in capitalist societies work is deprived of its inherent value and thus becomes drudgery, for it is looked at solely as a means to something else.

A few years later Tawney wrote another book that has also become a classic: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). It argued that it was the individualism and the ethic of hard work and thrift of Calvinist Protestantism that had fostered industrial organization and an efficient workforce in northern Europe. He thus shifted and extended the emphasis of the earlier work of Max Weber (of whom Tawney considered himself a disciple). Weber had argued that the ideological stage for the rise of capitalism had been prepared by Calvinist religious doctrines, especially predestination.