RH Tawney's Commonplace Book

Another piece of library serendipity brought me a real reading treat last week.

I had checked the catalogue, hoping to be able to renew my acquaintance with The Acquisitive Society. No luck, but there was a title I had not come across before: RH Tawney’s Commonplace Book.

Tawney was still a revered figure when I was an undergraduate – his Religion & the Rise of Capitalism (which is still in the library catalogue) was on the reading list we were sent before we arrived for our first term. I read it on my knee in between answering calls to the small switchboard of the insurance company where I was working (for £25 a month) that summer.

For those reasons alone, & as an inveterate keeper of commonplace books myself, I had to read this.

In truth I probably wouldn’t call this a commonplace book; the editors themselves also refer to it as a diary, but it is no mere record of engagements or events of the day - if it were mine I should probably have labelled it Notes & Jottings.

It was written between April 1912 & December 1914, which fact no doubt keeps it in the library for its relevance to local history, if for no other reason. Tawney was then living & working in Manchester, as a tutor for the Workers Educational Association. The last entry was written just before he reported for duty as a private in the British army, having reconciled his decision to do so with his religious & political beliefs: the place of a committed Christian, who worked & studied at the forefront of the social issues of the time, was, during war, at the front among the men in the ranks.

In these notes to his 32-year-old self one can see clearly the outline of the arguments, & ideas for the programme of research he would need to undertake to develop them in his major works.

I was especially struck by the number of times he makes comparison between the position of a slave & that of the contemporary (mainly industrial) working man. It comes as something of a shock to realise that, at the time he was writing, the West Indian slaves had been fully emancipated less than three-quarters of a century earlier – no time at all, really, if you think that the same distance of time from today would be, for us, the time of the gathering clouds of WWII.

There are other resonances with the issues we face today – not least his concern to ensure that economics should always include reference to the ethical dilemmas thrown up by the way we organise the production of wealth. For example, his response to an article by Alfred Marshall, which asserted that no good substitute could be found for the risk-taking entrepreneur, was that yes, ‘we shall probably for a century or so have to put up with political jobbery & ineptitude which at present is limited by the fact that large spheres of national life lie outside politics altogether’, but that ‘English people will not accept efficiency as a substitute for liberty’ – reflecting his view that, as employer, the industrial capitalist was little better than the slave owner. One wonders if, although we have undoubtedly experienced the political jobbery, he would think that today we are actually further along the road to that freedom.

Tawney also reports the working class contempt for middle & upper class attempts to regulate their lifestyle (for example by changes to the licencing laws) in order that they ‘may work better.’ He also discusses the idea of well-being, maintaining that poverty itself is not the issue – in the C16th a man might be extremely poor but have more control over his own work, & anticipates the finding of modern medical researchers that lack of such control is bad for your health: “to the mass of the people poverty means that the conditions of your work, & therefore of your life, are settled by someone else.”

And, he says, the university has a moral duty to make intellectual discipline accessible to all, neither relaxing standards for anyone who is ‘well to do or socially influential’ nor denying access to anyone ‘merely because they are poor or uncouth or socially incompetent.’

Later, considering what moral principles should underlie the organisation of the economy, he puts first that we should abandon the denial of moral responsibility which argues that a man cannot be blamed for the results of any action in business, provided those actions were compatible with the law.

And he worries about how to allocate the fruits of economic progress between worker, employer & consumer: Why should the employer get the advantage of labour saving machinery rather than the employee? & How would a public body resolve the same problem?

There is also one intriguing assertion which is new to me: the property of the Crown & of the monasteries was, in England, distribute among the middle classes at a fairly early date, giving them an incomparable advantage in terms of economic power. “In Germany a parliamentary government (of a kind) followed hard on the heels of absolute monarchy … hence the property of the former was never distributed & remains for the nation” I wonder if this (if true) explains, for example, the relative lack of obsession with owner occupation.

Links
Infed: Richard Henry Tawney, fellowship and adult education
CUP: R. H. Tawney's Commonplace Book
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18 September 1912