The fact that Lawrence Goldman’s biography is the first
for well over half a century is an indication of how far R H Tawney’s
reputation and influence has declined. It is hoped that this book is the start
of a revival of an interest in Tawney’s writings. The book is almost entirely
drawn from the archive based at the London School of Economics(LSE) and from
personal material from his family. Goldman takes a basic broadly chronological
approach, and tries but does not always succeed to work in the more serious
political and history issues that arose during his lifetime. The book delves
heavily into Tawney’s life to the detriment of a more in-depth study of his
politics and historiography.
Perhaps the most striking thought when reading the book
is the fact that Tawney’s archive has hardly been touched. Goldman does not
attempt to answer this conundrum but I believe that despite Tawney being a
Christian Socialist not a Marxist his work has falling victim to the onslaught
in academia led by large numbers of revisionist historians who have sought to
bury Marxist historiography under a large number of dead dogs.
Early Life
Tawney came from a family that was academic and
comfortably well off. Like large numbers of his class he was privately educated
in Tawney’s case at Rugby and later went on to Balliol. It is without doubt
Tawney’s social background that heavily influenced his political and historical
writings. As one writer pointed out he “
brought a late Victorian and Edwardian ethical sensibility to the economic and
industrial troubles of the 1920s and 30s,”[1]
It is clear that it was his “ethical sensibility” that
drove him to give something back to society in the form of educating the
working class. Tawney clearly had an empathy with the poor. While rejecting
Marxist theory he started the first Workers’ Educational Association courses in
Lancashire and the Black Country.
The education of workers and the unemployed through
Workers Educational Associations in one form or another was an international
phenomenon. The German Workers’ Educational Society in London was started in
1840 by a group of political refugees, who were members of the League of the
Just.
When the Communist League was founded in 1847, its
members played leading roles in the society. Creating branches in many workings
areas of London. The importance of the society attracted Marx and Engels in
1849-50 who took more responsibility for the political direction of the
society.
The Society, unfortunately, was closed 1918, by the British
Government. Goldman believes that Tawney choose his field of study
carefully. His study of economics was clearly motivated by his attempt to
understand the origins of capitalism.
Unfortunately, not by using a Marxist methodology, rejecting using
historical materialism as a method of examining capitalism. Goldman is not really interested in looking into Tawney’s
philosophy of history. While rejecting Marxism, Tawney adopted an essentially
utopian approach to politics and for that matter history.
This approach can be seen in one of his most important
and famous books. He states “The distinction made by the philosophers of
classical antiquity between liberal and servile occupations, the medieval
insistence that riches exist for man, not man for riches, Ruskin’s famous outburst,
“there is no wealth but life”, the argument of the Socialist who urges that
production be organized for service not for profit, are but different attempts
to emphasize the instrumental character of economic activities, by reference to
an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man.”[2]
Compare this to Marx “In the social production of their
existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent
of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given
stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality
of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and
to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness”[3]
Tawney rejected Marx’s linking of base and
superstructure. Tawney never believed that socialism should have a material
base. While he believed that working men and women should have strong
convictions his appeal was to the heart and not the head.
He was fond of quoting Oliver Cromwell who during the
English revolution commented on the type of person he wanted in the New Model
Army a “plain russet-coated Captain that knows what he fights for and loves
what he knows”.
Tawney’s socialism was suffused with Christian morality.
According to Goldman Tawney gave out good will and expected in return.
Declaring that “no political creed will ever capture their hearts which begins
by saying simply ‘we will give you a little more money’”. It is quite striking
that Tawney had a very low goal for socialism.
Would he have been a better historian if he had embraced
Marxist methodology I believe he would have been. But despite this handicap so
great was his influence at the time that his study of the period 1540-1640
became known as “Tawney’s century”.
Historiography
Probably the weakest part of the book is the treatment or
lack of it of the furious battles Tawney had with predominately right wing
historians. While it would have clear to even an O Level history or politics
student that Tawney was not a Marxist this did not stop him being attacked for
his perceived Marxist orientation.
He was involved in certainly the biggest and nastiest
discussion of the 20th century. While some of today’s historians have treated
this debate as arcane they are wrong and do so for mainly ideological reasons.
The start of the battle occurred when in The Economic
History Review of 1941, Tawney published ‘The Rise of the Gentry’ as Goldman
puts it he “argued that a change occurred in the ownership of property in the
century before the Civil War, with a new class of gentry replacing the old
land-owing classes. Tawney’s most important piece of empirical evidence was
what later came to be referred to as the ‘counting of manors’ – between 1561
and 1680 ‘the number of landholders owning more than 10 manors fell from 612 to
347. Impressionistically, the number of lesser landholders grew but the
wealthiest landholders were losing their grip and declining in numbers and
wealth’ (p. 234).
While Goldman is light on historiography the book would
have been greatly improved if he devoted more time and space to this debate,
which he did not see as an objective exchange of opinions. Personal prejudice
and petty jealousy was to intercede. American historian Lawrence Stone became
involved in the debate. Stone visited Tawney during the second world war.
The story goes that Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was covering
the same ground as Tawney gave Stone some papers on the subject. Whether Stone
deliberately gave Tawney papers to further his research is open to conjecture.
Trevor Roper saw this as a slight and decided to ‘smash’ Stone.
According to the National Oxford Biography Stone had an
“impatience to get on with ‘real’ history earned him a reputation for arrogance
during his post-war undergraduate year; on one occasion he stormed out of a
revision class conducted by a newly appointed Christ Church tutor, Hugh
Trevor-Roper”.
It would appear that Roper never forgave him for this but
does not explain Ropers vitriolic attack. Trevor-Roper accused Stone of failing
to understand the technological nature of the documents he studied and had
substantially exaggerated the level of indebtedness of the Aristocracy. See
also C Thompson Critic of Stone’s work) This ‘mistake’ did not warrant Roper’s
“academic vituperation”. Tawney was moved to defend Stone saying that ‘an
erring colleague is not an Amalakite to be smitten hip and thigh’.
On a broader point while Stone himself described his
early career as being a young Marxist perhaps his mistakes were the product of
an incomplete assimilation of the Marxist method of Historical Materialism.
Stone had a major problem in that he never really understood the difference
between genuine Marxism and a crude form of economic determinism.
In fact, Stone himself soon moved away from any link with
Marxist historiography and in his own words became as he put it in an interview
in 1987, "an old fashioned Whig". Stone never really deepens the reader’s knowledge of the
political persuasion of Roper or other historians such as J H Dexter who also
weighted in heavily to the debate with Tawney. Stone mistakenly described him
as a Liberal.
Hexter’s work is very readable but here is not the place
to evaluate its merit but it does warrant me to say that Hexter’s close links
to the American Encounter magazine which in turn had close links to the CIA
could have been exposed by Stone.
In the 1950s Hugh Trevor-Roper went to a conference in
Berlin which was largely made up of anti-communists, I am not sure if J H
Hexter went to as well but writer and some Stalinist intellectuals such as
Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, and Arthur Koestler. The result
of this conference was the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and
its magazine Encounter. Trevor Roper wrote extensively for the magazine
Encounter, is it any wonder that Stone who was mistakenly described as a
Marxist historian would get such a hostile treatment
This would in my opinion armed his readers with an
understanding of the fact that attacks on Stone’s and Tawney’s work were not
just motivated by historical accuracy but had a very right wing political
undertone.
The attack on Stone was unwarranted for a number of
reasons. The main one being that after writing the Cause of the English
Revolution he was moving away from any link to a Marxist analysis of the
English Revolution.
But it became clear that roper’s real target was Tawney.
Goldman to his credit does question whether Trevor-Roper was justified in
attacking both in this manner– ‘why, if he had killed the child, did
Trevor-Roper go on to kill the father?’ (p. 237). He chides Roper ‘for all the
huffing and puffing Trevor-Roper had merely offered an alternative and
admittedly better model of social structures in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries … Trevor-Roper had not vanquished Tawney, merely corrected him … The
judgement that he had delivered an ‘annihilating oposculum’ to Tawney’s article
is in need of revision. Trevor-Roper’s motivation was clearly ideological
driven. He saw Tawney as a Marxist that must be vanquished.
Conclusion
It is impossible in the space of this review to sum up
the importance of Tawney’s work or his legacy. To the modern reader Tawney was
clearly the archetypal absent-minded scholar, As Goldman points out he lived in
chaos. Goldman recounts a story that when Tawney invited William Temple (a
future archbishop of Canterbury) for a meal “and removed three musty volumes
from his bookshelf to reveal two cold chops on a plate” (p. 139).
A L Rowse also recounts a visit to Tawney ‘When I
penetrated his study in Mecklenburg Square I was amazed: not only the litter of
books and papers on every chair, table or ledge, but trays with scraps of food,
unwashed teacups etc. …Tawney sat imperturbably in the midst of the mess, he
didn’t seem to notice the squalor’, Historians I Have Known, pp. 93–4.
These anecdotes while amusing should not be an excuse for
ignoring an important historian. The least he deserves is a proper
re-evaluation of his work. Certainly the
“Storm Over the Gentry” debate needs to be put in a more appropriate context.
Hopefully Goldman’s book will rekindle not just an interest but provokes other
historians into doing some long overdue work on Tawney.
[1] For the
Common Good-Stefan Collini
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1362851.ece
[2] Religion and
the Rise of Capitalism (1926),
[3]K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas.
