The economist and historian RH Tawney remains one of the most influential socialist thinkers of the early 20th century. In a range of writings, he set out a very British style of ethical socialism. Now, more than 20 years after the last major assessment of his work, Gary Armstrong and Tim Gray have re-examined Tawney’s thinking across his entire oeuvre, with reference to three major issues: its coherence, its supposedly Christian roots and its chronological development.
The Authentic Tawney challenges the work of eight commentators who have made assumptions about Tawney’s thinking in these three areas, particularly that of Anthony Wright, who wrote in 1987 that Tawney’s work displays “massive unity, consistency and coherence”. Armstrong and Gray offer instead a more chronological and nuanced interpretation. They reduce the role that Christianity played in Tawney’s thought, showing how he gradually shifted the basis of his ethical ideas away from religious conceptions of equality before God towards secular argumentation. Unlike Wright, who considers that Tawney underplayed his Christianity in later years to attract non-Christians, they believe he “deliberately moved from an underdeveloped Christian exclusivity to a developed secular alignment for its explanatory, not its rhetorical, force”. This, they argue, strengthens rather than weakens him as a thinker.
In handling Tawney’s political philosophy, they consciously resist what Quentin Skinner has called the “myth of coherence”. Instead, they view Tawney not as a monolithic thinker detached from his life experiences but as a man willing to rethink his earlier pious socialism in terms of human needs, capable of transferring his loyalties from Christianity to the Labour Party and of accepting that institutional reform was
as important as personal ethical development.
Central to this reassessment is the rejection of the notion that Tawney’s diaries, written between 1912-14 and not intended for publication, can be quarried for ideas to fill in conceptual holes in his mature thought. This sets the authors on a different path than that trodden by Tawney scholars, since the diaries were published posthumously in 1972 as his Commonplace Book, and allows them to recast his thought as “characterised by change rather than stasis, and development rather than consistency”, and to show that his conceptions of religion, politics, equality, liberty, rights, duties and democracy were not consistent over his lifetime, and were prone to “residual fuzziness”.
They support this reassessment by a detailed analysis of Tawney’s entire output, and the bulk of the book is made up of their findings, divided into periods, with concise conclusions to each section. The discussion here has rather more value for a reader than a simple academic squabble, because the concepts under discussion are illuminated and explored, allowing parts of the book to serve as a primer in modern political thought. Tawney’s concepts of social function and equal worth are given a good airing, and the theory of democracy is examined from bottom up and top down.
To some degree, the book demystifies Tawney as the great Old Labour sage, but it covers the issues involved in a style that never destroys the material it handles. There is no great tension within the book, because its main arguments are
succinctly summarised on the first page, and it may well remain a volume more often referred to than read. But the work it contains is of undoubted value, because it is not a matter of purely academic concern to establish clearly what lies at the base of 20th century socialist thinking.
