Clift, Ben and Tomlinson, Jim. (2002) Tawney and the third way. Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol.7 (No.3). pp. 315-331. ISSN 1356-9317

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Abstract

From the 1920s to the 1950s R. H. Tawney was the most influential socialist thinker in Britain. He articulated an ethical socialism at odds with powerful statist and mechanistic traditions in British socialist thinking. Tawney's work is thus an important antecedent to third way thinking. Tawney's religiously-based critique of the morality of capitalism was combined with a concern for detailed institutional reform, challenging simple dichotomies between public and private ownership. He began a debate about democratizing the enterprise and corporate governance though his efforts fell on stony ground. Conversely, Tawney's moralism informed a whole-hearted condemnation of market forces in tension with both his concern with institutional reform and modern third way thought. Unfortunately, he refused to engage seriously with emergent welfare economics which for many social democrats promised a more nuanced understanding of the limits of market forces. Tawney's legacy is a complex one, whose various elements form a vital part of the intellectual background to current third way thinking.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	J Political Science > JC Political theory
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Tawney, R. H. (Richard Henry), 1880-1962, Mixed economy -- Great Britain, Socialism -- Great Britain, Welfare economics, Democratic centralism
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Political Ideologies
Publisher:	Routledge
ISSN:	1356-9317
Date:	October 2002
Volume:	Vol.7
Number:	No.3
Page Range:	pp. 315-331
Identification Number:	10.1080/1356931022000010593
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
References:	* 2. W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, Vol. 2, The Ideological Heritage (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 439-463; N. Dennis and A. H. Halsey, English Ethical Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); A. Wright, R. H. Tawney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); S. Collini, English Pasts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). * 3. R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (London: Collins, 1961 [1921]), p. 1. * 4. R. H. Tawney, Equality (London: Alien and Unwin, 1964 [1931]). * 5. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: John Murray, 1937 [1926]). * 6. D. Ormrod, Fellowship, Freedom and Equality: Lectures In Memory of R. H. Tawney (1990); H. Gaitskell, 'An appreciation', in R. Hinden (Ed.), The Radical Tradition (London: Alien and Unwin, 1964), pp. 211-214. * 8. Tawney, ibid, pp. 96-98; Tawney, op. cit.. Ref. 3, pp. 181-187. * 9. R. Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain's Theatre of Memories, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 240; R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1912). * 11. Tawney, ibid, p. 56. * 13. See B. C. Hunt, The Development of the Business Corporation in England, 1800-1867 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); L. Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (London: Methuen, 1983); and L. Tivey, The Politics of the Firm (Oxford: Martin Robert son, 1978). * 14. As Stuart MacIntyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917-1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 147, notes, discussing this period, 'the Marxist critique of capitalism had considerable impact on the rest of the Labour movement', and this is certainly true of Tawney. His discussion of monopoly (see below) is on the same lines as that of Britain's most important Marxist economist, Maurice Dobb, who in his Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress (London: Routledge, 1925) argued that in modern monopolistic conditions the capitalist entrepreneur no longer performed a useful function which required private ownership of the means of production. * 15. A. Berle's and G. C. Means's classic, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1933). * 20. See B. Clift 'Social democracy, the company, and public interest in the UK, 1918-1945' (Sheffield: PERC Research papers No. 1, 1999); and B. Clift, A. Gamble and M. Harris, 'The Labour Party and the company', in J. Parkinson, A. Gamble and G. Kelly (Eds), The Political Economy of the Company (Oxford: Hart, 2000). * 40. For example, A. Crosland tackled head-on these competing objectives in rather more technocratic terms in The Future of Socialism (London: Cape, 1956), pp. 215-217; and see, more generally, N. Ellison, Egalitarianism and Labour's Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 210. * 42. See D. McLellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 243-245. * 51. For a relatively recent incarnation of such a position, see G. Brown, Fair Is Efficient: A Socialist Agenda for Fairness (London: The Fabian Society, 1994). * 57. See A. Giddens, ne Third Way (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 65-66; A. Giddens, The Third Way and its Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), pp. 149-153; and also H. Collins, 'Is there a third way in Labour law?', in A. Giddens (Ed.), The Global Third Way Debate (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 303-308. * 61. This questioning of the foundational assumptions of neo-classical economics has subsequently proved a rich vein of theoretical critique and programmatic advocacy for progressive economists. A classic in this genre is A. K. Sen, 'Rational fools: a critique of the behavioural foundations of economic theory', in A. K. Sen, Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). * 65. N. Thompson, 'Hobson and the Fabians: two roads to socialism in the 1920s', History of Political Economy, 26 (1994), pp. 203-220; N. Thompson, The Market and its Critics (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 262-266. For more general treatments of Hobson, see M. Freeden (Ed.), /. A. Hobson: A Reader (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), and P. Clarice, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), chapter 7. * 67. Thompson, ibid., pp. 208-210. * 68. Thompson, ibid., pp. 210-211. * 69. On Labour's economic policies in the 1920, see, in addition to Thompson, A. Booth, 'The Labour Party and economics between the wars', Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 47 (1983), pp. 36-42, and A. Booth and M. Pack, Employment, Capital and Economic Policy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), chapter 1. The Living Wage issue became inextricably entangled with the dispute about family allowances, which aroused great trade union hostility: see L. Macnicol, The Movement for Family Allowances, 1918-1945: A Study in Social Policy Development (London: Heinemann, 1980), pp. 138-149. * 70. Tawney, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 56. See also M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought, 1914-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 313-315. Undoubtedly Tawney was closer to the decentralized forms of socialism, such as guild socialism, than to the more centralizing ideas of the Webbs. Equally, in the area of macroeconomic policy, Tawney recognized from Hobson the importance of effective demand, expressed under-consumptionist leanings, and endorsed a precursor to The Living Wage: see Tawney, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 38-39 and 140-141 respectively. * 71. Tawney, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 171; see also D. Riesman, State and Welfare: Tawney, Galbraith and Adam Smith (London: Chatto and Windus, 1982), pp. 108-111. * 72. Tawney, ibid, p. 144 * 73. Dennis and Halsey, op. cit., Ref. l, p. 199; J. Winter and D. Joslin (Eds), R. H. Tawney's Commonplace Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 18. * 75. Hinden, op cit., Ref. 5, p. 150; A. Sevan, In Place of Fear (London: Heinemann, 1952), chapter 4; Samuel, op. cit., Ref. 8, p. 249. * 80. Tawney, ibid, p. 178; see also Tawney, op. cit.. Ref. 3, pp. 161 and 173-174; Labour and the Nation (London: Labour Party 1928), p. 23. * 86. J. Tomlinson, Government and the Enterprise since 1900: The Changing Problem of Efficiency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 94-97. * 87. J. Tomlinson, The Unequal Struggle? British Socialism and the Capitalist Enterprise (London: Methuen, 1982); Hannah, op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 160. * 88. J. Viner, 'Adam Smith and laissez-faire', in J. C. Wood (Ed.), Adam Smith: Critical Assessments, Vol. 1 (London: Edward Elgar, 1984), pp. 143-167; T. Wilson, 'Sympathy and self-interest', in T. Wilson and A. Skinner (Eds), The Market and the State: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 73-99. * 89. A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, cited in A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, second edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 100. * 90. 'Since the collapse of communism, the ethical basis of socialism is the only one that has stood the test of time': T. Blair, Socialism (London: The Fabian Society, 1994), p. 3. * 94. There war a brief flurry of interest in 'market socialism' in Britain in the 1980s, but it soon died away: see, e.g., S. Estrin and J. Le Grand, Market Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/1069

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