R.H. Tawney and The Acquisitive Society
These two pieces tell us much about Titmuss’s approach by the early 1940s, and should be seen alongside, for example, the contemporaneous arguments encountered Chapter 3 where Titmuss had used the platform of Unser Kampf to make similar points. They again show, too, Titmuss reaching out to different audiences: the general, informed, readership of The New Statesman and the more specialist readers of Town and Country Planning. In terms of ideas, an obvious starting place is that parents must once again ‘desire’ children, rather than seeing them as economic handicaps. But they were being denied the opportunity to so by the ethos of an acquisitive society, a particular expression of monopoly capitalism. Once more, we find a clear acknowledgement of Tawney’s notion of an ‘acquisitive society’, a society which, in one formulation by Tawney, had grown ‘sick through the absence of a moral ideal’.15 It is thus important to outline briefly what ethical socialism involved, and Tawney’s account of why society had been taken ‘sick’, an idea also adopted by Titmuss.
Ethical socialism has been described as a ‘radical tradition which makes heroic claims on people and on the society that nurtures them’. It offered a ‘guide to social reform aimed at creating optimal conditions for the highest possible moral attainments of every person’ and, as such, was a theory both of human nature and of society. The ‘good society’, then, could encourage but ‘could not ensure the creation of exemplary citizens’. Rather, the individual could not be absolved from making moral choices, and it was for society to facilitate such decision taking.16 The authors of this analysis were themselves undergraduates at the LSE immediately after the Second World War, that is, while Tawney was still teaching there, and just before Titmuss’s arrival. One, A.H. Halsey, became a friend of Titmuss’s, and his daughter’s sociology tutor. In any event, it was within the intellectual framework of ethical socialism that Tawney wrote of the ‘acquisitive society’, a concept which Titmuss was to utilise in various formulations for the rest of his career as a weapon with which to lambast the morally corrupting effects of contemporary capitalism.
By the end of his career Tawney was, Collini notes, a ‘distinguished social and economic historian and doyen of the English tradition of ethical socialism’. Indeed, it was only a slight exaggeration to say that ‘Tawney became a historian in order to understand the origins of the distinctive pathology of modern society, namely the priority accorded to the pursuit of financial gain’.17 Michael Freeden, meanwhile, claims that Tawney ‘ascribed a powerful sense of altruistic fellowship to an ethically construed sense of community’. Freeden further contends that Tawney’s assertion of individual rights (not individualism) was part of his attempt to chart a version of social democracy ‘in an area hewn out between the denial of political liberty by both fascism and communism’, and ‘the denial of equal economic opportunities by the plutocracies of the West’.18 Titmuss has often been seen as a successor to Tawney. In one of many academic works making this linkage, John Offer argues that Titmuss was ‘impressed by Tawney’s writings’, that Tawney had a background in philosophical idealism, and that the latter hence went on to inform Titmuss’s own thought.19 Philosophical idealism, which argued an organic view of society, is another concept which recurs throughout this volume.
The Acquisitive Society was published in 1921, underwent many reprints, and, although not without its critics, became something of a Bible for strands of the British left.20 Lawrence Goldman comments that the book was a ‘work of transition’, embracing Tawney’s earlier ‘moralism’ but also reflecting the author’s ‘growing social experience, economic knowledge, and desire to make general rather than personal arguments’.21 The timing was also important, for the devastation of the First World War, in which Tawney had played a courageous part, was fresh in British minds, one reason why Tawney’s arguments are so powerful and impassioned. That Titmuss was delivering his own critique of the acquisitive society in the articles under discussion during the second, even more devastating, global conflict of the twentieth century adds to the urgency, and seriousness, of his arguments. This is not the place to make a detailed critique of Tawney’s work. Rather, the aim is to pick out certain ideas and arguments, focusing primarily on the chapter entitled ‘The Acquisitive Society’, which might be seen as having particular meaning for Titmuss as he developed his own take on modern Britain, and its ills.
Tawney argued that during the Industrial Revolution the idea became embedded ‘in England and in America’ that ‘property was held by an absolute right on an individual basis’. Consequently, ‘the enjoyment of property and the direction of industry’ did not require the provision of any ‘social justification’, as they were ‘regarded as rights which stand by their own virtue, not functions to be judged by the success with which they contribute to a social purpose’. During the nineteenth century, moreover, ‘the significance of the opposition between individual rights and social functions’ had been obscured by ‘the doctrine of the inevitable harmony between private interests and public good’. So was created ‘what may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth’. This had been a powerful idea that had ‘laid the whole of the modern world under its spell’. It promised to ‘the strong unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength’ and to the weak ‘the hope that they too one day may be strong’. In so doing, it made ‘the individual the centre of his own universe’ and, crucially, ‘dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediencies’. In such societies people did not become ‘religious or wise’, for to do so would be to accept limitations on the pursuit of wealth. There was thus an ‘appearance of freedom’, if it was accepted that such freedom was in pursuit of an object – wealth – which was nonetheless ‘limited and immediate’. In his conclusion, Tawney claimed that modern society was obsessed by economic matters, a ‘poison’ which ‘inflames every wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer’. Society could not solve its problems until that poison was expelled. To do so, it must ‘rearrange its scale of values’ so as to ‘regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life’. Its members would have to ‘renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue