It is my earnest belief that all young men and women ought to read R.H. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society, a book that is sincere, thoughtful, and probing, but without the hawkishness of Burke, for example.[1] It is not a revolutionary tract — it is exploratory. And that is what separates it in essence from that of Karl Polanyi’s work, for example. Tawney understands perfectly well the desire to make the world anew, and then, in his subtlety, lets that desire go to be more prudent and moderate. One must not necessarily subscribe to the conclusions that Tawney advocates — I do not — but that does not mean that the arguments expanded upon are worth examining, and that the questions posed demand answers, even if those answers are not Tawney’s, or may require some modification to accommodate the rise of our technological society.
Where does Tawney’s journey begin? In the realm of ideas, Tawney singles out the “latter half of the seventeenth century,” which witnessed “the growth of a political theory which replaced the conception of purpose by that of mechanisms.”[2] Without taking names, it is apparent who is being referenced here; only two philosophers, closer in actual effect than they may let on, can be reasonably assigned this group: Thomas Hobbes, whose dissertation is an apt training ground for tyrants and all sorts of regimes which are unable to see higher laws of being, and John Locke, whose tabula rasa empiricism was only a small step away from constructivism and eventual nothingness. What was the effect of this contractualist turn in the philosophy of politics? “The natural consequence,” Tawney writes, “was the gradual disappearance from social thought of the idea of purpose itself.”[3] A society necessarily based on rights, and rights alone, could not withstand the onslaught of industrialised society because it lost sense of the ends of political organisation; it turned the polis from a substantive form of association that aimed at some higher end, even imperfectly so, into a mere association that guaranteed individual rights at the expense of greater claims. Insofar as the individual was now the accepted ends of the polis, it seemed as though the polis itself was merely a means for the deprivation of common purpose, of organisation that went beyond bare-naked self-interest. A state based only on rights and without superior claims of organisation is a political structure liable to being dissolved at the very slightest intimation of danger — it is mortally terrified of making claims upon the common good, or of property and of other forms of economic life (this does not mean that it turn to planning their economies in their entirety, but only that taxation is legitimate as more than covering the cost of expenses of the bare minimum, for example). The substantive nature of political association must be first upheld before further enquiries can be made into the manner in which one ought to live and other ancillary questions.[4] The problem, thus, with contractualist approaches to political organisation can be summed up as follows:
“Thus conceived, society assumed something of the appearance of a great joint-stock company, in which political power and the receipts of dividends were justly assigned to those who held the most numerous shares. The currents of social activity did not converge upon common ends, but were dispersed through a multitude of channels, created by the private interests of the individuals who composed society.”[5]
The approach upon which Tawney fixes his sights is simple: a contract is a form of give-and-take which is, at its core, a brutish and nasty manner of examining something that ostensibly aims at that which is good. The state is not a ‘joint-stock company’, for it has obligations to the rich and the poor alike, for they are subject to it and to the laws that govern it. If it were merely a ‘joint-stock company,’ it would put its hands up when it found periods of loss and suffering — no joint-stock company would have fought the Great War, for instance, or the Second World War, because it would not have been profitable. In short, if society were to be a joint-stock company, it would be oligarchic and simultaneously shorn from common purpose save for the propagation of society and the extraction of maximal resources from those who are subject to. It would be a manifestly unjust society, one where distinctions of wealth would be equivalent to distinctions of honour, where that which is right is always compromised because it fails to be profitable in the immediate future. Furthermore, the only expectations the owners of a joint-stock firm have from those running the firm, politicians, is the continued provision of dividends and increases in financial value, such that most activities that may not be wholly moral or may be questionable in light of either the law of the land or the law of nature, must be countenanced, and profit in the present is of greater significance than any in the future. Thus, we see a society that exists for that which is wholly wrong, and this is what Tawney ventures to criticise.
When examined today, when a handful of joint-stock firms have infiltrated into every segment of our lives,[6] we have the opportunity to examine their conduct, and the manner in which they comport to their stated aims, and we can see the lust for power and unfair terms that pervade them. They are happy to do what is ‘right’ — or rather, what appears right to their customers — only because it will get them more money; they do not care for substantive moral principles. They are without sovereigns, and although they might be termed ‘Multi-National Firms’, they are firms without allegiances, loyalties, or any other thing that may hinder their profitability. They regularly indulge in conduct that violates the spirit of anti-trust laws even as they skirt the explicit letter. Could a government such as this be a suitable guide to any higher good? Most certainly not.
However, this is not the end of this line of argument: it is that if society were merely a joint-stock firm, “society has been regarded in the world of business as existing to promote them.”[7] Tawney terms such societies ‘Acquisitive Societies’: “their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth.”[8] The society that has as its principle goal the accumulation of wealth, of unbounded prosperity without obligation, responsibility, and duty, is the society of the joint-stock company. (I only exaggerate a little: the duty is the acquisition and accumulation of wealth). The wealth of the nation is not an aim of the polis among other, more substantive and essential aims, but the sole aim: it is the society that Bernard Mandeville seeks to describe in his infamous balderdash, The Fable of the Bees (its subtitle is more revealing: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits). The question of right and wrong is immaterial to the society which has as its aim general prosperity without ancillary principles that guide it, and dare I say, reign supreme over it — if it did not, would it matter whether the means of general prosperity were the sale of recreational drugs, destructive for the mind, body, and soul, or the barter and exchange of natural goods without care for the environment or of some other scruple that may hinder the progression of this acquisitive society?
The matter, then, is settled: the acquisitive society, solely interested in the pursuit of monetary gain over all else, is the wretched society. It is depraved and horribly unjust. But what makes it so fatally attractive? It is in part because of the charms of those ‘rights-based’ theories that Tawney criticised earlier:
“The secret of its triumph is obvious. It is an invitation to men to use the powers with which they have been endowed by nature or society, by skill or energy or relentless egotism or mere good fortune, without inquiring whether there is any principle by which their exercise should be limited. … By fixing men’s minds, not upon the discharge of social obligations, which restricts their energy, because it defines the goal to which it should be directed, but upon the exercise of the right to pursue their own self-interest, it offers unlimited scope for the acquisition of riches and therefore gives free play to one of the most powerful human instincts.”[9]
The metaphor, unwritten but writ large between the lines, is that the acquisitive society is no different from the Hobbesian state of nature, of the bellum omnium contra omnes. As with the state of nature that Hobbes posits, there seems to be no justice and no capacity for anything beyond basic sense perception from which right and wrong come to be: money is a false substitute for happiness of the real kind and an equivalent of the pleasure that is observed in the felicitous approbations of Hobbesian animals and of those who squeal in delight at the sight of money. The lack of money, then, is fallaciously made the equivalent of pain, and it seems that deprivation of any money is painful. The limit of pain is the limit to which pain guides the actions that result in pleasure. Thus, the acquisitive society creates a dichotomous mode of thought that denies man the chance to introspect, to flourish, to become more than a beast equipped with machines: it denies man the chance to be human, and that is where it must be faulted.[10] A focus on acquisition has the tendency to be single-minded because it removes from one’s psyche the ability to think beyond the standard of its success — monetary reward. It provides an avenue for greed to take root — greed that is vicious and without limit. The acquisitive society, if we may follow Aristotle, is the society where wealth is not an instrument that enables us to live the good life, but wealth the good life itself.
This is what leads to the paradox of wealth in contemporary civilisation that Tawney is so wary of: “But the faith upon which our economic civilisation reposes, the faith that riches are not a means but an end, implies that all economic gain is equally estimable, whether it is subordinated to a social purpose or not.”[11] It should be treated as the first principle of the study of economics that markets, business activity, and commercial life are all means to an end, and not ends in themselves. But this unquestioning faith in the market, mostly self-regulating, is the myth that remains unexamined despite having its origins shorn apart by incisive scissors because we seek to redeem the nonmaterial shortcomings of our materially prosperous present moment, and seek to continue down a path of boundless growth, paying no heed to the damage we inflict day in and day out, not merely upon man but also on nature. Business activity, properly ordered, has its place not in the development and propagation of more wealth — but leisure necessary to lead the good life, without which there cannot be freedom.[12] Tawney does not believe in the creation of a leisured class — he continually derides them as rentiers and calls them out for being the exploitative component of property divorced from function[13] — but this does not change the substance of the criticism he levels against those who seek to provide those with the ability to be free. While the gist of his proposals are well encapsulated by the term ‘guild socialism’ — a form of professionalisation of trades with still a significant degree of private ownership — it is naive to instantly dismiss his criticism solely because of the stance he is known to take as the cure for the ills of contemporary society. As we shall see, Tawney’s ‘guild socialism’ is of the same genus as Disraeli’s ‘squire socialism’: it is at once conservative in the English sense of that word, and yet humane, considerate, and compassionate, qualities that may not entirely be seen to be the domain of the conservative or of stock-and-barrel socialists, who aspire to power and technocratic politics more than the stated goal of human flourishing and economic justice.
It is possible to criticism Tawney for the romanticisation of the past, but a close reader would not make such a mistake. Yet, it is evident that Tawney is conscious of that sense of medieval piety that drove the English toward the Gothic in the Battle of the Styles, the intensity with which the medieval soul thought of religion and of the non material world in relation to their existence on this planet, and made monuments that reflected, however imperfectly, a sublime sense of paradise, of the palaces of light in Chartres and Reims, with their beautiful, long, slender, and graceful figures of the International Gothic set alongside the monstrous and terrifying sublimates of fear and wonder of another sort, the gargoyles of Notre Dame. It was not just this aesthetic dimension that Tawney alludes to: the spiritual dimension of the rich experience of the medieval world were like an ascending order: “It [society] stood as one rung in a ladder which stretched from Hell to Paradise, and the classes who composed it were the hands, the feet, the head of a corporate body which was itself a microcosm imperfectly reflecting a larger universe.”[14] Social hierarchy was fundamental to this; society was ordered to reflect another, ethereal, and eternal world, one that had its own hierarchy. But the changes wrought by the new positivism, by the science of Machiavelli and of the others — Locke and Hobbes come to mind — were drastic:
“But common habits, common traditions and beliefs, common pressures from above gave them a unity of direction, which restrained the forces of individual variation and lateral expansion; and the centre towards which they converged, formerly a Church possessing some of the characteristics of a State, was now a State that had clothed itself with many of the attributes of a Church.”[15]
The problem started, for Tawney, with the Reformation, which “made the Church a department of the secular government.”[16] It is not unusual to place the origins of the rupture between modernity and the medieval world in the schism perpetrated by Martin Luther; in this case the singular facet that is being emphasised is the schism’s effect in removing from the previously enchanted medieval world a widely accepted and truly universal system of belief, faith, and even morality that took into account different customs in the manner in which it articulated the particular but stayed faithful for the most part with the universal. Faith transcended the boundaries of nations, and while the Papacy enjoyed a degree of temporal power — a varying degree that swung wildly from enforced captivity as a result of a kidnapping by various European powers to total dominion over a swathe of the Italian peninsula — it was more concerned with the administration of spiritual concerns, for its domain was the nonmaterial world upon which man’s claims to being more than a beast were founded. But the Church understood fully well that while the individual soul must be saved, its care was for those whose souls needed saving, and its mission would always remain incomplete without at least attempting with all sincerity to be the saviour of all. It was at once wholly individualist insofar as it held the importance of individual will and action as significant components of moral and ethical action, and collectivist insofar as it gave expression to social organisation: when the Day of Judgement would come, and it would, for most medieval laymen thought it to be imminent,[17] all would be judged. But what was the creed that replaced the rich spiritual and religious experience of the Church, and turned the State into a church, in a perverse manner?
Tawney’s answer strikes at the heart of the modern condition: once, “individual variation and lateral expansion” were taken away from whatever higher purpose that they were assigned to, and then set loose such that they were allowed to operate unfettered and without being restrained by their previous direction, that which was common to all. That which was previously instrumental, a means to an end, now became an end in itself, and the old ends were soon forgotten and lost in most quarters. But Tawney did not lose sight of them; his solution is thoroughly medieval and yet modern. It draws from Venice and its confraternities, from Florence and its guilds, and from the systems of social organisation that encouraged the growth of an economic sector under the thumb of the greater purpose that society was oriented toward. The capitals upon which society was understood to stand upon were “common habits, common tradition and belief,” and without these the ends of even the forms of social organisation Tawney dreamt of could not be fulfilled. Society and culture could only rest on that which was common to all, and although it seems that Tawney’s ‘tradition’ is used somewhat sceptically in other utterances of this mode of thought in the book, it is the bedrock upon which any edifice must stand. Habit is an essential element of disposition, and tradition without habit cannot be customary, and without habit tradition is unfortunately fragile and requires other sources of power that may contribute to a general tendency toward imposition of belief rather than sincere adherence that belongs to the domain of the individual: it must come from within.
[1] R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1920). I must add that I love Edmund Burke the philosopher and aesthetician and parliamentary thinker, but his Revolutions is not the work I think of when I praise him most fervently.
[2] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 9.
[3] Ibid, 12.
[4] This is a recognizably Aristotelian impulse, though Tawney makes little reference to other thinkers. In this case, he bears remarkable similarity to Michael Oakeshott, whose aversion to citations was, well, pervasive, and would have landed me in academic trouble if I were ever to replicate it nowadays.
[5] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 13–14.
[6] Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Disney, and Netflix. Nowhere in the world, save for China, are these firms without reach or influence.
[7] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 26.
[8] Ibid, 29.
[9] Ibid, 30.
[10] I am reminded of Polanyi’s discussion of Townsend’s fable: “Hobbes had argued the need for a despot because men were like beasts; Townsend insisted that they were actually beasts and that, precisely for that reason, only a minimum of government was required.” Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 119.
[11] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 33.
[12] Obviously, this is Aristotle’s argument, and I do not claim this exegesis for Tawney. For more, see: William James Booth, Households: On the Moral Architecture of the Economy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 58–66, for a more historical discussion of the Aristotelian argument contained in Book 1 of the Politics and Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics.
[13] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 35–36. Tawney writes later in the book, rather puzzlingly: “Those to whom a leisure class is part of an immutable order without which civilisation is inconceivable, dare not admit, even to themselves, that the world is poorer, not richer, because of its existence.” (136)
[14] Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 10.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1986), 23–35.