R.H Tawney

1912
R.H.Tawney

Richard Henry Tawney came to LSE in 1912 and taught at the School for all of his professional life. He was appointed Professor of Economic History in 1931. He influenced generations of liberal minded students, and he spoke out for educational expansion. He had worked at Toynbee Hall, and he was deeply committed to the Worker's Education Association from 1905-47, serving as its president from 1928-44. He tried to enter Parliament twice.

R.H Tawney

Tawney was a social critic whose work provoked debate on liberal and economic questions. Intellectually, he was influenced by Matthew Arnold (1822-88). A political and social critic, an eminent poet, and an influential figure of his time, Arnold is famous for his Culture and Anarchy (1869), a work in which he argues that culture is vital to the life of a democratic state. Tawney's importance as a figure of twentieth-century opinion is shown by Raymond Williams' devotion of a chapter to Tawney in Culture and Society (1958), where Tawney is characterised as the last important voice in a tradition that sought to humanise the modern system of society in its own best terms. Raymond Williams (1921-88) was an eminent humanist writer, an academic, and one of the most pervasively influential cultural thinkers of post-war Britain. He positioned the concept of culture at the heart of political argument.

Tawney was a Christian and a socialist and his writing was diverse. The Acquisitive Society (1926) argued that material acquisitiveness was morally wrong and a corrupting influence. His Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) examined the interaction between religion and the social, political, and economic developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth century that led to capitalism. In Equality (1931) Tawney tackles the questions of social inequality in circumstance and opportunity, advocating extending social services and the social role of industry. Equality influenced social thought, particularly in the Labour Party, and his ideas have proved to be precursors of more recent social policy. In later years he became the archetypal absent-minded professor.