Richard Henry Tawney (1880-1962) was an English economic historian, born in Calcutta and educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford. He taught working men's tutorial classes for the Workers' Educational Association, served as a sergeant in the First World War and was badly wounded on the first day of the Somme, and later became Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. A devout Anglican and a Christian socialist active in the Labour movement, he also wrote The Acquisitive Society (1921) and Equality (1931).
Frequently Cited
“The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.”
“It was a creed which sought, not merely to purify the individual, but to reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by penetrating every department of life, public as well as private, with the influence of religion.”
“Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.”
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is a historical study, first given as the Henry Scott Holland Memorial Lectures in 1922, of how Christian thought about economic life changed between the late Middle Ages and the early eighteenth century. Tawney's question is how a society that once judged trade, lending and prices by moral and religious standards came to treat economic activity as a self-governing realm ruled by impersonal laws.