The Acquisitive Society

Summary

The Acquisitive Society is a short book of social and moral argument written by the economic historian R. H. Tawney in the unsettled year after the First World War, when strikes in the mines and railways and the Coal Industry Commission on which he sat had put the ownership and management of British industry in question. Tawney opens by observing that the English prefer practical activity to principles, but that in abnormal times a traveller who is unsure of his road must stop and ask where it leads. His central distinction is between rights and functions. A function is an activity that expresses a social purpose and for which the agent is answerable to some higher authority; the purpose of industry is to supply what is necessary, useful or beautiful. Tawney argues that medieval thought, for all its failures in practice, subordinated economic life to a moral and religious end, and that from the Reformation onward the State and the Church withdrew from that task. Locke and the individualist tradition then made private rights, especially rights of property, absolute and unconditional, and trusted that the free pursuit of private interest would yield the public good. A society organised on this principle he calls acquisitive: its whole tendency is to promote the acquisition of wealth, and because it makes the means of life into the end, it cannot be satisfied. He traces the results: luxury that diverts labour to frivolous ends, contempt for those who labour without growing rich, and a vicious circle in which every class insists on its rights and none on its duties. In the constructive chapters Tawney distinguishes property that serves its owner's work (personal possessions, tools, land worked by its owner) from passive property, such as royalties and urban ground rents, that draws income without service, adopting J. A. Hobson's word 'Improperty'. He proposes that rights be maintained only where a function is performed, that industry be reorganised as a profession with the public standards of medicine, teaching or the law, and that the professional organisations of the workers, including managers and technical staff, share responsibility for the service under public scrutiny. He insists that no change of machinery can cure human greed; it can only set before people an end on which to fix their minds. The book closes with Dante's Paradiso and Bacon's phrase about work for the glory of God and the relief of man's estate, calling for economic activity to be restored to its place as the servant, not the master, of society.

Plot or Argument

• Ch. I, Introductory: the English distrust of principles

  Tawney argues that post-war Britain cannot simply restore the pre-war order; a nation unsure of its direction must examine the principles on which its economic life rests rather than proceed by habit.

• Ch. II, Rights and Functions

  Defines function as activity directed to a social purpose. Sketches the medieval conception of society as an organism of functions, its dissolution after the Reformation, and the rise, with Locke and the eighteenth century, of a philosophy that made individual rights absolute and trusted a natural harmony of interests.

• Ch. III, The Acquisitive Society

  Names the society that results: one whose end is happiness understood as the acquisition of wealth, and which invites people to use their powers without asking what limits their use. Its triumph is its appeal; its weakness is that it has no common purpose.

• Ch. IV, The Nemesis of Industrialism

  The consequences: wealth diverted to luxury, the degradation of those who labour without large rewards, and a vicious circle of claims without duties. Tawney compares the dominance of economic interest to 'Prussian militarism', a character not of an army but of a whole society.

• Ch. V, Property and Creative Work

  A scale of property running from payment for personal services and personal possessions, through tools and land used by their owners, to pure interest, royalties and ground rents. Active property is defended; passive property that functions as a private tax is called 'Improperty'.

• Ch. VI, The Functional Society

  Applies the principle of purpose: whatever makes industry better at providing the material basis of a good life is wise, and whatever obstructs it is foolish, including payment without service and the crippling of education for the sake of industry.

• Ch. VII, Industry as a Profession

  Contrasts industry, judged only by return to shareholders, with professions such as medicine, law, teaching and soldiering, which judge success by service and enforce standards no fee can buy. Proposes extending the professional spirit to industry.

• Chs. VIII-X: secrecy, efficiency and the brain worker

  Argues that industry's accounts must be public so its service can be judged; that the old order is failing even in efficiency because workers no longer respond to its incentives; and that managers and technical staff would become 'one workman among others' in a professionally organised industry, drawing on the coal debates before the Sankey Commission.

• Ch. XI, Porro Unum Necessarium

  Purpose as a principle of limitation, unity and apportionment. Tawney quotes Piccarda's speech from Dante's Paradiso as the image of a society united by devotion to a common end and calls for an intellectual conversion that would make economic activity the servant of society.

Characters

• John Locke, philosopher criticised

  Presented as the first famous exponent of the philosophy that made the indefeasibility of private rights the foundation of the social order.

• Francis Bacon, authority invoked

  Quoted in the final chapter for the ideal of work carried on for the glory of God and the relief of man's estate.

• Dante and Piccarda, literary model

  Piccarda's lines in Paradiso III, quoted in Italian, supply the image of a diverse society ordered by a single end.

• J. A. Hobson, economist cited

  Source of the term 'Improperty' for property that yields income without corresponding service.

• The coal miners and owners, contemporary case

  The 1919 coal dispute and the evidence before the Coal Industry Commission are Tawney's recurring example of an industry in crisis.

Lessons

• Rights that answer to a purpose

  Tawney's argument rests on one distinction: a right is justified by the function it enables a person to perform, not by its mere existence in law. He applies this to property, wages and management alike. Students can test the principle against their own claims: what duties make a right legitimate, and who judges whether a function is being performed?

  • How does Tawney define a function, and why does he insist on responsibility to a 'higher authority'?
  • Which kinds of property does Tawney defend, and which does he attack? Is his line in the right place?
  • Could Tawney's principle be used to justify too much state power over private life? How might he reply?

• Wealth as end or as means

  Tawney argues that a society which makes the acquisition of wealth its goal can never be satisfied, because a means turned into an end has no natural limit. The argument stands in a long Christian and classical line, from Aristotle's distinction between household management and money-making to the medieval doctrine of the just price, which Tawney explicitly recalls. It invites reflection on the sin of avarice as a social as well as personal disorder.

  • Why does Tawney say that an acquisitive society could be satisfied by nothing short of infinity?
  • Compare Tawney's account of luxury with the warning in 1 Timothy 6:10 about the love of money. Where do they agree, and where does Tawney go further?
  • Is Tawney criticising individuals, institutions, or the beliefs behind them?

• The professional conscience

  Tawney's model for reformed industry is the profession. A doctor may grow rich, but the meaning of medicine is that it makes health; there are acts no fee can buy. Students can weigh whether this ideal is realistic, and Tawney himself warns against idealising professionals, who have their own deserters and blacklegs.

  • What makes a profession different from a business, according to Chapter VII?
  • Tawney imagines medicine run like an industrial company, with hospitals as factories. Has anything like that happened, and does it bear out his warning?
  • What safeguards does Tawney say would be needed if the professional spirit spread to industry?

• Institutions cannot make men good

  In the final chapter Tawney admits that no system can abolish egotism, greed or quarrelsomeness; it can only stop rewarding them and offer people an end to fix their minds on. That admission separates his argument from utopian schemes and connects it with older Christian teaching about the limits of law. It is a good passage for distinguishing what laws and structures can and cannot do.

  • What does Tawney think social organisation can achieve, and what does he concede it cannot?
  • Why does he call for an 'intellectual conversion' before any change of machinery?
  • Is Tawney's hope for a functional society consistent with a realistic view of human nature?

Context

Tawney wrote in 1919-1920, after a war that had expanded state control of industry and promised returning soldiers a better country, and during a period of major strikes. As a member of the Coal Industry Commission chaired by Mr Justice Sankey (1919), which reported in favour of the nationalisation of the mines, Tawney had heard evidence from owners and miners; the coal dispute is his recurring example. His argument draws on Christian social thought in the Church of England, on the guild socialism then current, on Ruskin's moral criticism of political economy, and on his own historical research into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Composition

The book grew out of an essay published as a Fabian pamphlet, The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society, and the attached text acknowledges an article first printed in the Hibbert Journal. The American edition, which this record's text follows, was published by Harcourt, Brace and Howe in New York in 1920; the British edition was published by G. Bell and Sons. Tawney was then a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and a tutor for the Workers' Educational Association.

Reception

The book sold widely and became a founding text of British ethical socialism, influencing the Labour Party and the Christian social movement around William Temple. Tawney developed its historical argument in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) and its social argument in Equality (1931). Critics from the free-market side, including later writers such as Hayek, rejected its view that economic activity should be directed toward a single common purpose; Röpke, from a Christian humanist position, shared some of its criticism of mass industrial society while defending markets.

Comparisons

• The Wealth of Nations

  Smith argued that individuals pursuing their own gain are led to promote the public interest; Tawney's attack on the 'alchemy' by which private ends are transmuted into public good is aimed at the eighteenth-century tradition Smith shaped, though Smith himself denounced monopolies and idle rentiers in terms Tawney could have used.

• A Humane Economy

  Röpke shares Tawney's worry that economic life has crowded out other goods, and both appeal to a moral order above the market, but Röpke defends competition, private property and decentralised markets as conditions of freedom, whereas Tawney looks to professional self-government of industry and the abolition of functionless property.

• Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

  The later book supplies the history only sketched in Chapter II of this one: how the medieval Church's teaching on economic life gave way after the Reformation to a view in which commerce was a private affair outside moral rule.

• Rerum Novarum

  Leo XIII's encyclical (1891) also rejects both unrestricted individualism and the abolition of private property and grounds property in work and use; Tawney's distinction between active property and 'Improperty' runs parallel, though he writes as an Anglican and proposes more extensive public control.

• The Road to Serfdom

  Hayek argues that organising society around a single common purpose requires coercive planning; Tawney's closing chapter, which calls for purpose as a principle of unity, is exactly the kind of argument Hayek set out to refute.

• Politics

  Aristotle's distinction in Book I between household management and unlimited money-making anticipates Tawney's claim that wealth pursued as an end has no natural limit.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine matters to the book as a model rather than a subject. Tawney holds up the medical profession, with its code of conduct that no fee can override, as the pattern for reorganising industry, and he warns that medicine could have developed like industrial capitalism, with hospitals as factories and the poor badly served. The argument is relevant to the history of medical professionalism and medical ethics in the years before the National Health Service. His language of social diagnosis is also medical: the Fabian pamphlet version was titled The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society, and the last chapter describes industrial societies as hypochondriacs and economic obsession as a poison and a fever. These are metaphors, not clinical claims.

• Ch. VII, 'Industry as a Profession', pp. 93-95

  The professions, especially medicine, contrasted with industry: success measured by service, conduct no fee can buy, and the makers of patent medicines as an example of profit by deception.

  Physicians Doctors Medical Ethics
• Ch. VII, 'Industry as a Profession', p. 95

  Tawney imagines medicine organised like industrial capitalism, with hospitals as factories, doctors hired at competitive wages and the poor supplied with inferior service or none.

  Physicians Doctors Medical Ethics
• Ch. IX, 'The Condition of Efficiency', p. 156

  Surgeons, scientific investigators, teachers and medical officers of health cited as workers whose skill cannot be measured simply by the economic advantage their occupations offer.

  Physicians Doctors
• Ch. XI, 'Porro Unum Necessarium', p. 184

  Industrial societies compared to a hypochondriac absorbed in his own digestion; economic obsession described as a poison that turns scratches into ulcers and keeps society in a fever.

  Hypochondria

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Choose one job you know well (farmer, nurse, shopkeeper, software developer) and argue whether it could be organised as a 'profession' in Tawney's sense, with standards no payment could override.

• Dialogue

  Write a debate between Tawney and Adam Smith on whether the pursuit of private gain serves the public good, with each using his own examples.

• Classroom

  Using Tawney's six-point scale of property in Chapter V, have students sort a list of modern forms of income and explain each placement.

Further Reading

• Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R. H. Tawney

  The historical companion to this book (1926).

• Equality, R. H. Tawney

  His later argument for social equality (1931).

• Unto This Last, John Ruskin

  Earlier moral criticism of political economy that shaped Tawney's generation.

• Christianity and Social Order, William Temple

  Archbishop Temple's 1942 statement of Anglican social thought, from Tawney's circle.

• R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship, Ross Terrill

  Standard study of Tawney's life and thought.