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.

Top 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?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.