The Acquisitive Society Book

The Acquisitive Society by Richard Henry Tawney

Overall not grabbed by this - weird that this is more widely read than Equality.

Less vibrant precise energised writing.
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When they are touched by social compunction, they can think of nothing more original than the diminution of poverty, because poverty, being the opposite of riches which they value most, seems to them the most terrible of human afflictions. They do not understand that poverty is a symptom and a consequence of social disorder, while the disorder itself is something at more fundamental and more incorrigible, and that the quality in their social life which causes it to demoralize a few by excessive riches, is also the quality which causes it to demoralize many by excessive poverty.

Chapter 2 Rights and Functions

But in England, at least, it was gradual, and the 'industrial revolution' through catastrophic in its effect, was only the visible climax of generations of subtle moral change. The rise of modem economic relations, which may be dated in England from the latter half of the seventeenth century, was coincident with the growth of a political theory which replaced the conception of purpose by that of mechanism. During a great part of history men had found the significance of their social order in its relation to the universal purposes of religion. It 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. When the Reformation made the Church a department of the secular government, it undermined the already enfeebled spiritual forces which had erected that sublime, but too much elaborated, synthesis. But its influence remained for nearly a century after the roots which fed it had been severed. It was the atmosphere into which men were born, and from which, however practical, or even Machiavellian, they could not easily disengage their spirits. Nor was it inconvenient for the new statecraft to see the weight of traditional religious sanction added to its own concern in the subordination of all classes and interests to the common end, of which is conceived itself, and during the greater part of the sixteenth century was commonly conceived to be the guardian. The lines of the social structure were no longer supposed to reproduce in miniature the plan of the universal order. But common habits, common traditions and beliefs, common pressure from above gave them a unity of direction, which restrained the forces of individual variation and lateral expansion; and the centre towards they converged, formerly a Church possessing some of the characteristics of the State, was now a State that had clothes itself with many of the attributes of the Church.

Not only the facts, but the minds which appraised them, were profoundly modified. The essence of the change was the disappearance of the idea that social institutions and economic activities were related to common ends, which gave them their significance and which served their criterion. In the eighteenth century both the State and the Church had abdicated that part of the sphere, which had consistent in the maintenance of a common body of social ethics; what was left of it was repression of a class, not the discipline of a nation .Opinion ceased to regard social institutions and economic activity as amenable, like personal conduct, to moral criteria, because it was no longer influenced by the spectacle of institutions which, arbitrary, capricious, and often corrupt in their practical operation, had been the outward symbol and expression of the subordination of life to purposes transcending private interests.

But what was familiar, and human and lovable - what was Christian in Christianity had largely disappeared. God had been thrust into to the frigid altitudes of infinite space.

The natural consequence of the abdication of authorities which had stood, however imperfectly, for a common purpose of social organisation, was the gradual disappearance from social thought of the idea of purpose itself. Its place in the eighteenth century was taken by the idea of mechanism. The conception of men as united to each other, and of all mankind of united to God, by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end, which vaguely conceived and imperfectly realised, had been the keystone holding together the social fabric, ceased to be impressed upon men's mind, when church and State withdrew from the centre of social life to its circumstances. What remained when the keystone of the arch was removed, was private rights and private interests, the materials of society rather than a society itself. These rights and interests were the natural order which had been distorted by the ambitions of kings and priests, and which emerged when the artificial super structure disappeared, because they were the creation not of man, but of Nature herself. They had been regarded in the past as relative not to some public end, whether religion or national welfare. Henceforward they were thought to be absolute and indefeasible, and to stand by their own virtue. They were the ultimate political and social reality; and since they were the ultimate reality, they were not subordinate to other aspects of society, but other aspects of society were subordinate to them.

… the descent from hope to resignation, from the fire and passion of an age of illimitable vistas to the monotonous beat of the factory engine, from Turgot and Condorcet to the melancholy mathematical creed of Bentham and Ricardo and James Mill.

They thought it a monstrous injustice that the citizen should pay one tenth of his income in taxation to an idle Government, but quite reasonable that he should pay one fifth of it in rent to an idle landlord.

Chapter 3 The Acquisitive Society

The enjoyment of property and the direction of industry are considered, in short, to require no social justification, because they are regarded as rights which stand by their own virtue, not functions to be judged by the success with which they contribute to social purpose.

A society which aimed at making the acquisition of wealth contingent upon the discharge of social obligations, which sought to proportion renumeration to the service and denied it to those by whom no service was performed, which inquired first not what men possess but what they can make or create or achieve, might be called a Functional Society, because in such a society the main subject of social emphasis would be the performance of functions. … Modern societies aim at protecting economic rights, while leaving economic functions, except in movements of abnormal emergency, to fulfil themselves. The motive which gives colour and quality to their public institutions, to their policy and political thought, is not the attempt to secure the fulfilment of tasks undertaken in a public service, but to increase the opportunities open to individuals of attaining the objects which they conceive to be advantageous to themselves.

The acquisitive society… makes the individual the centre of his own universe and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediencies. And it immensely simplifies the problem of social life in complex communities. For it relieves them of the necessity of discriminating between different types of economic activity and different sources of wealth, between different types of economic activity and different sources of wealth, between enterprise and avarice, energy and unscrupulous greed, property which is legitimate and property which is theft, the just enjoyment of the fruits of labour and the idle parasitism of birth or fortune, because it treats all economic activities as standing upon the same level, and suggests that it treats all economic activities as standing upon the same level, and suggests that excess or defeat, waste or superfluity, require no conscious effort of the social will to avert them, but are corrected almost automatically by the mechanical play of economic forces.

Chapter 4 The Nemesis of Industrialism

But if it is single-minded it destroys the moral restraints which ought to condition the pursuit of riches, and therefore also makes the pursuit of riches meaningless.

So wealth becomes the foundation of public esteem, and the mass of men who labour, but who do not aquire wealth, are thought to be vulgar and meaningless and insiginificant compared with the few who acquire wealth by good fortune or by the skillful use of economic opportunities. They come to be regarded, not as the ends for which alone it is worth while to produce wealth at all, but as the instruments of acquisition by a world that declines to be soiled contact with what is thought to be dull and sordid business of labour. They are not happy for the reward of all but the very mean is not merely money, but the esteem of their fellow men, and they know they are not esteemed, as soldiers, for examples, are esteemed, though it is because they give their lives to making civilisation that there is civilisation which is worthwhile for soldiers to defend. They are not esteemed, because the admiration of society is directed towards those who get, not towards those who give; and though workmen give much they get little. And the rentiers whom they support are not happy; for in discarding the idea of function, which sets a limit to the acquisition of riches, they have also discarded the principle that gives their riches meaning. Thence they can persuade themselves that to be rich is in itself meritorious, they may bask in social admiration, but they are unable to esteem themselves. For they have abolished the principle which makes activity significant, and therefore estimable. They are, indeed, more truly pitiable than some of those who envy them. For like the spirits in the Inferno, they are punished by the attainment of their desire.

While the effective demand of the mass of men is small, there is a small class which wears several men's clothes, eats several men's dinners, occupies several families' houses, and lives several men's lives.

The idea that industrial peace can be secured merely by the exercise of tact and forbearance is based on the idea that there is a fundamental identity of interest between the different groups engaged in it, which is occasionally interrupted by regrettable misunderstandings. Both the one idea and the other are an illusion. The disputes which matter are not caused by a misunderstanding of identity of interests, but by a better understanding of diversity of interests.

The essence of industrialism, in short, is not any particular method of industry, but a particular estimate of the importance of industry, which results in it being thought the only thing that is important at all, so that it is elevated from the subordinate place which it should occupy among human interests and activities into being the standard by which all other interests and activity are judged.

When the press clamours that the one thing that is needed to make this island an Arcadia is productivity, and more productivity, and yet more productivity, that is Industrialism. It is the confusion of means with ends.

They resent any activity which is not coloured by the predominant interest, because it seems a rival to it. So they destroy religion and art and morality, which cannot exist unless they are disinterested; and having destroyed these, which are the end, for the sake of industry, which is a means, they make their industry itself what they make their cities, a desert of unnatural dreariness, which only forgetfulness can make endurable, and which only excitement can enable them to forget.

INDIVIDUALISM AND NATIONALISM.
And, like individualism it [nationalism] if pushed to its logical conclusion, it is self destructive. For as in nationalism, in its brilliant youth, begins a claim that nations, because they are spiritual beings, shall determine themselves, and passes too often into a claim that they dominate others, so individualism begins by asserting the right of men to make their own lives what they can, and ends by condoning the subjection of the majority of men to the few whom good fortune or special opportunity or privilege have enabled most successfully to use their rights.

So the perversion of nationalism is imperialism, as the perversion of individualism is industrialism. And the perversion comes, not through any flaw or vice in human nature, but by the force of an idea, because the principle is defective and reveals its defect as it reveals power.

V. Property and creative work

To those who believe that institutions which repudiate all moral significance must sooner or later collapse, a society which confuses the protection of property with the preservation of its functionless perversions will appear as precarious as that which has left the memorials of its tasteless frivolity and more tasteless ostentation in the gardens of Versailles.

VII. Industry as a profession.

Rights without functions are like the shades in Homer which drank blood but scattered trembling at the voice of a man. To extinguish royalties and urban ground rents is merely to explode superstition. It needs as little - and as much - resolution as to put one's hand through any other ghosts.

XI. Porro unum necessarium

That obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears today; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which is it concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames of every would and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society will not solve the particular problems of industry which afflict it until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see industry itself in the right perspective. If it is to do that, it must rearrange its scale of values. It must regard economic interests as one element of life, not as the whole life. It must persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of gains to accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in fever. It must so organise industry that the instrumental character of economic activity is emphasised by its subordination for the social purpose for which it is carried on.