Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Book

As a Christian socialist, the theoretical root of R H Tawney’s criticism of capitalism is its division between commerce and morality - which he attributes to the Protestant reformation. He contrasts this with medieval thought on economic matters. He does not idealise the medieval Church: he frankly describes it as ‘an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric’. That fabric was riddled with feudalist exploitation, oppression and the enforced poverty of serfdom. Nevertheless there was also, at the core of Church ideas, something admirable: ‘… its insistence that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that economic activity, which is one subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral ends for which it supplies the material means’.

‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’ is a classic study that probably suffers from being so influential that its arguments have been largely accepted since its publication in 1926. However the book is still worth reading in its own right, not least because - derived as it is from a series of lectures - Tawney’s account of theology and religious history is one of the more accessible accounts of a dense and esoteric topic (which is still difficult).

A contemporary criticism of Tawney’s work would be his neglect of the other great religion of the medieval times - Islam. A new study of religion and the rise of capitalism would have to at least mention Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and his development of the Aristotelian view of money, as well as the great trading links over the Mediterranean Sea between Europe and the Muslim world. Tawney’s focus on the thought of ‘schoolmen’ also means there is no mention of women, whereas a new study that included far more social history would have to address the role of women in establishing and maintaining commercial and market arrangements that ensured everyday economic life kept functioning.

In the 21st century we are used to treating ‘the economy’ as if it is an entity in its own right, to be tended, fed, and appeased in the hope that we benefit. There is a genuine strangeness about a time described by Tawney in which economic activity was not the principle activity of life itself. There is no need to feel fondly about such a time, given the ample evidence Tawney supplies of the misery of serfdom. However by looking at the ways Puritanism transformed ‘Christian man’ into ‘Economic man’, Tawney renders the rise of capitalism itself as problematic, rather than natural. You don’t have to fully buy his idealist version of the spread of capitalism, to accept his point that we don’t have to consider it natural and unavoidable. Human beings have previously created systems in which commerce and material gain are not the primary ends of life, and there is nothing inevitable or permanent about the current system under which we live as if they were.