rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_4a144aaf-d1a7-5995-977c-1f7956cbdaa6">16 The authors of this analysis were themselves undergraduates at the LSE immediately after the Second World War, that is, while Tawney was still teaching there, and just before Titmuss’s arrival. One, A.H. Halsey, became a friend of Titmuss’s, and his daughter’s sociology tutor. In any event, it was within the intellectual framework of ethical socialism that Tawney wrote of the ‘acquisitive society’, a concept which Titmuss was to utilise in various formulations for the rest of his career as a weapon with which to lambast the morally corrupting effects of contemporary capitalism.
By the end of his career Tawney was, Collini notes, a ‘distinguished social and economic historian and doyen of the English tradition of ethical socialism’. Indeed, it was only a slight exaggeration to say that ‘Tawney became a historian in order to understand the origins of the distinctive pathology of modern society, namely the priority accorded to the pursuit of financial gain’.17 Michael Freeden, meanwhile, claims that Tawney ‘ascribed a powerful sense of altruistic fellowship to an ethically construed sense of community’. Freeden further contends that Tawney’s assertion of individual rights (not individualism) was part of his attempt to chart a version of social democracy ‘in an area hewn out between the denial of political liberty by both fascism and communism’, and ‘the denial of equal economic opportunities by the plutocracies of the West’.18 Titmuss has often been seen as a successor to Tawney. In one of many academic works making this linkage, John Offer argues that Titmuss was ‘impressed by Tawney’s writings’, that Tawney had a background in philosophical idealism, and that the latter hence went on to inform Titmuss’s own thought.19 Philosophical idealism, which argued an organic view of society, is another concept which recurs throughout this volume.
The Acquisitive Society was published in 1921, underwent many reprints, and, although not without its critics, became something of a Bible for strands of the British left.20 Lawrence Goldman comments that the book was a ‘work of transition’, embracing Tawney’s earlier ‘moralism’ but also reflecting the author’s ‘growing social experience, economic knowledge, and desire to make general rather than personal arguments’.21 The timing was also important, for the devastation of the First World War, in which Tawney had played a courageous part, was fresh in British minds, one reason why Tawney’s arguments are so powerful and impassioned. That Titmuss was delivering his own critique of the acquisitive society in the articles under discussion during the second, even more devastating, global conflict of the twentieth century adds to the urgency, and seriousness, of his arguments. This is not the place to make a detailed critique of Tawney’s work. Rather, the aim is to pick out certain ideas and arguments, focusing primarily on the chapter entitled ‘The Acquisitive Society’, which might be seen as having particular meaning for Titmuss as he developed his own take on modern Britain, and its ills.
Tawney argued that during the Industrial Revolution the idea became embedded ‘in England and in America’ that ‘property was held by an absolute right on an individual basis’. Consequently, ‘the enjoyment of property and the direction of industry’ did not require the provision of any ‘social justification’, as they were ‘regarded as rights which stand by their own virtue, not functions to be judged by the success with which they contribute to a social purpose’. During the nineteenth century, moreover, ‘the significance of the opposition between individual rights and social functions’ had been obscured by ‘the doctrine of the inevitable harmony between private interests and public good’. So was created ‘what may be called Acquisitive Societies, because their whole tendency and interest and preoccupation is to promote the acquisition of wealth’. This had been a powerful idea that had ‘laid the whole of the modern world under its spell’. It promised to ‘the strong unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength’ and to the weak ‘the hope that they too one day may be strong’. In so doing, it made ‘the individual the centre of his own universe’ and, crucially, ‘dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediencies’. In such societies people did not become ‘religious or wise’, for to do so would be to accept limitations on the pursuit of wealth. There was thus an ‘appearance of freedom’, if it was accepted that such freedom was in pursuit of an object – wealth – which was nonetheless ‘limited and immediate’. In his conclusion, Tawney claimed that modern society was obsessed by economic matters, a ‘poison’ which ‘inflames every wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer’. Society could not solve its problems until that poison was expelled. To do so, it must ‘rearrange its scale of values’ so as to ‘regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life’. Its members would have to ‘renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in a fever’. In short, the ‘instrumental character of economic activity’ had to be put in a position of ‘subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on’.22
It is not hard to see here what appealed to Titmuss. Tawney’s arguments were historically grounded, as were so many of Titmuss’s. The latter’s critique of individualism, at least as understood and practised under contemporary capitalism, matches that of Tawney, as does his related appeal to ‘community’ and the best it can enable in individuals given the opportunity. It was to be a constant in Titmuss’s thought that, just as for Tawney, society and its aspirations could not be satisfied simply by the claims of economics, or the market, or materialism. But perhaps most interestingly in the context of Titmuss’s early wartime writings is Tawney’s notion of ‘the whole community in a fever’. For Titmuss, too, modern society had a pathological problem, deriving from the psychological strains of modernity, and the consequent disastrous moral sickness at both social and individual levels. The idea that societies, like individuals, could be ‘sick’ was, again, a recurring theme in Titmuss’s social analysis. It also sits well with the notion, noted in Chapter 3, of an ‘organic’ society, with its emphasis on human interconnectedness. Society can damage the individual, which, in turn, does further damage to the organism as a whole.
As we have seen in his articles for Town and Country Planning and The New Statesman, Titmuss argued that the problems societies had in reproducing themselves were not distinct from but, on the contrary, were fundamentally linked to, and even among the causes of, the present war. Materialism and selfishness, and the psychological damage they inflicted, led to a declining birth rate, personal stress and unhappiness, and conflict. The message was clear, and built on and enlarged that of Tawney. A ‘morally unhealthy’ society had to be replaced by one which prioritised cooperation over competition, and enabled the release of humanity’s inherent altruism. Civilisation was at stake in the 1940s, with the possible alternative being a ‘race of sub-men’. In short, morality had to replace the constant seeking of material gain. Titmuss’s revulsion at the single-minded pursuit of material gain at the expense of all truly human sentiments was to be a further constant thread in his thought, informing his views on matters apparently diverse as how social workers went about their professional duties, the perils of an ‘Affluent Society’ in post-war Britain, and voluntary blood donation.
Saving the poor and feeding the masses
Just as ‘progressive opinion’ did not have the political field to itself, so too were Titmuss’s views not unchallenged. In early 1940, for instance, The Spectator published his article ‘Can the Poor Save?’ The timing here is important as, in autumn 1939, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon, had presented his first wartime budget. Unsurprisingly, this was geared to the demands of Britain’s prosecution of the war, squeezing taxpayers and consumers of goods such as sugar and tobacco. Shortly
