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Yes to A Nobler Europe |
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by
Peter Etherden
First published in June 2001 in Fourth World Review Nos. 121 & 122
Few people have come up with as many genuinely new ideas in a lifetime as Ivan Illich. Yet he would always insist that there was no such thing as a new idea. Inscribed on the edge of our new two-pound coins are the words 'Standing on the shoulders of giants'. This was one part of Illich's meaning.
It is revealing to look at the writings of John Papworth in 'Fourth World Review' in this light because it would appear that the ideas could be traced to two sources. The first and familiar source would be the writings of Leopold Kohr...to which can be attributed Papworth's views on small nations, small communities and the need for a human scale in human affairs. The other lesser-known source would be the writings of R.H. Tawney on the relationship between religion and society.
The story is told of a 'Harvard' professor addressing the latest intake of undergraduates and announcing that half of everything taught them over the next three years would be wrong. After waiting for the laughter to die down, he looked intently at his audience and with a twinkle in his eye continued. 'Your job while you're here,' he declared, 'is to find out which half'. He reportedly left the platform to loud applause. So much for 'Harvard'. How about our man from the 'London School of Economics'?
When quizzed on the subject, Papworth immediately acknowledged his debt to Tawney, but insisted that the suggestion that Leopold Kohr was the source of his ideas on the human scale was 'right off the rails'. Kohr had come to his human scale approach through his academic work, whilst Papworth had come to his through active work and as a parliamentary candidate.
Indeed Papworth tells the tale of the time he was explaining his ideas to Leopold's partner, Diana Lodge. Her instant response was: 'But Leopold is saying exactly the same things; you should read his book,' whereupon a copy of 'The Breakdown of Nations' was thrust into his waiting hands.
Before returning to Tawney there is another story to be told of the time Papworth turned down the offer of a safe 'Labour' seat in the industrial north...an offer made by Ann Kerr MP in the tearoom in the 'House of Commons'. After demurring on the grounds that he knew nobody there and nobody knew him, the somewhat naive young Papworth was astonished to be told 'with easy assurance', 'Well, these things can be arranged you know.' Half a century later, Papworth was to comment: 'This was an incident which helped to increase my disillusionment with the whole mass political movement long before I met Leopold or, later, Schumacher.'
Though a 'Labour Party' member and a strong 'Fabian', Papworth, like many other young men at the time, was far from happy with its timid approach. So with the help of G.D.H. Cole, who became its President, he formed 'The International Society for Socialist Studies' as its secretary. The subsequent demise of the organisation under 'reams of Marxist twaddle' and the 'internal quarrelling and ego-tripping' at the root of it, is another story.
But the side effects often turn out to be the main effects. At the institute, Cole and Papworth teamed up with an Italian architect and communitarian anarchist named Carlo Daglio. Daglio and not Kohr should adorn the pedestal Illich has reserved for Papworth...Daglio and Richard Henry Tawney. Hands up all those who got it right? Better miseducated at Harvard than uneducated in Harlem?
A lifetime ago, after surviving the Kaiser War as an NCO in the British army, Tawney embarked upon two mighty intellectual undertakings. In the first he sought to explain the origin of modern industrial civilization. And in the second he sought to establish principles for the evolution of that same industrial civilization. These were two sides of the same coin.
The former began its public life as the 'Holland Memorial Lectures' in 1922 and was eventually published in March 1926 as 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism'. This went out of print but was resurrected by the 'Peregrine' imprint of 'Penguin Books' in 1984. The latter appeared as a 'Fabian Society' tract entitled 'The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society' and was subsequently republished in April 1921 as 'The Acquisitive Society'. It is out of print.
You will look in vain to find any direct appreciation of the concept of scale in Tawney's writings but yet the significance of bringing human moral judgements to bear on the problems of civilization pervade his every thought. As a result, the moment you seek to apply the principles Kohr espouses to the real world, you will find a reading of Tawney to be indispensable.
Tawney had two big ideas. The first was the idea that society
should be organised for the performance of duties rather than
the maintenance of rights. This led to the idea that industry
and banking should be organized as professions. The other was
intrinsic in his analysis of the nature and proper function of
property and led to far-reaching and incisive attacks on 'functionless
property' and 'divorcing ownership from use'...attacks that went
far beyond the ideas of either Marx or Proudhon and echoed Gesell.
In Tawney's view his two big ideas were related. He begins his
discussion of 'property and creative work' in 'The Acquisitive
Society' with the words: 'The application of the principle
that society should be organised upon the basis of functions...offers
a standard for discriminating between those types of private
property which are legitimate and those which are not'. Nowadays
most economists have learnt to discriminate between 'goods' and
'bads' in our gross national products, but if Tawney had his
way, they would also be distinguishing between property and 'improperty'.
'Property,' exclaimed Tawney, 'is not theft, but a good deal
of theft becomes property'.
I would wager that Peter Drucker was a disciple of Tawney...and to many of our leading businessmen Drucker is wisdom and truth personified. Peter Drucker was the first business mind...and much of the best economics comes from the business schools...to examine seriously 'General Motors' invention of the idea of company pension funds. He was sufficiently intrigued by the socialist implications in the idea that he made pensions and socialism the subject of one of his earliest books.
Yet this was clearly set out in Tawney's writings decades before. And one of Peter Drucker's big ideas...the idea of the mind worker as a distinct class...had already appeared in Tawney's discussion of the position of the brainworker and the growth of an intellectual proletariat in 'The Acquisitive Society'.
Another thinker I would wager to be a Tawney man is the Harvard Professor, John Kenneth Galbraith. The Scotch Canadian Galbraith kicked off his broad-ranging career with a trilogy of books that were rooted in Tawney's observation that 'the agreeable optimism that the less attractive characteristics of our industrial civilization, its combination of luxury and squalor, its class divisions and class warfare, are accidental maladjustments which are not rooted in the centre of its being, but are excrescences which economic progress itself may in time be expected to correct, will not survive an examination of the operation of the institution of private property in land and capital in the industrialized communities.'
And though we think of globalisation as something that has crept up on us unexpectedly in the last decade of the twentieth century, nothing could be further from the truth. Tawney laid it all out for us a lifetime ago. He homed straight in on passive property allied to the limited liability of the joint stock company as the cancer eating away at the heart of our civilization.
Here is Tawney again: 'In earlier ages the protection of property was normally the protection of work, the relationship between them has come in the course of the economic development of the last two centuries to be very nearly reversed.' Tawney saw very clearly the 'constant collision' between 'active efforts and passive property, the labour of human beings and the tools which human beings use. Of these two elements those who supply the first maintain and improve it, those who own the second normally dictate its character, its development, and its administration'.
In G.N. Clarke's 1946 publication of 'The Wealth of England from 1496 to 1760' for the 'Oxford University Press Home University Library of Modern Knowledge', he recommended the 1937 edition of 'Religion and The Rise of Capitalism', adding the cautionary note that it was 'a controversial book, and the controversy still goes on'.
Tawney in his preface to the 1937 edition explained that this controversy was grounded in the 'suggestion that (his book) was the sinister concoction of a dark modern conspiracy designed to confound Calvinism and Capitalism, godly Geneva and industrious Manchester, in a common ruin'.
Tawney then went on to argue that his book had been stirred together in the same heretical brew as Max Weber's 'preparatory essay' (Weber's words) on the influence of religious thought on social issues 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', noting that although the two books were dealing with the same thing they were coming at it from 'two different sides'.
Where Weber emphasized the influence of religion on men's outlook on society, R. H. Tawney, Professor of Economic History at the 'University of London' from 1931 to 1949, was interested in the effect of economic and social changes on religion.
Where Weber made little attempt to inquire into matters such as how far the Reformation was a response to social needs, Harry Tawney, for sixteen years President of the 'Workers Educational Association', burned with a passion to change the world he lived in and sought always to play a part in challenging the social evils he saw around him.
John Papworth tells the story of the time the young Papworth was expounding his views on human scale and local democracy to the great man. As Tawney got up to leave he fixed his gaze on the young (and failed) 'Labour Party' candidate and said quietly: 'Have you written about any of this, Papworth?' 'No Sir,' was the plaintive reply. 'Write it down, my boy! Write it down!'
Half a century later, with Papworth's 'Small is Powerful'
now selling well in German as well as English, Tawney has a lot
to answer for.
Nowadays Weber is required reading at universities throughout
the world, while no student either within or without our ivory
towers, reads Tawney any more. Perhaps it is time to exhort a
new generation to heed his words with the cry: 'Take it up, my
boy! Take it up! Read the words Tawney wrote down!' But read
them not only for the wisdom and truth they contain, but also
for the future embedded within them.
Globalisation is at its limits. A new generation is stopping it in its unsustainable tracks. Implicit in Tawney's analysis of the origins of the beast is the idea that the world must one day tread the same path again in reverse. This time we have a guide. There will be no need to muddle through.
Those in the over-developed world should read Tawney, not to see where their country has been, but to understand the route it must take into the future. Read and reverse.
Those in the under-developed world should be looking aghast at the spiritual state of the over-developed world. But there is no need for them to pass that way...nor any hope that they might. Instead they could head straight for the elysian fields...if the tiny elites of 'improperty holders' in the over-developed world could be persuaded that it was in their own self-interest to allow them do so.
Death may always be with us. But poverty, slavery, taxes...and interest...are human constructs.
Weber may be essential reading for the past but Tawney is what is needed if we are to move with intellectual confidence into the future...Tawney, together with the Austrian Jewish academic Leopold Kohr, the communitarian anarchist professor teaching at the Catholic 'University of Bologna', Carlo Daglio and the dissident 'shop-lifting' Anglican vicar, John Papworth.
The apostles of Jesus were a motley crew but they produced four excellent books that have stood the test of time. Perhaps it goes with the radical territory? Besides the young writer of 'The Fabian Papers', George Bernard Shaw insisted many centuries later that their guvn'r, Jesus of Nazareth, was a first-rate political economist. Now there's a new idea for you.
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