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R. H. Tawney Quotes

Richard Henry "Harry" Tawney, generally known as R. H. Tawney , was an English economic historian, social critic, ethical socialist, Christian socialist, and important proponent of adult education.The Oxford Companion to British History explained that Tawney made a "significant impact" in all four of these "interrelated roles". A. L. Rowse goes further by insisting that "Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally". Wikipedia  

✵ 30. November 1880 – 16. January 1962
R. H. Tawney photo
R. H. Tawney: 34   quotes 0   likes

Famous R. H. Tawney Quotes

“An erring colleague is not an Amalkite to be smitten hip and thigh.”

R. H. Tawney

"The Rise of the Gentry: A Postscript," The Economic History Review, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1954)

“Mankind may wring her secrets from nature, and use their knowledge to destroy themselves.”

R. H. Tawney

Conclusion
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

“It is probable that democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any other single movement.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

“Its desire is that what is weak in the higher education of the country should be strengthened, and that what is already excellent should be made accessible to all.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

“The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+8%3A36&version=KJV "What shall it profit a man?"] carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

“The full comedy of the situation was revealed in 1900, when, nearly a century after France and Germany had laid the foundations of a public system of secondary education, the Court of Appeal virtually decided that there was no Public Authority in England with legal power to establish and maintain secondary schools.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

R. H. Tawney Quotes about education

“Labour can claim with some confidence that it is both voicing the demands of nearly all enlightened educationalists and working for the only organization of education which will enable the community to make the best use of the most precious of its natural resources — the endowments of its children.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

“Democracy is unstable as a political system as long as it remains a political system and nothing more, instead of being, as it should be, not only a form of government but a type of society, and a manner of life which is in harmony with that type. To make it a type of society requires an advance along two lines. It involves, in the first place, the resolute elimination of all forms of special privilege which favour some groups and depress other, whether their source be differences of environment, of education, or of pecuniary income. It involves, in the second place, the conversion of economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant, into a servant of society, working within clearly defined limits and accountable for its actions to a public authority.”

R. H. Tawney

Equality (1931)

“Defined by its purpose, its [education's] main aim is not to impart the specialized technique of any particular trade or profession, but to develop the faculties which, because they are the attribute of man, are not peculiar to any particular class or profession of men, and to build up the interests which, while they may become the basis of specialization at a later stage, have a value extending beyond their utility for any particular vocation, because they are the condition of a rational and responsible life in society.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

“England has not yet imitated the example set by America and by most of the British Dominions in making public secondary education free.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

“Even before 1918 we had traveled far from the doctrine of 1870, that "elementary" education was the education of a special class which would obtain no other — what the Committee of Council called in 1839 education "suited to the condition of workmen and servants"”

R. H. Tawney

and secondary education that of their masters.
Secondary Education For All (1922)

“Transference from the primary school to higher education should depend solely upon whether it is likely to be for the benefit of the children concerned.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

R. H. Tawney Quotes about children

“In place… of "elementary" education for nine-tenths of the children and "secondary" education for the exceptionally fortunate or the exceptionally able, we need to envisage education as two stages in a single course which will embrace the whole development of childhood and adolescence up to sixteen, and obliterate the vulgar irrelevances of class inequality and economic pressure in a new educational synthesis.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

“Apart from the children of the well-to-do”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)
Context: Apart from the children of the well-to-do, who receive secondary education almost as a matter of course, and whose parents appear usually, though quite mistakenly, to believe that they pay the whole cost of it, secondary education is still commonly regarded as a "privilege" to be conceded only to the exceptionally brilliant or fortunate.

“In England it is not ungentlemanly to steal halfpennies from children, and industrial interests, it may be assumed, will oppose any reform which interferes with the supply of cheap juvenile labour.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

R. H. Tawney Quotes

“They would very strongly advise”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)
Context: They would very strongly advise that in selecting children for higher education care should be taken to avoid creating, as was done, for example, in India, a large class of persons whose education is unsuitable for the employment they eventually enter.

“The primary school is like the rope which the Indian juggler throws into the air to end in vacancy”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)
Context: The primary school is like the rope which the Indian juggler throws into the air to end in vacancy; that while in the United States some twenty-eight per cent, of the children entering the primary schools pass to high schools, in England the percentage passing from elementary to secondary schools is less than ten.

School

“It is still possible for the largest education authority in the country to propose”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)
Context: It is still possible for the largest education authority in the country to propose to erect inequality of educational opportunity into a principle of public policy by solemnly suggesting, with much parade of philosophical arguments, that the interests of the community require that the children of well-to-do parents, who pay fees, should be admitted to public secondary schools on easier intellectual terms than the children of poor parents who can enter them only with free places, and that the children who are so contemptible as to be unable to afford secondary education without assistance in the form of maintenance allowances shall not be admitted unless they reach a higher intellectual standard still!

Education , Country

“Those who have hitherto governed the nation, believing, and believing with justice, that ignorance and docility go hand in hand, have taken care to ration the education of the workers in doses small enough to be innocuous to the established order.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

“The organization of education on lines of class”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)
Context: The organization of education on lines of class, which, though qualified in the last twenty years, has characterized the English system of public education since its very inception, has been at once a symptom, an effect, and a cause of the control of the lives of the mass of men and women by a privileged minority. The very assumption on which it is based, that all that the child of the workers needs is "elementary education" — as though the mass of the people, like anthropoid apes, had fewer convolutions in their brains than the rich — is in itself a piece of insolence.

Education

“Virtues are often conquered by vices, but their rout is most complete when it is inflicted by other virtues, more militant, more efficient, or more congenial.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 2
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

“Convinced that character is all and circumstances nothing, [the Puritan] sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion … but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 3
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Way

“[To work is to pray. ] By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material necessity.”

R. H. Tawney

Laborare est orare.
Part IV, Ch. 3
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

God , Health , Soul , Nature

“To countless generations of religious thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian social ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to Timothy: "Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. For the love of money is the root of all evil." Now, while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a new standard was raised within the citadel by its own defenders. The garrison had discovered that the invading host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limitless increase and expansion, became the goal of the Christian's efforts.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Love , Life , Money , World

“What in Calvin had been a qualified concession to practical exigencies appeared in some of his later followers as a frank idealization of the life of the trader, as the service of God and the training-ground of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic motives, which had been as characteristic of the reformers as of medieval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 3
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Life , God , Religion , Soul

“In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 2
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Men , Soul

“Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.”

R. H. Tawney

in Equality (1931)
sometimes cited as an English proverb, sometimes also attributed to Isaiah Berlin
Disputed

Death , Freedom

“Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners today, can lead a crusade against royalties.”

R. H. Tawney

Part I, Ch. 3
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

“By a kind of happy pre-established harmony, such as a later age discovered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has laboured faithfully in his vocation.”

R. H. Tawney

describing the Puritan view, Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Age , Business , Success , Happiness

“The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual independence which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of this world.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

World , Democracy , Sense

“The number both of pupils and school places in 1922 is… all too small. But, inadequate as they are, they represent something like an educational revolution compared with the almost complete absence of public provision which existed prior to 1902.”

R. H. Tawney

Secondary Education For All (1922)

Education , School

“Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, [the Puritan] has made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 3
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

“There was in Puritanism an element which was conservative and traditionalist, and an element which was revolutionary; a collectivism which grasped at an iron discipline, and an individualism which spurned the savorless mess of human ordinances; a sober prudence which would garner the fruits of this world, and a divine recklessness which would make all things new.”

R. H. Tawney

Part IV, Ch. 2
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

World

“The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.”

R. H. Tawney

Conclusion
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Age , Problem

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