Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship

R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship

Terrill, Ross

Paperback

General Sociology

ISBN10: 0674743776
ISBN13: 9780674743779
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: Jan 1 1973
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.15
Height: 0.76 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.24
Language: English

Economic historian, democratic socialist, educator, and British labor party activist, R. H. Tawney touched many worlds. His life, too, spanned great distance and change. When he was born in Calcutta in 1880, Gladstone, Tennyson, and Queen Victoria were flourishing and the British Empire was approaching its height. By the time of his death in 1962, the Empire had shrunk to a few tourist islands, and socialism, once so shocking, was now commonplace.

Ross Terrill, in this absorbing first study of Tawney's thought, view his subject within three related contexts. The first is Tawney, the man. Terrill makes skillful use of unpublished material--the early diary, speech and lecture notes, letters, interviews with friends and associates--to tell the story of Tawney's life in relation to his times. Second is social democracy. Tawney was one of its most influential philosophers and prophets, and this book argues for the continuing validity of his socialism as a path between capitalism and communism. Third is British politics. From Edwardian liberal consensus to mid-century collectivist consensus, Tawney's long career, often at odds with prevailing orthodoxies, offers a window on British political culture.

Four key ideas are found in Tawney's political thought: equality and the dispersion of power--the shape of socialism; function and citizenship--the life of socialism. These ideas, and indeed the life of the man himself, Terrill believes, are summed up in socialism as fellowship. As long as men are men, Tawney said, a poor society cannot be too poor to find a right order of life, nor a rich society too rich to have need to seek it.

This book is a blend of biography, history, and the study of political ideas. It provides a striking portrait of a remarkable man and a panorama of changing ideas and situations in the society where he tried to realize his socialist vision. It offers many glimpses of Tawney's associates, among them Beveridge, the Webbs, Laski, A. P. Wadsworth, Temple, Margaret Cole, and Leonard Woolf; and surprising snippets, like the fact that Tawney used the phrase private affluence and public squalor in 1919.

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