Tim Rogan: The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism. Princeton, NJ / Oxford: Princeton University Press 2017. 978-0-691-17300-

Hann, Chris

English

SSOAR - Social Science Open Access Repository 

www.ssoar.infoThe Invention of Another Tradition: Tim Rogan on aTrio of Radical Historians in 20th Century BritainHann, ChrisVeröffentlichungsversion / Published VersionRezension / reviewEmpfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation:Hann, C. (2018). The Invention of Another Tradition: Tim Rogan on a Trio of Radical Historians in 20th Century Britain.Soziopolis: Gesellschaft beobachten. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-82597-4Nutzungsbedingungen:Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zurVerfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen findenSie hier:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.deTerms of use:This document is made available under a CC BY Licence(Attribution). For more Information see:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0The Invention of Another TraditionChris Hann | 10.05.2018Chris Hann | Rezension | 10.05.2018The Invention of Another TraditionTim Rogan on a Trio of Radical Historians in 20th Century BritainTim RoganThe Moral Economists . R. H. Tawney, KarlPolanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critiqueof CapitalismUSA / GroßbritannienPrinceton, NJ / Oxford 2017: PrincetonUniversity Pressviii, 263 S., $ 39,95 / £ 30,00ISBN 978-0-691-17300-9 R. H. (Harry) Tawney (1880–1962), Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) and E. P. Thompson(1924–1993) are three radical historians whose accounts of the emergence of industrialcapitalism in Britain have been enormously influential, not only among historians butacross the social sciences. The common threads of their successive reactions to 19th centuryutilitarian thought are skillfully woven together by Cambridge historian Tim Rogan, whoadapts “moral economy”, a term of Thompson, as his master concept. All three engagedwith what the mainstream economists from Alfred Marshall onwards turned their backsupon: the value of each individual human personality, and the ways in which traditionalsocial relations and the force of custom shape the rational choices made by persons.Of course, the three humanist heroes themselves have to be placed in social and intellectualcontexts if we are to understand whence their ideas came and their influence not only onother scholars but on wider publics, including political and economic policymakers (thoughonly in the case of Tawney was the last category of much significance). Tim Rogan chartsthese contexts with a sure hand. In Chapter 1 he allows himself a 15 page excursus tosurvey the terrain in which Tawney pioneered his original “high minded” (as it seemed tomany, even at the time) moral critique. The influences included Oxford idealist© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 1 / 6The Invention of Another TraditionChris Hann | 10.05.2018philosophers (notably T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet) rejected in the wake ofEdwardian crisis, the more constructive shortcomings of “pluralism” (exemplified by legalhistorian F. W. Maitland and his protégé Ernest Barker), Guild Socialists (notably G. D. H.Cole) – and numerous dyed-in-the-wool Fabian socialists still sadly in thrall toutilitarianism. Chapter 2 presents Christian socialism as the main strand of continuitybetween Tawney and Karl Polanyi (whose formative intellectual influences in Hungary arenot charted in such detail because that would take Rogan too far outside hisoverwhelmingly English genealogy). Before moving on to tackle Thompson, the authorgathers breath by devoting an entire chapter to outline the midcentury moment when, inthe wake of another war, the “beast” of capitalism suddenly seemed as if it might be tamed.For this third chapter he has combed the writings of long forgotten Labour Partyrevisionists, notably Evan Durbin and Anthony Crosland; the sociology of knowledgedeveloped by another Hungarian immigrant, Karl Mannheim, during and after the SecondWorld War also figures prominently, as part of the intellectual background to the birth ofthe welfare state and Butler’s Education Act of 1944. Chapter 4 is then devoted to EdwardPalmer Thompson, who unlike the other main characters was a communist by convictionfrom his schooldays. After military service, Thompson’s social philosophy was initiallyshaped by the political economy of the Marxist Maurice Dobb on the one hand and theconservative humanism of T. S. Eliot on the other. Rogan outlines the steps which ledThompson to distance himself from Stalinism, his deep aversion for the anti-humanism ofinfluential Parisian philosophers, and abiding tensions with Perry Anderson and otherleading lights of the New Left Review. By the end of this fourth chapter, even natives of theisland in the era of Jeremy Corbin and Brexit will have learned much from the author’s deftreconstructions of progressive politics over the best part of a century. In addition tofascinating insights into the social history of intellectual elites, Rogan’s narrative offersinstructive glimpses into the emergence and professionalization of new social sciencedisciplines (social psychology and sociology as well as economics).Though Tim Rogan pays some attention to their lesser works, it is convenient for him thatall three moral economists wrote a single opus magnum that deservedly assumes pride ofplace in his analysis. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was based on a series oflectures at the LSE and published in 1926. It traced the onset of capitalism back to theimpact of Protestantism from the 16th century, well before industrialization, but inreinterpreting the thesis of Max Weber, Tawney’s ethical message was very different. Hisdeeper motivation was that of a Christian moralist who preferred Anglican doctrines of theincarnation of Jesus to the “twaddle” of Marshallian economics. Like others in the 1920s(such as Marcel Mauss in Paris), Tawney was attracted by notions of Guild Socialism as a© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 2 / 6The Invention of Another TraditionChris Hann | 10.05.2018middle way between liberal individualism and Bolshevik collectivism. These ideas wereimbibed by the economic journalist Karl Polanyi in Vienna. When it was time to leave in1934, Polanyi made his way to London, where he worked closely with his Christian socialistcontacts (in particular moral philosopher John Macmurray, but also Tawney himself). Butin Rogan’s analysis the Jewish Central European promptly substituted the early writings ofKarl Marx (then recently published by Siegfried Landshut and J. P. Mayer in German) as hishumanist touchstone. By the time he published The Great Transformation in 1944, Polanyihad taken a further significant step. According to Rogan, his inadequate treatment ofhistorical sources, notably those pertaining to the motivations of the magistrates inSpeenhamland in the late 18th century, which led him to date the onset of disembeddedcapitalist relations to the early 19th century, cost Polanyi any chance he had of obtaining anacademic position in Britain. But whatever the quality of his archival research, his move todispense with the need to ground economic critique in either theology or secularphilosophy was of lasting significance. It was enough for him to return to the tradition ofAdam Smith, and thus to reconstruct a critical political economy from within.Despite the lack of textual evidence (Thompson does not cite Polanyi in any published workand his private papers will not become available to researchers for decades), Rogan arguesplausibly that the youngest of his heroes effectively took over Polanyi’s analysis ofSpeenhamland (rejected by Tawney), and thereby his alternative chronology for capitalisttransformation. Thompson’s talent as a narrative historian, nourished by his exposure to F.R. Leavis and the literary criticism of the journal Scrutiny, enabled him to dig deeper intothe sources. In The Making of the English Working Class (1963) he expounded how oldervalues of community and solidarity, which in Tawney’s account began to atrophy in the 17thcentury, in fact persisted well into the 19th century. Yet Thompson was not willing to followPolanyi in embracing Adam Smith. Following the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and laterpolemical exchanges with Leszek Kołakowski in England, even after becoming acquaintedwith the writings of the early Marx via French translations, Thompson was compelled toadmit the deficiencies of Marxism; but the allegedly scientific socialism of Althusser and hisfollowers was no solution. Instead, according to Rogan, Thompson’s principal legacy tofuture generations is the elusive notion of (the) “moral economy”. This was introducedalmost incidentally in the major work of 1963, where it carries no theoretical weight. Laterit was formulated more elaborately to account for “bread riots” in small market towns. Bythe time of Thompson’s death it had been extended to countless other cases, most famouslyby James Scott to the survival strategies of peasants in Southeast Asia.1 Thompson wasuneasy about these adaptations of “moral economy” to radically different contexts, butconceded at the end of his life that he had no patent on his coinage.© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 3 / 6The Invention of Another TraditionChris Hann | 10.05.2018Noting the paradox that “moral economy” only took off for general, interdisciplinaryresearch purposes after Thompson had invested it with a specific and rather narrowmeaning in late 18th century Britain, Rogan signs off with a short Conclusion in which heoutlines some more generic ways in which the moral dimension has been revived inmainstream economics. Shortly after the Second World War, Kenneth Arrow was the firstto move beyond the limitations of utilitarian welfare economics and to acknowledge theuniversal importance of a “scheme of socio-ethical norms” that could not be groundedexclusively in calculating individuals.2 Arrow cited Tawney in making this argument.Following a brief discussion of the utopian alternatives proposed by E. F. Schumacher inthe 1970s,3 Rogan then settles on Nobel laureate Amartya K. Sen as the economist who hasdone most to advance the moral agenda, premised on his recognition of the evolved“impurities” of human social relations in history.4 But would Tawney, Polanyi andThompson (none of them notably numerate, each arguably more interested in “love” thanin analysis) have recognized a continuation of their emancipatory ambitions in themathematical sophistication of Arrow and Sen? It was not clear to me at the end of this richbook why Rogan finds redemption with these particular economists, rather than with e.g.Thomas Piketty, whose influential materialist analysis of rapidly expanding inequalities ina globalized capitalism,5 however admirable, is judged to lack a grounding in the moral orspiritual dimension. Isn’t the social choice theorists’ lack of a sociological dimension (e.g. intheir reluctance to use a concept of “social class”) an equally serious shortcoming?Another aspect where I would have appreciated further discussion is biographical. It is arecurrent theme of Rogan’s that all three moral economists were profoundly influenced bytheir exposure to the vitality of the working class communities where they lived andworked in formative phases of their careers: the English Potteries for Tawney, Yorkshire forThompson, and ’Red Vienna’ for Polanyi. But just how closely did these extremelyproductive intellectuals interact with the locals? All three were privately educated andrebelled against the privileges of their own social class: can we trust their interpretations ofcustom and tradition among the workers? One cannot expect much detail about interactionacross class boundaries in a study that operates primarily at the level of intellectual history.Besides, these authors, whose works have had enormous impact on anthropologists, neverclaimed to be fieldworking anthropologists themselves. There are a few clues that laterbiographers will no doubt be able to elaborate on: in one revealing detail we learn that thepuritanical Thompson did not enjoy drinking beer (p. 236, n.13). He did not manage to hit itoff with Raymond Williams (a near contemporary in Cambridge with working class roots inSouth Wales, whose Marxism Thompson considered to be somehow idealistic and abstract)any more than he managed to get along with more cosmopolitan aristocrats of the British© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 4 / 6The Invention of Another TraditionChris Hann | 10.05.2018left such as Anderson.One is left wondering whether these three moral economists and their three great booksperhaps exaggerate solidarities and romanticize certain elements that the authorssomehow envied, while glossing over other, less attractive elements (such as racism or“jingoism”) a little too quickly. Given the comparable relationship between author andsubject in each case, how can these works provide the basis for an account of the moraldimension of socio-economic organization that would have more general, even universalvalidity, beyond subalterns and beyond the capitalist mode of production? What exactly dowe mean by capitalism anyway, and how can historians differ so widely as to its origins?Are the liberal utilitarians really as devoid of moral credentials as these three radicals paintthem? Do the theoreticians of social choice provide an adequate scholarly framework fordealing with custom or culture (and, if the answer is yes, then only at the expense ofexpunging the political radicalism that mattered for all three of Rogan’s protagonists)?These are some of the questions I was left with after reading this elegant and immenselystimulating book. They are important because, to return to Tawney’s metaphor, as we nowknow, the capitalist “beast” was not slain after all. Quite the contrary, it is still alive andbarely tamed. In an age of neoliberalism that could hardly be more different from theclimate of Clement Attlee’s Britain (when Tawney, Polanyi and Thompson mightconceivably have interacted in London, though there is no evidence that they did), our needto grasp the non-utilitarian factors that shape human social relations has never beengreater.© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 5 / 6The Invention of Another TraditionChris Hann | 10.05.2018Endnoten1. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Rebellion and Subsistence inSoutheast Asia, New Haven, NJ 2006.2. Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, New York / London 1951.3. See E[rnst] F[riedrich] Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. A Study of Economics as ifPeople Mattered, New York / London 1973; A Guide for the Perplexed, New York /London 1977.4. Amartya K. Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, San Francisco, CA 1970; cf. Sen,The Idea of Justice, London 2009.5. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge, MA 2014. Chris HannProfessor Dr. Chris Hann is a social anthropologist and ethnologist. He is director of theMax Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Dieser Beitrag wurde redaktionell betreut von Karsten Malowitz.Artikel auf soziopolis.de:https://www.soziopolis.de/the-invention-of-another-tradition.htmlPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 6 / 6

The Invention of Another Tradition: Tim Rogan on a Trio of Radical Historians in 20th Century Britain

Hann, C.

MPG.PuRe

The invention of another tradition: Tim Rogan on a trio of radical historians in 20th century Britain

https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/document/82597/1/ssoar-sopolis-2018-hann-The_Invention_of_Another_Tradition.pdf

The Invention of Another Tradition: Tim Rogan on a Trio of Radical Historians in 20th Century Britain

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

SSOAR - Social Science Open Access Repository

MPG.PuRe