Richard Henry Tawney (30 November 1880 – 16 January 1962) was a 19th century British economic historian and social critic.
Biography[]
Richard Henry Tawney was born in Calcutta, British India in 1880, and he was educated at Rugby and Oxford. He was a social worker and investigator at Toynbee Hall, and then, in 1908, became engaged in adult education as the first tutorial teacher for the Worker's Education Association (WEA). He served in the Manchester Regiment in World War I, and was almost fatally wounded in the Battle of the Somme. In 1919, he began to teach for the London School of Economics, where he was professor of economic history from 1931 to 1949. His academic writing centered on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economics, his most famous work being Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). He was active in the Labour Party, failing four times to be elected to Parliament. However, his work Secondary Education for All (1922) was the basis of Labour's education policy, and was central in the writing of its 1928 policy statement Labour and the Nation. He also had much influence on social thought through The Acquisitive Society (1920), which argued that material acquisitiveness was morally wrong, and Equality (1929), which criticized "the religion of inequality" dominating England based on class privilege. He was a major influence in the social thought of the Labour Party and on the Church of England, and a significant force in the history of adult education.
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