R.H. Tawney
Born on 30 November 1880 in Calcutta, British India (present-day Kolkata, India), Tawney was the son of the Sanskrit scholar Charles Henry Tawney. He was educated at Rugby School, arriving on the same day as William Temple, a future Archbishop of Canterbury; they remained friends for life.[12] He read Greats at Balliol College, Oxford.[13] The college's "strong ethic of social service" combined with Tawney's own "deep and enduring Anglicanism" helped shape his sense of social responsibility.[14] After graduating from Oxford in 1903, he and his friend William Beveridge lived at Toynbee Hall, then the home of the recently formed Workers' Educational Association (WEA). The experience was to have a profound effect upon him. He realised that charity was insufficient and major structural change was required to bring about social justice for the poor.[15]
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Christian socialism
Whilst Tawney remained a regular churchgoer, his Christian faith remained a personal affair, and he rarely spoke publicly about the basis of his beliefs.[16] In keeping with his social radicalism, Tawney came to regard the Church of England as a "class institution, making respectful salaams to property and gentility, and with too little faith in its own creed to call a spade a spade in the vulgar manner of the New Testament".[17]
For three years from January 1908, Tawney taught the first Workers' Educational Association tutorial classes at Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, and Rochdale, Lancashire.[18] For a time, until he moved to Manchester after marrying Jeannette (William Beveridge's sister and a Somerville graduate), Tawney was working as part-time economics lecturer at Glasgow University. To fulfil his teaching commitments to the WEA, he travelled first to Longton for the evening class every Friday, before travelling north to Rochdale for the Saturday afternoon class. Tawney clearly saw these classes as a two-way learning process. "The friendly smitings of weavers, potters, miners and engineers, have taught me much about the problem of political and economic sciences which cannot easily be learned from books".[19] 
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Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) was his classic work[29] and made his reputation as an historian.[30] It explored the relationship between Protestantism and economic development in the 16th and 17th centuries. Tawney "bemoaned the division between commerce and social morality brought about by the Protestant Reformation, leading as it did to the subordination of Christian teaching to the pursuit of material wealth".[31]
The Oxford historian Valerie Pearl once described Tawney as having appeared to those in his presence as having an "aura of sanctity". He lent his name to the Tawney Society at Rugby School, the R. H. Tawney Economic History Society at the London School of Economics, the annual Tawney Memorial Lectures (Christian Socialist Movement), the R. H. Tawney Building at Keele University[citation needed] and the Tawney Tower Hall of Residence at Essex University.
Adrian Hastings wrote:
Behind the list of major publications was the mind of a man tirelessly guiding government, Labour movement, Church and academic community towards a new society, at once fully democratic, consciously socialistic and fully in accord with Christian belief. In effective intellectual terms it is doubtful whether anyone else had remotely comparable influence in the evolution of British society in his generation[12]
"Two of Tawney's books stand out as his most influential social criticism:[30] The Acquisitive Society (1920), Richard Crossman's "socialist bible",[12] and Equality (1931), "his seminal work".[32] The former, one of his most widely read books,[27] criticised the selfish individualism of modern society. Capitalism, he insisted, encourages acquisitiveness and thereby corrupts everyone. In the latter book, Tawney argues for an egalitarian society.
Both works reflected Tawney's Christian moral values, "exercised a profound influence" in Britain and abroad, and "anticipated the Welfare state".[30] As David Ormrod of the University of Kent stresses, "intermittent opposition from the Churches to the new idolatry of wealth surfaced from time to time but no individual critics have arisen with a combination of political wisdom, historical insight and moral force to match that of R.H. Tawney, the prophet who denounced acquisitiveness".[33]
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