Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study by R. H. Tawney

Author:R. H. Tawney
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Great Britain--Social conditions, Religious thought--History, Economics--Religious aspects--Christianity--History, Capitalism
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2023-07-19T21:18:16+00:00

III

The Growth of In­di­vidu­al­ism

Though the as­ser­tion of the tra­di­tion­al eco­nom­ic eth­ics con­tin­ued to be made by one school of church­men down to the meet­ing of the Long Par­lia­ment, it was in­creas­ingly the voice of the past ap­peal­ing to an ali­en gen­er­a­tion. The ex­pres­sion of a the­ory of so­ci­ety which had made re­li­gion su­preme over all sec­u­lar af­fairs, it had out­lived the syn­thes­is in which it had been an ele­ment, and sur­vived, an ar­cha­ic frag­ment, in­to an age to whose in­creas­ing in­di­vidu­al­ism the idea of cor­por­ate mor­al­ity was as ob­jec­tion­able as that of ec­cle­si­ast­ic­al dis­cip­line by bish­ops and arch­deac­ons was be­com­ing to its re­li­gion. The col­li­sion between the pre­val­ent prac­tice, and what still pur­por­ted to be the teach­ing of the Church, is al­most the com­mon­est theme of the eco­nom­ic lit­er­at­ure of the peri­od from 1550 to 1640; of much of it, in­deed, it is the oc­ca­sion. Whatever the Church might say, men had asked in­terest for loans, and charged what prices the mar­ket would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of Faith. But then, ex­cept in the great com­mer­cial cen­ters and in the high fin­ance of the Papacy and of sec­u­lar Gov­ern­ments, their trans­ac­tions had been petty and in­di­vidu­al, an oc­ca­sion­al shift to meet an emer­gency or seize an op­por­tun­ity. The new thing in the Eng­land of the six­teenth cen­tury was that devices that had formerly been oc­ca­sion­al were now woven in­to the very tex­ture of the in­dus­tri­al and com­mer­cial civil­iz­a­tion which was de­vel­op­ing in the later years of Eliza­beth, and whose sub­sequent enorm­ous ex­pan­sion was to give Eng­lish so­ci­ety its char­ac­ter­ist­ic qual­ity and tone. Fifty years later, Har­ring­ton, in a fam­ous pas­sage, de­scribed how the ru­in of the feud­al no­bil­ity by the Tu­dors, by demo­crat­iz­ing the own­er­ship of land, had pre­pared the way for the bour­geois re­pub­lic.275 His hint of the eco­nom­ic changes which pre­ceded the Civil War might be giv­en a wider ap­plic­a­tion. The age of Eliza­beth saw a steady growth of cap­it­al­ism in tex­tiles and min­ing, a great in­crease of for­eign trade and an out­burst of joint-stock en­ter­prise in con­nec­tion with it, the be­gin­nings of some­thing like de­pos­it bank­ing in the hands of the scriven­ers, and the growth, aided by the fall of An­t­werp and the Gov­ern­ment’s own fin­an­cial ne­ces­sit­ies, of a money-mar­ket with an al­most mod­ern tech­nique—spec­u­la­tion, fu­tures and ar­bit­rage trans­ac­tions—in Lon­don. The fu­ture lay with the classes who sprang to wealth and in­flu­ence with the ex­pan­sion of com­merce in the later years of the cen­tury, and whose re­li­gious and polit­ic­al as­pir­a­tions were, two gen­er­a­tions later, to over­throw the mon­archy.

An or­gan­ized money-mar­ket has many ad­vant­ages. But it is not a school of so­cial eth­ics or of polit­ic­al re­spons­ib­il­ity. Fin­ance, be­ing es­sen­tially im­per­son­al, a mat­ter of op­por­tun­it­ies, se­cur­ity and risks, ac­ted among oth­er causes as a solvent of the sen­ti­ment, fostered both by the teach­ing of the Church and the de­cen­cies of so­cial in­ter­course among neigh­bors, which re­garded keen bar­gain­ing as “sharp prac­tice.” In the half-cen­tury which fol­lowed the Re­form­a­tion, thanks to the col­lapse of ster­ling

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