Religious Thought on Social and Economic Questions in the Sixteenth -1

Religious Thought on Social and Economic Questions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: I R. H. Tawney The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Aug., 1923), pp. 461-493. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-3808%28192308%2931%3A4%3C461%3ARTOSAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T The Journal of Political Economy is currently published by The University of Chicago Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sat Jul 21 14:09:50 2007 THE JOURNAL POLITICAL ECONOMY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT ON SOCIAL AND ECO- NOMIC QUESTIONS I N THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES I. THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND The purpose of these articles is a short and tentative examina- tion of one strand in the earlier history of economic thought. I have called them "Religious Thought on Social and Economic Questions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," not because there were not other currents which were of equal or greater significance for the future, but because in the last analy- sis it was a change in the character of religious thought which gave secular political economy an opportunity to develop. Kor, perhaps, is a discussion of the treatment given to eco- nomic issues by writers whose interest was primarily ethical, quite so otiose today as it might have seemed a generation ago. There have been periods in which a tacit agreement, accepted in practice if not stated in theory, excluded economic activities and social institutions from examination or criticism in the light of religion. X Prime Minister of the early nineteenth century, ~vhose conceptions of the relations of church and state appear to haye 11een modeled on those of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine cle P,ourgh, is said to have crushed a clerical tleputation with the 461 protest: "Things have come to a pretty pass if religion is going to interfere with private life," and a more recent occupant of his oflice has explained the catastrophe which must follow if it crosses the Rubicon which divides the outlyiilg provinces of the spirit from the secular capital of public affairs.' Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident today that the line of division between the spheres of religion and secu- lar business which they assume as self-evident is shifting. By common consent the treaty of partition has lapsed and the boun- daries are once more in motion. ICightly or wrongly, with wis- dom or with its opposite, not only in England but on the Conti- nent and in America, not only in one denomination but among Roman Catholics. Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an attempt is being made to restate the practical implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith, and to restate them in a form suffi- ciently comprehensive to provide a standard to judge the col- lective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere both of international politics and social organization. I t is being made today. I t has been made in the past. Whether it will result in any new synthesis, whether in the future it will be a t some point pushed farther into the tough world of practical affairs that men will say, Here nature first begins Her farthest verge, and chaos to retire As from her outmost works, a broken foe, will not be known by this generation. What is certain is that, as in the analogous problem of the relations between church and state, issues which were thought to have been buried by the discretion of centuries have shown in our own day that they were not dead, but sleeping. To examine the forms which they have assumed and the phases through which they have passed, even in the narrow field of a single country and a limited period, is not mere antiquarianism. I t is to summon the living, not to invoke a corpse, and to see from a new angle the problems of our own age by widening the experience brought to their consideration. I Mr. 1,loyd George, apropos of utterances by .\nqlican bisllops on the govern- ment's policy in Ireland and on the loclout of British miners in 1921. SIXTEESTZI-CE,VTrRY RELZGZOCS THOUGHT 463 In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies are obviously a critical period. Dr. Figgisl has described the secularization of political theory as the most momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the modern world. I t mas not the less revolutionary because i t was only gradually that its full consequences became apparent, so that seeds which were sown before the Reformation yielded their full fruit in Eng- land only after the Civil War. The political aspects of the trans- formation are familiar. The theological mold which shaped political theory from the 3fiddle Ages to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and theology a t best one science among others. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institu- tioni is expediency, not religious authority. Religion, ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into a department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant to overstep. 'I'he ground which i t vacates is occupied by a new institution, armccl ~vi th a novel doctrine. If the church of the llIiddle Ages \vr.a, CL kind of state, the state of the Tudors had some of the char- acteristics of a church; and it was precisely the impossibility for all but a handful of sectaries of conceiving a society which treated religion as a thing privately vital but publicly indifferent nhich in England made irreconcilable the quarrel between Puri- tani-m and the monarchy. When the mass had been heated in the furnace of the Civil it7ar, its coinponent parts were ready to be disengaged from each other. By the end of the seventeenth century the secular state, separate from the churches which are subordinate to it, has emerged from the theory which had regarcled them as dual aspects of a single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do not meddle xvith the e~ te rna l fabric of the political and social system, which is the concern of the former. The age of religious struggles virtually ends n i th the 'I'reaty of 1645. The age of the wars of economic nationalism \-irtually begins n i th the mar betneen Cng1;ind and Iiolland in 16j2. The state, first in England, then in .lmerica and France, finds its sanction, not in religion, but I I'ro17z Gersot~to Groliiis. in nature, in a presumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual protection and the convenience of mutual assistance. It appeals to no supernatural commission, but exists "to pro- tect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights which lvere vested in them by the immutable laws of nature." IVhile the political significance of this development has often been described, the analogous changes in social and economic thought have received less attention. They were, however, momentous, and deserve consideration. The emergence of an objective and pass'onless economic science took place more slo~vly than the corresponding movement in the theory of the state, becaus; the issues were less absorbing, and while one marched in the high lights of the open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in the wings. I t was not till a century after Macchiavelli had emancipated the state from religion that the doctrine of the self-contained department with laws of its own begins generally to be applied to the world of business rela- tions, and even in the b:nglancl of the early seventeenth century to tfiscuss questions of economic organiiation purely in terms of pecuniary profit and loss ?till 1ve:~rs an air of not quite reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century begins. not only political but social theory is saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct as naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed them in terms of mechanism. The most fundamental of all divisions among theories of society is between those which regard the norld of human affairs as self-contained and those which appeal to a supernatural cri- terion. 12Zodern social theory, like motlern political theory, develops only when society is given a naturalistic instead of a religious ex-planation, and the capital fact which presides a t the birth of both is a change in the conception held of the nature and functions of a church. The crucial period is the sixteenth ant1 seventeenth centurie,. The most important arena of it (apart irom Holl:lnd) is England. hecause it is in England, with its neiv geograpllica' 1)o.ition ;i.; the entrepbt hetween Europe ant1 rhlerica, its uillie\-emclil of intcriial economic unity two SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS TI70UGHT 465 centuries before France and two and a half centuries before Ger- many, its constitutional revolution, and its powerful bourgeoisie of bankers, ship-owners, and merchants, that the transformation of the structure of society is earliest, swiftest, and most complete. I t s essence and result is the secularization of social and economic philosophy. The synthesis is resolved into its elements-politics, business, and spiritual exercises: each assumes a separate and independent vitality and obeys the laws of its own being. The conception of a hierarchy of values, embracing all human interests and activities in a system of which the apex is religion, is replaced by the conception of separate and parallel compart- ments, between which a due balance should be maintained, but which have no vital connection with each other. The intellectual movement is, of course, a very gradual one, and is compatible with both throw-backs and precocities which seem to refute its general character. I t is easy to detect antici- pations of the coming philosophy in the later Middle Ages, and reversions to an earlier manner a t the very end of the seventeenth century. Oresme' in the fourteenth century can anticipate the monetary theory of Locke; and St. Antoninoqn the fifteenth can describe the significance of capital; Baxter3 in 1673 can write a C'ljristia~z Directory in the manner of a medieval Summa; and Bunyan4 in 1680 can dissect the economic iniquities of Mr. Bad- man, who ground the poor n i th high prices and usury, in the manner of a metliexal friar. Rut the distance traversed in the two centuries 1)etneen I joo and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense. .It the carlier date, though economic rationalism has proceeded far in Italy, the typical economic systcms are those of the School- men; the typical popular teaching is that of the sermon, or of manuals such as "l>i\-es and I'auper;" the typical appeal in difficult cases of conscience is to the Bible, the Fathers, the Canon Law, and its interpreters; the typical controversy is carried on in h-icholas Oresme, De Jizrtatione Mo t z~ t a r~~~n . Siinz?na ATf~rulz~ . See also Ilgner, Die Volks&dr t sc l z~~ j i~ ic~~e t~12tzschaz~~~agen /l tztonins zon Florenz. :A Christialz Directory, or a Szrmmi~ of Practical Tlzcorie uitd Coses of Co~zscie?zce. 41,lf t a~td Deullt o f Mr. Budntatt. terms of morality and religion as regularly and inevitably as two centuries later in terms of economic expediency. I t is not necessary to point out that the age of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had nothing to learn from the twentieth century as to the niceties of political intrigue or commercial sharp practice. But a cynical unscrupulousness in high places is not incompatible with a general acceptance of moral standards which are contradicted by it. Let anyone read the discussion which took place between I joo and Ij jo on three burning issues -the rise in prices, capital and interest, and the land question in England-and he will find that in three-fourths of them the final authority is what the author conceives to be traditional Christian morality. I t is because that is conceived to be the final authority that the officers of the church claim to be heard on questions of social policy, and that, however Catholics and Anglicans, Lutherans and Calvinists may differ on doctrine or ecclesiastical government, Luther and Calvin, Latimer and Laud, John Knox and the Pilgrim Fathers are agreed that social morality is the province of the church, and are prepared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by suitable discipline. By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is altered. After the Restoration in England we are in a new world of eco- nomic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of the church, a t best a shadowy one, to maintain rules of good conscience in economic affairs, finally vanished with the destruction of Laud's experiment in a confessional state. After the Civil War the attempt to maintain the theory that there was a Christian stand- ard of economic conduct was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of the churches made i t evident that no common standard existed which could be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery, and the doctrine of the Restoratioil economists1 that, as proved by the ercperience of Holland, trade I E.g., Petty, Political rlritl~melic: "Iloreover it is to be observed . . . . that trade is most vigorously carried on, in every State and Go~~ernment , by the heterodos part of the same, and such as profess opinions different from what are publicly established". See also Sir IViIliam Temple's remarks on the economic significance of toleration in IIolland. SZXTEESTII-CENTCRY RELIGIOC'S THOVGHT 467 and tolerance flourished together had its practical significance in the fact that neither could prosper without large concessions to i n d i ~idualism. The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist is quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred years is not with the attempt to reaffirm, with due allowarlce for altered circumstances, the conception that a n~oral rule is binding on Christians in their economic transactions, but with the new science of Political Arithmetic, which asserts, a t first with hesitation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, i t handles economic phenomena not as a casuist. con- cerned to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal economic forces. I t s method, tem- per, and assumptions are accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, long after its particular conclusions continue to he tlisputecl. I t s greatest English exponent, before the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker, Dean of Bristol. Some of the particular stages in this transition will be dis- cussetl later. But that there was a transition, and that the intel- lectual and moral conversion which i t produced was not less momentous than the effect of some 111ore familiar intellectual revolutions, is untleniable. Kor is it to be refuted by insisting that economic motives and economic needs are as old as history, or that the appeal to religion may be a decorou-, drapery for a triumphant materialism. A medieval cynic, in expounding the Canon Law as to usury, remarked that "he who takes i t goes to Hell, and he who does not goes to the workhouye. "I Mr. Coulton does well to remind us that, even in the ages of faith, resounding principles were compatible with very sordid practice. In a discussion which has as its subject social thought, not the history of business organization, it is not necessary to elabo- rate that truism. But, because doctrine and conduct diverge, i t does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt abstractions. nenvenuta da Imola, Comm. s21per. Dent. Cottzed. (ed. Lacaita), I , j i g : "Qui f ,~cit usur'rm vadit ad infcrnum; qui non facit vadit ad inopiam." S IXTEE ,VTH-CESTrRY RELIGIOC'S THOCGHT 469 latter grew out of the former, to trace the change from a view of economic activity which regarded it as one among other kinds of moral conduct to the view of it as dependent upon impersonal and almost automatic forces; to observe the struggle of individ- ualism in the face of restrictions imposed in the name of religion by the church and of public policy by the state, first denounced, then palliated, then triumphantly justified in the n'ame of eco- nomic liberty; to watch how ecclesiastic authority strives to main- tain its holtl upon the spheres i t had claimed and finally abdi- cates them--to clo this is not to indulge a vain curiosity, but to stand a t the sources of rivulets which are now a flood. 113s religious opinion in the past regarded questions of social organiz;rtion and economic conduct as irrelevant to the life of the spirit, or has it endeal-ored not only to Christianize the individual but to make a Christian civilization? Can religion admit the existence of a sharp clivision between the life of the individual ant1 the economic environnlent ? Does the idea of a church in\ ol\.e any particular standard of social morality, and if so, ougl~t a church to endeavor to enforce it as among the obliga- tions incumbent on its members-such are a few of the questions xvhich men are asking today and on ~~-11ich competenta more examinatiun of hi\tory than I can hope to offer might throw a t any rate an oblique anel n-a\.ering light. ITe are a>king theye quebtions today. JIen were asking the same questions, though in different language. throughout the iixteenth century. I t ia a commonplace that modern econornic histov l~egins with a series of revolutionary changes in the direction ancl organization of commerce, in finance, in prices, and in agriculture. 'Yo the new economic situation men brought a body of tloctrine, la~i., tradition, use, and wont hammered out during the preceding three centuries. Since the changes were hexviltlerinq and often shocking to the consciences of decent 111en, moralists ant1 re!igious teachers met them a t first by a reaffirma- tion of the trat1ition:rl tloctriues by which, it seemed, their excesses might he restrained lint1 their ahuses corrected. ,Isthe changed environment hecome, not a novelty, but an established fact, these tloctrinc.5 ?i:itl to 1)e nxoclifiecl. .Is thc eft'ccts of the Refor- mation developed, different churches produced characteristic differences of social opinion. But these were later developments which only