16 - ‘The Apostle of Equality’: Titmuss and R.H. Tawney

Summary

Introduction

From the 1930s onwards Titmuss had positively embraced the ideas of R.H. Tawney. The alleged moral and psychological distortions engendered by, in Tawney's phrase, the ‘Acquisitive Society’ continued to trouble Titmuss, as we saw in his critique of its later manifestation, the ‘Affluent Society’. Indeed, as David Marquand pointed out, on Tawney's eightieth birthday in 1960, the latter was not only the ‘Prophet of Equality’, but could also claim to be the ‘first critic’ of the ‘Affluent Society’. Tawney had also played a part in Titmuss's appointment to the LSE, where the two were briefly colleagues. An opportunity for Titmuss to repay his debt to the older man came in 1960, when he was instrumental in arranging Tawney's birthday celebrations. In this chapter we look at the origins of this event before re-engaging with Titmuss's reading of Tawney. This is done through, especially, an examination of the former's ‘Introduction’ to a new edition of one of Tawney's most famous works, originally published in 1931, Equality. As Ben Jackson notes, on first publication this was prominent among those inter-war era works which had an ‘agenda setting role’ for the political left. The 1930s saw the beginnings of Titmuss's political activism, and it is more than plausible to see him as one of those who had signed up to the Tawney ‘agenda’. For Lawrence Goldman, meanwhile, and looking ahead to Titmuss's own moment in the sun, Equality was among those books which ‘shaped post-Second World War Britain’. The chapter concludes with a return to one of Titmuss's obsessions, occupational pensions, for him a prominent example of the operations of inequality in contemporary society.

The birthday party

Titmuss and Tawney were, post-war, friends as well as colleagues. Tawney was a visitor, for both social and intellectual reasons, to Titmuss's home, so the latter's involvement with the eightieth birthday celebrations was unsurprising. It began in 1959 when Arthur Creech Jones, a Labour MP and old friend of Tawney’s, contacted Harry Nutt, General Secretary of the organisation with which Tawney had long been associated, the Workers’ Educational Association. He was looking into putting together a book to include an ‘appreciation and assessment of Tawney's work outside his contribution to economic history’.