Is the Intellectual Life an End in Itself?

Extract

AtAbout the time I received my first faculty assignment at Swarthmore College, an obituary notice of an old and admired professor made a deep impression on me. The subject was L. T. Hobhouse, the distinguished English sociologist and lifelong liberal. He had been one of the intellectual pillars upon which the Webbs and a few others had constructed the London School of Economics. I did not know Hobhouse well. But his obituary notice was written by a man I much admired, who was in a way my intellectual father: R. H. Tawney. You perhaps know him as the author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, but he was much better known then as a moral force in the British Labour party. To some of its members Tawney's Acquisitive Society, first published in 1921, seemed to offer a fresh charter of liberty, giving a kind of spiritual sanction, missing in Marxian philosophy, to the struggle to overcome misery and poverty with the help of political action.