The Acquisitive Society

what is appropriate to their function, no more and no less, so that those who perform no function receive no payment, and those who contribute to the common end receive honourable payment for honourable service.

Frate, la nostra volontà quieta
Virtù di carità, che fa volerne
Sol quel ch’avemo, e d’altro non ci asseta.
Si disiassimo esse più superne,
Foran discordi li nostri disiri
Dal voler di colui che qui ne cerne.

Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse
Tenersi dentro alla divina vogli,
Per ch’una fansi nostre vogli e stesse.

Chiaro mi fu allor com’ ogni dove
In Cielo è paradiso, e sì la grazia
Del sommo ben d’un modo non vi piove.

The famous lines in which Piccarda explains to Dante the order of Paradise are a description of a complex and multiform society which is united by overmastering devotion to a common end. By that end all stations are assigned and all activities are valued. The parts derive their quality from their place in the system, and are so permeated by the unity which they express that they themselves are glad to be forgotten, as the ribs of an arch carry the eye from the floor from which they spring to the vault in which they meet and interlace.

Such a combination of unity and diversity is possible only to a society which subordinates its activities to the principle of purpose. For what that principle offers is not merely a standard for determining the relations of different classes and groups of producers, but a scale of moral values. Above all, it assigns to economic activity itself its proper place as the servant, not the master, of society. The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired.

That obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears today; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames every wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society will not solve the particular problems of industry which afflict it, until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see industry itself in the right perspective. If it is to do that, it must rearrange its scale of values. It must regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life. It must persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in a fever. It must so organize industry that the instrumental character of economic activity is emphasized by its subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on.

Endnotes

1. Reprinted in The Industrial Council for the Building Industry. ↩

2. Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence, Vol. I, p. 2506. ↩

3. Coal Industry Commission, Minutes of Evidence, pp. 9261⁠–⁠9. ↩

4. The Coal Mines Department supplied the following figures to the Coal Industry Commission (Vol. III, App. 66). They relate to 57 percent of the collieries of the United Kingdom.

   Salary, including bonus and value of house and coal	Number of Managers
   	1913	1919
   £100 or less	4	2
   £101 to £200	134	3
   £201 to £300	280	29
   £301 to £400	161	251
   £401 to £500	321	213
   £501 to £600	57	146
   £601 and over	50	152

   ↩

Colophon

The Acquisitive Society
was published in 1920 by
R. H. Tawney.

This ebook was produced for
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Lukas Bystricky,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2010 by
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The cover page is adapted from
Safe Money,
a painting completed in 1898 by
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May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

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