What Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, and the others were criticising, among other things, was the society – and not only the war society – which capitalism had brought about, a society where value was placed on possessions, where life had become a race to acquire things, as opposed to knowledge, understanding, or virtue. In short, they were attacking the acquisitive society. This was in fact a new phrase, coined the year before by R. H. Tawney in a book that was too angry and too blunt to be considered great literature. Tawney was typical of a certain kind of figure in British society at the time (William Beveridge and George Orwell were others). Like them, Tawney came from an upper-class family and was educated at a public school (Rugby) and Balliol College, Oxford; but he was interested all his life in poverty and especially in inequality. After university, he decided, instead of going into the City, as many of his background would have done, to work at Toynbee Hall in London’s East End (Beveridge, the founder of Britain’s welfare state, was also there). The idea behind Toynbee Hall was to bring a university atmosphere and lifestyle to the working classes, and in general it had a profound effect on all who experienced it. It helped turn Tawney into the British socialist intellectual best in touch with the unions.1 But it was the miners’ strike in February 1919 that was to shape Tawney’s subsequent career. Seeking to head off confrontation, the government established a Royal Commission on the Coal Mines, and Tawney was one of six men representing the labour side (another was Sidney Webb).2 Millions of words of evidence were put before the commission, and Tawney read all of them. He was so moved by the accounts of danger, ill-health, and poverty that he wrote the first of the three books for which he is chiefly known. These were The Acquisitive Society (1921), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), and Equality (1931).
Tawney, a mild man whose bushy moustache made him appear avuncular, hated the brutalism of unbridled capitalism, particularly the waste and inequalities it produced. He served in the trenches in the war as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission. He expected capitalism to break down afterward: he thought that it misjudged human nature, elevating production and the making of profit, which ought to be a means to certain ends, into ends in themselves. This had the effect, he argued, of encouraging the wrong instincts in people, by which he meant acquisitiveness. A very religious man, Tawney felt that acquisitiveness went against the grain – in particular, it sabotaged ‘the instinct for service and solidarity’ that is the basis for traditional civil society.3 He thought that in the long run capitalism was incompatible with culture. Under capitalism, he wrote, culture became more private, less was shared, and this trend went against the common life of men – individuality inevitably promoted inequality. The very concept of culture therefore changed, becoming less and less an inner state of mind and more a function of one’s possessions.4 On top of that, Tawney also felt that capitalism was, at bottom, incompatible with democracy. He suspected that the inequalities endemic in capitalism – inequalities made more visible than ever by the acquisitive accumulation of consumer products – would ultimately threaten social cohesion. He saw his role, therefore, as helping to provide an important moral counterattack against capitalism for the many like himself who felt it had been at least partly responsible for war.5
But this wasn’t Tawney’s only role. He was an historian, and in his second book he looked at capitalism historically. The thesis of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was that ‘economic man,’ the creature of classical economics, was by no means the universal figure in history he was supposed to be, that human nature was not necessarily shaped as classical liberals said it was. Tawney argued that the advent of capitalism was not inevitable, that its successes were relatively recent, and that in the process it had rendered extinct a whole range of behaviours and experiences and replaced them with its own. In particular capitalism had extinguished religion, though the church had to take some share of the blame insofar as it had abdicated its role as a moral leader.6
In retrospect, not all of Tawney’s criticisms of capitalism ring true anymore.7 Most obviously, and importantly, capitalism has not proved incompatible with democracy. But he was not wholly wrong; capitalism probably is inimical to what Tawney meant by culture – indeed, as we shall see, capitalism has changed what we all mean by culture; and it is arguable that capitalism has aided the change in morality we have seen during the century, though there have been other reasons as well.
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Tawney’s vision was bitter and specific. Not everyone was as savage about capitalism as he was, but as the 1920s wore on and reflection about World War I matured, an unease persisted. What characterised this unease, however, was that it concerned more than capitalism, extending to Western civdisation as a whole, in some senses an equivalent of Oswald Spengler’s thesis that there was decay and ruin everywhere in the West. Without question the man who caught this mood best was both a banker – the archsymbol of capitalism – and a poet, the licensed saboteur.
T. S. Eliot was born in 1888, into a very religious Puritan family. He studied at Harvard, took a year off to study poetry in Paris, then returned to Harvard as a member of the faculty, teaching philosophy. Always interested in Indian philosophy and the links between philosophy and religion, he was infuriated when Harvard tried to separate the one from the other as different disciplines. In 1914 he transferred to Oxford, where he hoped to continue his philosophical studies. Shortly after, war broke out. In Europe, Eliot met two people who had an immense effect on him: Ezra Pound and Vivien Haigh-Wood. At the time they met, Pound was a much more worldly figure than Eliot, a good teacher and at that time a better poet. Vivien Haigh-Wood became Eliot’s first wife. Initially happy, the marriage had turned into a disaster by the early 1920s: Vivien descended steadily into madness, and Eliot found the circumstances so trying that he himself sought psychiatric treatment in Switzerland.8
The puritanical world Eliot grew up in had been fiercely rational. In such a world science had been dominant in that it offered the promise of relief from injustice. Beatrice Webb had shared Eliot’s early hopes when, in 1870, she said, ‘It was by science, and by science alone, that all human misery would be ultimately swept away.’9 And yet by 1918 the world insofar as Eliot was concerned was in ruins. For him, as for others, science had helped produce a war in which the weapons were more terrible than ever, in which the vast nineteenth-century cities were characterised as much by squalor as by the beauty the impressionists painted, where in fact the grinding narratives of Zola told a grimmer truth. Then there was the new physics that had helped remove more fundamental layers of certainty; there was Darwin undermining religion, and Freud sabotaging reason itself. A consolidated edition of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough was also published in 1922, the same year as The Waste Land, and this too hit hard at Eliot’s world. It showed that the religions of so-called savages around the world were no less developed, complex, or sophisticated than Christianity. At a stroke the simple social Darwinian idea that Eliot’s world was the current endpoint in the long evolutionary struggle, the ‘highest’ stage of man’s development, was removed. Also subverted was the idea that there was anything special about Christianity itself. Harvard had been right after all to divorce philosophy and religion. In Max Weber’s term, the West had entered a phase of Entzauberung, ‘unmagicking’ or disenchantment. At a material, intellectual, and spiritual level – in all senses – Eliot’s world was laid waste.10