Certainly, Clark cultivated the air of a man whose worst nightmare would be the loss of a good umbrella. He looked, sounded, dressed and carried himself like a plum-voweled Tory grandee. Vibe apart, however, he was a socialist, if one allows a very English, decidedly unstrident, institution-loving, patrician declension of socialism.

Born into a textile fortune in Grosvenor Square, Clark grew up in ginormous piles in Suffolk and Argyll that made Brideshead look cozy. It was an Edwardian upbringing that he later described as “vulgar, disgraceful, overfed, godless”. Winchester, then, came as a culture shock. There, at school, he acquired the habits of mind — a certain social conscience; commitment to public service — that his biographer James Stourton described as a kind of Wykehamical socialism, by turns patrician and progressive, of which Rishi Sunak is, after a fashion, a product. The school produced generations of civil servants, diplomats and a surprising number of Lefty intellectuals — Clark mingled with such socialist grandees as Hugh Gaitskell and Richard Crossman. “Winchester may not have had the Whig insouciance and Athenian elegance of Eton,” Stourton wrote, “but it had a high seriousness of purpose and an intellectual distinction that has produced generations of ambassadors, permanent secretaries, heads of Oxbridge colleges, and field marshals.”

Oxford added a second education, further nudging Clark towards the Left. An outsized influence was the classics don Maurice Bowra. Outrageous, erudite, and forever teasing the priggishness out of Clark with the delicacy of a surgeon removing shrapnel, he saw himself as the chief of the set he variously called the Immoral Front, Homintern, and the 69th International. Bowra widened Clark’s literary diet — Yeats, Rilke, Turgenev — and cemented his socialism. In later years, they would spend Christmases together. Clark never abandoned his self-styled Bowrista politics. It was a blend of the socialism of Clark’s older lodestars, William Morris and John Ruskin, both patron saints of his adolescence who dissolved his aristocratic complacency, as well as that of the Christian socialist R. H. Tawney, a name to reckon with in working-class reading groups of the Twenties. As a boy, Clark had regarded the local working men’s club as “a different species… as figures of fun” but Ruskin persuaded him by his late teens that beauty belonged to everyone. Art, he decided, was not a private indulgence but a universal right. This was the conviction he took into adulthood.

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Already in his early twenties, Clark had traded the effortless connoisseurship of his class for something more serious. Under Charles Bell, keeper of fine art at the Ashmolean, and the incomparable art historian Bernard Berenson at his Florentine palazzo I Tatti, Clark shed the skin of a gifted amateur and emerged as a scholar. Promotion followed at an indecent pace: Bell’s job at 28, Director of the National Gallery at 31, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures shortly thereafter.

Life at the National plunged him into the social kaleidoscope of interwar London. There were weekends at Port Lympne with Philip Sassoon, whose Cape Colonial fantasia of a country house was the playground of what Clark called the “unorthodox Tory fringe”. It was here, amid Sassoon’s murals and monocles, that Clark acquired his reputation as the token Red in Tory circles and the token tweedy baron in progressive milieus.

War supplied him with a mission. At the Ministry of Information’s Film Division, Clark revealed a surprisingly deft hand for propaganda. Those years also exposed the marrow-deep socialism he rarely owned up to in company. “Every day makes me a more committed socialist”, he wrote to his mother, railing against “the present system, where private profit is the controlling factor”, before remembering that courtesy calls do not ordinarily fan out into plodding treatises: “however I mustn’t turn this letter into a Ruskinian tract.”

Yet a touch of Ruskin was unmistakable during his decade at the National, and even more during the war. It was Clark who orchestrated the evacuation of the entire national collection, hiding it in the slate caverns of Manod in North Wales like some modern monk protecting manuscripts from marauders. As the Luftwaffe reduced London to rubble, he transformed the emptied Gallery into a sanctuary of music with lunchtime concerts and then, with inspired theatricality, brought back one masterpiece each month — one work to remind a battered people that civilization was still flickering.

More radical still was what happened outside London. Clark sent touring exhibitions of masterpieces into the provinces, ensuring that miners in South Wales and factory workers in the Midlands could stand, unmediated, before a Rubens or a Rembrandt. It was redistribution, in a way — of beauty rather than wealth.

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Meanwhile, his wife Jane set about decorating the so-called British Restaurants, those wartime communal kitchens, with murals by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Clark himself lent pictures from his own walls, ladling out high culture with cauliflower and carrots; East Ham alone received 22. His collectivist instinct even seeped into his sexual affairs. Collecting relationships as others did prints, he tangled himself in what Stourton coyly calls “a series of amitiés amoureuses”. Yet through all the flutter, Jane remained the center of his emotional orbit. He was, improbably, an uxorious philanderer.

After the war, he brooded incessantly on Britain’s future: how art and architecture might improve ordinary lives, how the state might support culture without turning it into a bureaucratic terrarium. Attlee’s victory thrilled him, even as he continued to cherish his Tory acquaintances. This delicate straddling of camps confused his contemporaries but is clearer in retrospect. Clark was an elitist who believed art should belong to the many. He never liked Marxism, distrusting historical materialism, but he admired the Marxist art historian Frederick Antal’s learning and found Marxist social history invigorating in small doses. His own view of art history was stubbornly individualist. “My approach to history,” he explained, “was unconsciously different from that now in favor in universities, which sees all historical change as the result of economic and communal processes. I believe in the importance of individuals, and am a natural hero-worshipper.”

At the same time, Clark believed, with an almost touching sincerity, that it was the state’s duty to safeguard the basic conditions necessary for human flourishing. This was not the language of the class warrior but the civil servant prescribing the correct temperature for afternoon tea. His faith in institutions — galleries, universities, libraries, the Beeb — bordered on the devotional. It was in this spirit that Clark, as chair of the Arts Council in the Fifties, inherited the cultural flank of the Attleeian welfare state. Before the war, England had no state opera, no subsidized orchestras, and no government spending on living artists. The cumbersomely titled Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, later the Arts Council, changed all that. “The best for the most,” declared the Observer drama critic Ivor Brown when he joined CEMA, and Clark made it his credo. For him, the arts were not a luxury but a necessity, fully on a par with health and education in their claim on the public purse.

It was Civilisation, however, that distilled Clark’s singular worldview into a single decanter. It was a charmingly improbable premise: 13 prime-time episodes, funded by the license fee, in which a life peer guided viewers through Aquinas, Caravaggio, and the fall of Rome in chiseled sentences that never once insulted their intelligence. The Left accused him of Edwardian pieties; the Right embraced him as their mandarin mascot. Clark, delighted, insisted he had only intended to offer “no more than a sequence of pretty pictures in color”. David Attenborough thought the secret lay in Clark’s manner: “absolute mandarin prose” punctuated by colloquial jolts that revealed he actually knew how ordinary people thought. “People don’t necessarily dislike toffs,” Attenborough observed. “Toffs who speak directly are quite appealing.”

And Clark did speak directly. The miracle of Civilisation was not its grandeur but its assumption that the proles had brains. He presumed the nation could cope with Chartres, Gothic proportion, and the darker recesses of the Dark Ages. Beneath the feline elegance, the whole series was a collectivist sermon: that civilization is sustained by shared memory and shared institutions; that beauty is a public good; that culture is “our inheritance”. One could almost hear Tawney nodding with approval. One could not, however, prefigure Thatcher.

His professional colleagues were uncharitable. A few sneered reflexively at the art historian who elected to live in a castle and liked slumming it on the telly, wafting above their seminars like a benevolent archangel. Clark reciprocated in kind, likening their “scholarly minutiae to knitting”. Later, more assured as a master practitioner of the Reithian tradition of haute vulgarization, he offered a more measured response: “academics were furious at the simplification of their labors.”

Yet the public adored him at the time, even if his star has since faded. He became the national shorthand for art history, as if some kind of ambulant National Gallery. And this, as he knew, he owed to Ruskin, who taught him, above all, the heresy that beauty is everyone’s birth right. Clark carried this Victorian gospel into the 20th century in lapidary prose. But he was, in short, a product of Edwardian England: his socialism was Anglican and ethical, smelling faintly of pipe smoke and polished pews. Small wonder that when asked to tell the story civilization, he politely ended his tale in 1914, as if the guns of August had closed the cultural ledger.

But for all his paradoxes — the socialist in the castle; the elitist championing access; the bureaucrat preaching beauty — Clark believed one thing with utter conviction: civilization does not maintain itself. It requires guardianship. It requires money. It requires institutions. And it requires the shared belief that the best of human achievement belongs to everyone, not merely to the connoisseurs. In an age of conservative philistinism and progressive iconoclasm, that belief seems less reactionary than revolutionary.

This is the one paragraph version of William Morris’s famous fictional classic, News From Nowhere, a book serialised in the socialist magazine Commonweal in 1890. Though these days he is better known as a textile designer, in his day Morris was one of the pre-eminent public intellectuals of the Victorian era. He wrote books and poems. And News from Nowhere was widely read.

“Nowhere” was a reference to, and a translation of, the word “utopia,” the name of Sir Thomas More’s well-known 16th century attempt to describe heaven on Earth. But unlike More’s fictional island, situated somewhere off the coast of South America, Morris’s updated version was not a nowhere at all but based on an existing place: Kelmscott in the Cotswolds, where Morris had his much-loved country residence. The Kelmscott Press edition of News From Nowhere has an engraving of Kelmscott Manor on the cover next to the words: “This is a picture of the old house on the Thames to which the people of this story went.”

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So wherever you might be going on your holidays, I reckon I have it beat. I went to paradise. I went to Kelmscott itself. As the sun beat down, I stepped out through the reeds and swam in the Thames right by Morris’s house, which is currently undergoing extensive refurbishment. My family went for country walks down shady lanes. We drank in The Plough Inn. “There is no need to lock the car door,” a local drinker informed me: “we don’t have crime round here.” The only sound in the air was that of nature and the gentle waft of cricket commentary coming from a neighbourly radio. Yes, paradise.

But I have bad news for William Morris, bad news from nowhere as it were: lovely place though Kemscott undoubtedly is, it is absolutely not a socialist paradise.

This is socialism only for those that can afford it. Zoopla informs me that, despite a recent dip in prices, the average cost of a house in the village is over £700,000 – that’s the average! This is where David Cameron was MP and it remains a Tory stronghold. Every other car is a Range Rover. Kate Moss and Gary Barlow come to the pub here from their country residences in the next village along. And only a little further afield, the whole social buzz of the Chipping Norton/Burford sets — the English version of the Hamptons — are known for some of the most extravagant, celebrity-studded, cocaine-fuelled parties ever thrown in this country. Forget socialist paradise, think The Great Gatsby.

William Morris always hated the fact that his wallpaper designs were loved by the middle and upper classes. He may have come from a wealthy bourgeoise family himself and was educated at public school and Oxford, but his commitment to socialism was real, if a little paternalistic. He read Marx. He got arrested at demonstrations. He employed working-class boys from Euston in his studio to produce the wallpapers that made his name. But his life was unmistakably one of privilege. And it really bothered him that he was becoming the great guru of middle-class taste. So if William Guest – or Morris himself – were to wake from sleep in the early 21st century, he would be appalled. Morris would also probably be appalled that Kelmscott Manor is being restored. He founded a society to campaign against restoration.

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Despite News From Nowhere and its quasi science fiction fantasy, Morris was always more concerned with the past than the future. And unlike many of his contemporaries, it wasn’t the classical world that inspired him, but medieval England. For Morris, this was the pre-lapsarian paradise, full of guilds and gothic spires and maypoles, a world before the fall of the industrial revolution.

Socialism, as it came to develop in this country, and especially through the Labour party and the Trade Unions, became more and more about industry and increasingly lost touch with the John Ruskin/William Morris type of anti-industrial strain. Perhaps that is why the peculiarly Tory kind of socialism that you find in this tradition exists only on the fringes of the Left, if Left it is.

John Ruskin — Morris’ greatest political and aesthetic influence — described himself as both a Tory and a Communist. He claimed “a most sincere love of kings, and a dislike of everybody who attempted to disobey them” and yet also declared himself the “reddest of the red” – though his communism was decidedly old-school, less Paris Commune, more Acts of the Apostles. Ruskin believed that men and women had been alienated from their labour and ripped off by rapacious capitalism. This is the tradition out of which the present Red Tory/Blue Labour movements develop: socially conservative, economically redistributive. Its enemy is liberalism in all its forms, both the social liberalism of the Left and the economic liberalism of the Right.

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And this, roughly speaking, is my political tradition too. But it is often misunderstood. It is, for example, a completely different thing – chalk and cheese different – from the so-called “Tory socialism” the Telegraph wrote about the other day. The article described how wealthy property developers are seeking a Covid bailout from the government. These are the people who live by the principles of laissez faire economics but are magically converted to “bail-outs” when it suits them, and they are rightly to be chastised. But they are not Tories. And it does slightly bother me that the Telegraph, of all papers, has got this one wrong.

Tories should not be confused with the rich or the business class. Real Tories believe in God, Queen and country traditionalism, they are Brexity by instinct, and ever so slightly look down upon the nouveau riche obsession that the middle classes have with money — just as true Cotswold Tories are probably just a little embarrassed by the showy extravagances of the whole Chipping Norton set.

Tories are not natural capitalists. Tories are farmers and country squires. Of course, they too need to pay the bills — so they have nothing against making money. But, to them, capitalism is not a matter of core doctrine. What they really believe in is the same land, lanes, pubs and churches that Morris did. And so this sort Toryism is a natural bedfellow of the Morris/Ruskin kind of agrarian socialism — they might sleep uncomfortably together perhaps, but would have a solid respect one for the other.

Kelmscott church – dedicated to St George, who else – is where Morris is buried. One hundred and thirty years on, the area may not look like Morris hoped it would, but it is not the Tories who have ruined it. This is Notting Hill in Hunter wellies. And these people are, broadly speaking, natural liberals, often both socially and economically. All his life, William Morris feared that his work would be appropriated by the forces of liberal capitalism. And nowhere is this fear more realised that here, in the place of his burial, in the very heart of the English Eden.

It’s a question being asked with renewed urgency at the moment. Is there a way of being Labour that doesn’t fall into the centrist liberalism of the TIG’s new breakaway party – “Blairites” has understandably become a term of abuse – yet one that avoids the excesses of the Marxist analysis?

A possibility could lie in the retrieval of one of the original strands of Labour’s historic formation, now almost forgotten: that of moral socialism. And there can be no better figure to remind us of that once important aspect of Labour socialism than the economic historian and educationalist R H Tawney – a Labour man to his core, and one described by his biographer, Laurence Goldman in his biography The Life of RH Tawney: Socialism and History, as “the most influential theorist and exponent of socialism in Britain in the twentieth century”.

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It was nearly a century ago that Tawney, described the empty moral centre of capitalism in his classic The Acquisitive Society (1920):

“To the strong it promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it makes the individual the centre of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences.”

Tawney is often described as a Christian socialist, though he wore his Anglo-Catholic faith lightly in public. For him, socialism was primarily a moral project; one, above all, concerned with the moral betterment of all of society. His quarrel with Marxism, and indeed with the utilitarianism of the Fabians too, was that both were unremittingly materialist in outlook, concerned with the redistribution of wealth – something of which he wholeheartedly approved – but without any accompanying interrogation of what money was supposed to be for and the part it played in a fulfilled life.

There is something “devilish”, Tawney insisted, in the idea that “human life, justice etc should be measured as items on a balance sheet”. Like Ruskin, one of his great heroes, Tawney maintained a distinction between wealth and “illth”, as Ruskin called it – the sort of wealth that is not conducive to human flourishing.

“It will be said ‘abolish economic privileges, and there will be enough wealth for all to live, and for all to lead a spiritual life’. This, I take it, is the Webbs’ view. Now economic privileges must be abolished, not primarily because they hinder the production of wealth, but because they produce wickedness.”

In his Commonplace Book (or diary, kept between 1912 and 1914) Tawney also attacks “Marxian socialists” as “not revolutionary enough”. Goldman explains: “By this he meant that they too accepted the conventional ends of life and merely argued over the distribution of spoils.”

Not that Tawney drew back from the need for wholesale redistribution of wealth or from a thoroughgoing egalitarianism. Indeed, he was among the first to recognise that capitalism cleverly seeks to buy off revolutionary politics with the offer of social mobility – the “golden prize” – for a few clever and talented individuals.

For Tawney, social mobility was “merely converting into doctors, barristers and professors a certain number of people who would otherwise have been manual workers” (The Radical Tradition, 1964) – something that is fair enough for those who get ahead, but as a substitute for social justice it is woefully inadequate, since it leaves the underlying structures of inequality fundamentally intact.[1. Professor Diane Reay from the University of Cambridge has done important work in this area.]

As an academic historian, Tawney argued that rot set in way back in the 17th century.

In his classic study, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922), Tawney described how Calvinists transformed Christianity from a religion that, from its very beginnings, had been (in theory, at least) thoroughly suspicious of money and material wealth into one in which being rich became a mark of inner virtue. For these puritans, wealth was understood as the consequence of hard work and thrift, of Christian asceticism. And thus it became an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace: salvation.

“The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, ‘What shall it profit a man?’ carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.” (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism)

This, argued Tawney, was a pivotal moment in social and economic history – and a disastrous one – his reference to “less enlightened ages” is sarcasm. The world of the middle ages, founded on God and the institutions of the church, ideologically suspicious of individual wealth and its corrupting power, was transformed into the beginnings of modernity where the individual is king and money is the mark of his or her majesty.

Mr Morgan Phillips, when he was General Secretary of the Labour Party, said that the Labour movement “owed more to Methodism than to Marx”. It was an unhelpful and misleading comment. Methodism took many of the Puritan assumptions for granted.

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Rather, it was the Anglo-Catholic/Gothic revival of the 19th century that provided Labour with many of its core values. John Ruskin, William Morris, Charles Gore, F D Maurice and so on – these were the key thinkers. They shared a sense that that the reformation – and the subsequent industrialisation of capitalism that it paved the way for – had broken a whole way of life in which human beings were understood as flourishing within a settled stable and mutually supportive community. They looked back to a world of guilds and collectives, where economic activity was not divorced from a sense of social good and moral purpose. And it was Tawney who became their most eloquent spokesman:

“The revolt of ordinary men against Capitalism has had its source neither in its obvious deficiencies as an economic engine, nor in the conviction that it represents a stage in social evolution now outgrown, but in the straight-forward hatred of a system which stunts personality and corrupts human relations by permitting the use of man by man as an instrument of pecuniary gain.” (The Radical Tradition, 1964)

Can any of this be revived? Or is it a world lost forever? Frank Field is the most obvious inheritor of this tradition. And Blue Labour has its roots here too, though it is rightly more ecumenical in scale. It may be that, as both a churchman and a socialist, I look back with an unhelpful nostalgia to a time when Christianity played a greater role in the thinking of the Left.

But trying, if I can, to set such personal preferences aside, it still strikes me that the Labour party could do with a moral revival of the sort described by Tawney. It certainly needs a moral revival of some sort. “Tawney reminds us that there was a socialism that aspired to ‘the higher life,’” writes Goldman. It would be hard to say that of socialism today.

Max Weber has an influential addendum to this story: that Calvinism came to think of hard work and thrift as indicators of a life that is saved by God. And as such, the characteristics of a financially successful life became fused with a particular understanding of religious piety – hence the Protestant work ethic. Others have argued that it was Catholicism, and specifically patterns of financial stewardship developed by the late medieval monasteries, that produced a concern for financial efficiency that reflected many of the later concerns of capitalism.

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But whatever the variations on this general account, the basic problem is that capitalism didn’t exist during that time period. Capitalism, both as a word and as a developed idea, is a product of the mid-nineteenth century. Even Adam Smith, writing in the eighteenth century, wasn’t really discussing capitalism as such. His concern was with markets and commercial society more generally.

If you want to understand the relationship between capitalism and Christianity, therefore, you have to look at a much shorter time frame – which also has the advantage of helping to avoid some of the soggy generalisations that characterise many of the more familiar approaches to this subject.

Capitalism, in anything like the form we now know it, is something that came into being in Britain around the 1840’s and 50’s with the introduction into law of the stock company as an independent legal personality, and with the idea of limited liability.

The idea that individuals could group together and pool their capital for common commercial enterprise was itself nothing new. The East India Company was given a Royal Charter by Elizabeth I in 1600 for this very purpose. But it was the legal protections afforded by the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 and the Limited Liability Act 1855 that created the private company as we now know it. Coupled with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, this was the period when old style state mercantilism gave way to free enterprise driven by private interest.

The hostility to the Corn Laws – and to import duties more generally – was led and financed by non-conformist mill owners in the North West who attacked the established church as benefiting from corn prices kept artificially high by the imposition of duties on cheaper imports. The tithes that the clergy of the established church were able to collect from their parish were based on the average price of corn over seven years, and so they, along with the agricultural landowners, had a financial interest in maintaining import duties.

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But the Church of England was more than just a high Tory alliance between church and the landed aristocracy. For it was during this period that a theological revolution was taking place within the Church of England, namely the Oxford Movement. Originally a reaction against the growing forces of Whig secularism – the government’s decision to reduce the number of Irish bishops was the spark that ignited it – the Oxford Movement sought to re-introduce into the Church of England an emphasis on the importance of liturgy and the beauty of holiness.

This led to many being distrusted by a broadly evangelical church leadership, with the consequence that Oxford Movement clergy were denied the best livings and forced to work in the slums. And it was as a result of this association that the Oxford Movement came to develop a particular concern for social justice, having a ring side view of the impact that industrialisation was having on mid-nineteenth century Britain.

Conservative in nature, the Oxford Movement looked back to local forms of association that were thriving in the middle ages – the parish, the guilds, the historic connection between people and place – and contrasted this with the dark satanic mills of industrialisation, and particularly the free movement of labour which created social dislocation.

Those broadly of this group all had things to say about the so-called ‘Condition of England’ problem, and were generally highly scathing in their condemnations of industrial capitalism as creating a new form of urban poverty, with the poor cut off from their traditional forms of support. In other words, the earliest Christian critique of Capitalism originated from a broadly conservative, not progressive, perspective.

One such was John Ruskin who in 1860 published Unto This Last, a reference to the “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” from Matthew’s Gospel. It was perhaps the first ever specific attack upon capitalist economics from a Christian perspective and generated much outright hostility from the general public.

Ruskin argued that all deserve a basic level of pay irrespective of their contribution to the economy. Credited with anticipating the welfare state, Ruskin was also developing ones of the earliest critiques of the labour market from a Christian perspective. The capitalist economics of his day was “the most cretinous, speechless, paralysing plague that has yet touched the brains of mankind” wrote Ruskin. And Adam Smith was a “half-bred and half-witted Scotchman” who had taught the “deliberate blasphemy” that “thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods”.

Among the various criticisms Ruskin had of the economic practices of his day, one of his most serious charges was that the division of labour inherent in the basic efficiency gains of the capitalist working model led to the worker being distanced and thus alienated from the overall purpose of his task.

On this, Smith and Ruskin agree. Where they differ, however, is on the whole subject of human motivation. Adam Smith may only have used the phrase once in The Wealth of Nations, but his “invisible hand” is the holy ghost of capitalism.

Self regard – or “self love” as Smith prefers – is the animating spirit that benefits all through the beneficial effects of trade. The idea that “self-love” can be a powerful force for good is at the heart of the moral defence of capitalism. Christians, however, will always be suspicious, pointing out, as Ruskin does, that it can produce as much “ilth” (Ruskin’s invented word for the opposite of wealth) as it does wealth. And those who maintain a robust commitment to original sin and human depravity will always be suspicious of a system driven along by so corrupted an engine. Capitalism, in contrast, is confident that it can harness the energy of selfishness for public benefit.

There is much more to say about all of this. Churches like the Church of England are generally in no position to mount an all out attack on capitalism, benefiting as they do from substantial investment portfolios. Oxford Movement radicalism has given way to an acceptance of the broad principles of the capitalist project. At most, the churches seek to moderate the worst excesses of greed and injustice – but have little to say about the nature of capitalism per se. And here, it seems, the Church has surrendered its principles too quickly.

Because Christianity and capitalism differ very substantially when it comes to their respective attitudes towards human motivation. For Christianity, “self-love” is dangerous stuff. Indeed, for many theologians, it is precisely that from which we need saving. The great aim of Christianity is to transfer the centre of interest from self to others.

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The experience of the 2008 banking crisis and the fact that the state had to spend hundreds of billions of pounds of public money to bail out reckless corporations that had been driven to excess by private greed suggests, at the very least, that the confidence that capitalism has in the moral safety of Smith’s “self love” ought to be thought through once again.

Capitalism has continued to change since it was invented not yet two centuries ago. But the human beings that power it remain very much the same. And when it comes to human beings themselves, Christianity may have the more realistic appraisal. Are they compatible? I fear not. For I suspect that the dangers of “self-love” will one day overpower all the undoubted good that capitalism does in bringing many out of poverty. Smith thought the market could be held in check by the exercise of his very residual Presbyterian values. In reality, however, he contributed to their erosion. And a market without values, driven by “self-love”, will eventually destroy itself.