Isn’t it boring? No wonder people prefer to watch bogus videos about voter fraud, or join their local Black Trans Lives Matter protest, when the alternative is this kind of technocratic tedium. Yes, we need 143-page think-tank reports and ingenious policy wonkery and “cross-government data architecture” and all that. But eventually you want something which inspires, something which treats socio-economic questions with the beauty, drama, tragedy and pathos they deserve. You want something like the historian RH Tawney’s 1926 cult classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

We hear a lot at the moment about the prospect of a more communitarian society, which acknowledges that we have responsibilities as well as rights. In Tawney’s book this is not just a theory, but a vision. For the medieval mind, he writes,

The property of the feudal lord, the labour of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation, and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasise that they had undergone a rededication at the hands of religion. Baptised by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.

I too had to Google it: Ithuriel is an angel in Paradise Lost whose spear instantly uncovers the reality behind a disguise – “for no falsehood can endure / Touch of celestial temper”. For Tawney, the medieval order revealed the truth of social relations. The rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, are shown to be part of one human society, in which we owe each other justice and love.

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Maybe this makes him sound like one of those sentimentalists who imagine the Middle Ages as an era of cheerful peasants, dignified craft guilds, virtuous monks and splendid cathedrals. Not so. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism describes the feudal system as “exploitation in its most naked and shameless form”. Guilds, Tawney writes, were monopolistic schemes, often corrupt, and the vast majority of workers weren’t members in any case. Catholics who want to praise the glories of Christendom will have to reckon with the fact that the pinnacle of financial immorality was the Vatican. As for the cathedrals, Tawney quotes St Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the greatest spiritual master of the time: “The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.”

And yet… there was, Tawney argues, “a certain tarnished splendour” to the Middle Ages. The Church, as its central institution, stood for “the ideal, at least, of social solidarity,” and upheld two fundamental points: “that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding.”

Tawney admits that these lofty notions were endlessly flouted. But not always. Church law levelled heavy penalties, including excommunication, against usurers who exploited the vulnerable. Institutions like the Mounts of Piety enabled the poor to borrow money and goods without incurring ruinous debts. Social stigma and the law often worked on the side of economic justice: businessmen who formed cartels or drove up prices might easily find themselves in the courts — or in the stocks.

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“At every turn,” Tawney writes, there were “limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs.” Of course, there are “limits, restrictions, warnings” that set the boundaries of economic life in 2020. But they hardly derive from a coherent moral framework. The World Economic Foundation, home of the “Great Reset”, may believe that neoliberalism should be abandoned, but it is also keen to assure us that “The Great Reset … is not a revolution or a shift to some new ideology.” (The horror — imagine, a new worldview!) “Rather, it should be seen as a pragmatic step toward a more resilient, cohesive, and sustainable world.” Not much moral, let alone spiritual, idealism here. For the WEF economic reform is just another way to “meet systemic global challenges,” to quote the soul-crushing bureaucratese.

The word “reset”, often used this year by both Left and Right, itself makes society sound like an electronic device, not a living, breathing community of people torn between passionate virtues and vices. Like so much political language, it colours the world in grey. Parts of Liz Truss’s speech on inequality the other day were quite sensible. But it was hardly inspiring. The government is committed, apparently, to “delivering fairness through modernisation, increased choice and openness”. Fairness is not an urgent moral demand or a dream of solidarity, but yet another solution to be “delivered” via the most useful apps.

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A different idea of fairness appears in a prayer for landlords, quoted by Tawney, which was included in a prayer book issued by King Edward VI in 1553: “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes after the manner of covetous worldlings; but so let them out to others, that the inhabitants thereof may… be able truly to pay the rents.”

A political question — housing inequality — is here treated both on practical terms, and as part of a cosmos illuminated by spiritual realities.

There are some hints at a moral and spiritual awakening today: in the urgent rhetoric of the new socialists, in the rise of quasi-spiritual leaders like Jordan Peterson, in parts of the environmental movement, in the increasingly blurred lines between religion and politics, even in the furious exchanges of the culture wars. But they are only hints. It’s been rightly said that the big question of politics today is Who are we? Another question lurks around the corner: What kind of universe do we live in?

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.