He was inspired and stood ideologically close to the ideas of the Fabian Society and the Guild Socialism and inspired by people like R. H. Tawney, L.T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson.
Adrian Hastings wrote: “Behind the list of major publications was the mind of a man tirelessly guiding government, Labour movement, Church and academic community towards a new society, at once fully democratic, consciously socialistic and fully in accord with Christian belief. In effective intellectual terms it is doubtful whether anyone else had remotely comparable influence in the evolution of British society in his generation”.
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Tawney “bemoaned the division between commerce and social morality brought about by the Protestant Reformation, leading as it did to the subordination of Christian teaching to the pursuit of material wealth”.
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In 1919, he and Sidney Webb were among the trade union side representatives on the First Royal Commission on the Coal Mining Industry, chaired by Sir John Sankey.
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He served at the Battle of the Somme (1916), where he was wounded twice on the first day and had to lie in no man's land for 30 hours until a medical officer evacuated him.
R. H. Tawney (1880–1962), English writer, economist, and historian