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[Douglas Haig] isn't talked about so much these days. His name comes up, if at all, when people show their decency and buy their poppies. Yet in what remains of folk memory, with only a handful of very old men still surviving, the First World War has begun to sound like some vast act of God. Hitler's war, the just war, still has its rationale more than six decades on. But how did an archduke's murder ever make 1.2 million deaths on the Somme seem inevitable? Then there was R H Tawney, the great Christian socialist, a man who refused a commission in order to serve with the ordinary soldiers of the Manchester Pals. After 30 hours lying wounded in noman's-land, Tawney had the luck to go on to provide the philosophical arguments for the welfare state. Talk about the Somme, nevertheless, and you end up talking in numbers. Somehow, only the statistics can contain the collective experience that demands remembrance. The 2nd Middlesex: of 800 men, 540 were killed or wounded.

A committed socialist, Professor [R H Tawney] wrote the Labour Party's manifesto in 1929 and several influential political works, including Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and The Acquisitive Society. Professor Tawney tried to enter Parliament twice, but was unsuccessful. He was invited to join the Upper House in 1962 but declined the offer of a peerage, asking, \"What harm have I ever done to the Labour Party?\" Tawney advocated the extension of social services and the social role of industry. His work influenced social thought at the time, particularly in the Labour Party and, although he died in 1962, his ideas can still be recognised in some of the party's more recent social policy.

At a time when most encounters were face-to-face, it was possible to lead a moral economic life simply by extrapolating from the injunction to love one's neighbour, but a revolution in manufacturing, finance and trade made this extrapolation less possible. \"Granted that I should love my neighbour as myself,\" [R. H. Tawney] wrote, \"the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organisation, remain for solution are, 'Who precisely is my neighbour?' and, 'How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice?' To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realised that they could be put.\" Tawney, an activist in the Labour party, believed the period between Machiavelli and the English Revolution had a lot to teach his own time. Maybe it has more to teach ours, since it was marked by a \"sweeping redistribution of wealth\" and an \"orgy of interested misgovernment\", not to mention its \"reassertion of the traditional doctrines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion\", in the face of a world that was rendering them irrelevant. Usury was a general term meaning \"taking advantage\". We dismiss those who were obsessed with it at considerable peril to our own business ethics. \"If the medieval moralist was often too naive in expecting sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone,\" Tawney wrote, \"he was at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or from their opposite.\" In this light we can see that Fairtrade, promoters of socially responsible investing, activists for sustainable development and the micro credit movement are all groping towards a workable, tolerant, enforceable modern doctrine of usury.

Labor in China,'' published in 1932, R. H. Tawney likened the rural Chinese to a man standing up to his neck in water and leading a life so precarious ''that even a single ripple is sufficient to drown him.'' In recent years few foreigners have had Tawney's opportunity to observe rural China personally at any length. Steven W. Mosher, a Sinologist and anthropologist, fluent in two dialects of Chinese, is one of the rare ones. In ''Broken Earth,'' a tough-minded account of rural China, the result of more than a year of field research in southern Guangdong Province, Mr. Mosher portrays a peasantry hardly better off than that described by Tawney. That conclusion is striking if only because, as Mr. Mosher observes, it is ''the paramount myth of the Chinese revolution'' that Communist rule, whatever it has done in other areas of life, has produced great strides in the countryside where 80 percent of China's one billion people live. Mr. Mosher writes that well into his stay in China, he too believed in this ''paramount myth.'' On his second night in the village where he stayed, he was visited by Lao Baixing, an elderly village official, who enumerated the elements in the alleged transformation of rural life by the revolution: station, guaranteed rice rations, elimination of the exploiting landlord class, among other things. What he has to say about the birth control program in ''Broken Earth'' is indicated by the title of his chapter on it: ''Birth Control: A Grim Game of Numbers.'' Mr. Mosher describes China's Malthusian dilemma. In the Sandhead Production Brigade, where he lived, there had been a population increase of 130 percent in 27 years and the land under cultivation amounted to only one-sixth of an acre per person. Yet the population control program, as it was implemented there, seemed to contain many of the excesses and abuses of earlier mass campaigns in China. Zealous local leaders, eager to show success to their superiors, bludgeoned local resistance out of existence. Mr. Mosher describes a visit he made to an abortion clinic during one of the ''high tides,'' during which women who have become pregnant in defiance of state plans are encouraged to have abortions. The women in the clinic, Mr. Mosher says, were in ''physical and mental anguish.'' He reports on a meeting between pregnant women and party leaders who, cajoling and threatening, told the women that they really have no choice about having an abortion.

The work & thought of R. H. Tawney before WWI is explored. Tawney's commitment to a more democratic educ found its embodiment in the newly founded Workers' Educ'al Assoc, of which he became a part in 1905 & which he helped develop. It was clear to Tawney that a class-ridden system of educ, catering to the more fortunate citizens, was a reflection as well as a major cause of society's soc problems. English educ was corrupt to the extent that it was bound by the values of capitalist materialism. Tawney's contact with & involvement in working men's lives are described. Human relationships based on the principles of service & human dignity were at the heart of Tawney's pre-WW1 vision of socialism. Ideas were real things to him, powerful factors the neglect of which distorted any true idea of historical change & conflict. What had changed in the pre-war yrs was not the material world, but rather the way men approached pol'al issues. The causes of widespread suffering & oppression were rooted, Tawney argued, in the development of British industr society. Soc conflict arose, in Tawney's view, when men saw oppression in the same way that they saw sin, that is, as a violation of moral standards which applied to groups as well as to individuals. The way out of econ & pol'al strife was to develop a set of ideas to which all men could subscribe regardless of their work or wealth. It is concluded that this early pol'al theory of Tawney was far more useful as a critique of contemporary soc thought & policy than as a basis for programmatic action. It was abstract, neglected the process by which rhetoric turns into pol'al action, & obscured the complex ethical problems implicit in all pol'al action. M. Maxfield.

Richard Henry Tawney (1880-1962) was an influential writer on soc policy in Britain between the world wars. He was a Christian Socialist preaching an ethical, democratic egalitarianism philosophy & a sense of community. A cult of participation & fellowship dominated his thought on econ org, po1, & culture. He defined the purpose of society as personal self-fulfillment, which he interpreted as a process of spiritual development. He protested against the materialism of the acquisitive society. He rejected the idea of absolute rights in favor of conditional rights derived from their functions in society. He insisted that rights be effective claims, not negative permissions. He urged the Church to offer moral witness in defining standards & goals. As an econ historian he sought to undermine the prestige of capitalism. As president of the Workers' Educ'al Assoc (WEA) he sought to generate the soc dynamic to create a socialist society. He was not merely a radical liberal proposing a career open to talent supplemented by a nat'l minimum, the ladder & the net, as it has been called. The title of the WEA journal, the Highway, was intended as a challenge & an alternative to the elitist metaphor of the ladder. AA.

Rendel reviews English Ethical Socialism: Thomas More to R.H. Tawney by Norman Dennis and A.H. Halsey.

The roles adopted by two early twentieth century English political intellectuals are contrasted. S. Webb adopted the role of expert in the belief that the provision of information to the powrful would gain him an access to power. R. H. Tawney took up the contrasting role of social moralist. He believed that political change in a democracy depended upon the creation of a large political movement prepared to push through proposals for reform. These two positions are described in detail, based on original manuscript sources. The evidence of twentieth century British politics & sociological theory suggest that Tawney's approach did have some impact, while the work of S. Webb has been largely forgotten. Influence for an intellectual in modern democracy depends upon his adopting the role of social moralist. Modified AA.

A year after the Urban Task Force report, Stephen King pictured, policy adviser at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors assesses how much closer Britain is to an urban renaissance.