BY R. H. TAWNEY
READER IN ECONOMIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON; SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.
TO
DR. CHARLES GORE
WITH
AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE
“Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.”
Bishop Berkeley, Siris, 350.
INTRODUCTION
The object of this book is to trace some strands in the development of religious thought on social and economic questions in the period which saw the transition from medieval to modern theories of social organization. It does not carry the subject beyond the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it makes no pretense of dealing with the history either of economic theory or of economic practice, except in so far as theory and practice were related to changes in religious opinion. In reality, however, the connection between them was intimate and vital. The revolutions, at once religious, political and social, which herald the transition from the medieval to the modern world, were hardly less decisive for the economic character of the new civilization than for its ecclesiastical organization and religious doctrines. The economic categories of modern society have their roots in the economic expansion and social convulsions which accompanied the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation.