The Acquisitive Society

by R. H. Tawney

That constitution must be sought by considering how industry can be organized to express most perfectly the principle of purpose. The application to industry of the principle of purpose is simple, however difficult it may be to give effect to it. It is to turn it into a Profession. A Profession may be defined most simply as a trade which is organized, incompletely, no doubt, but genuinely, for the performance of function. It is not simply a collection of individuals who get a living for themselves by the same kind of work. Nor is it merely a group which is organized exclusively for the economic protection of its members, though that is normally among its purposes. It is a body of men who carry on their work in accordance with rules designed to enforce certain standards both for the better protection of its members and for the better service of the public. The standards which it maintains may be high or low: all professions have some rules which protect the interests of the community and others which are an imposition on it. Its essence is that it assumes certain responsibilities for the competence of its members or the quality of its wares, and that it deliberately prohibits certain kinds of conduct on the ground that, though they may be profitable to the individual, they are calculated to bring into disrepute the organization to which he belongs. While some of its rules are trade union regulations designed primarily to prevent the economic standards of the profession being lowered by unscrupulous competition, others have as their main object to secure that no member of the profession shall have any but a purely professional interest in his work, by excluding the incentive of speculative profit.

The conception implied in the words "unprofessional conduct" is, therefore, the exact opposite of the theory and practice which assume that the service of the public is best secured by the unrestricted pursuit on the part of rival traders of their pecuniary self-interest, within such limits as the law allows. It is significant that at the time when the professional classes had deified free competition as the arbiter of commerce and industry, they did not dream of applying it to the occupations in which they themselves were primarily interested, but maintained, and indeed, elaborated machinery through which a professional conscience might find expression. The rules themselves may sometimes appear to the layman arbitrary and ill-conceived. But their object is clear. It is to impose on the profession itself the obligation of maintaining the quality of the service, and to prevent its common purpose being frustrated through the undue influence of the motive of pecuniary gain upon the necessities or cupidity of the individual.

The difference between industry as it exists to-day and a profession is, then, simple and unmistakable. The essence of the former is that its only criterion is the financial return which it offers to its shareholders. The essence of the latter, is that, though men enter it for the sake of livelihood, the measure of their success is the service which they perform, not the gains which they amass. They may, as in the case of a successful doctor, grow rich; but the meaning of their profession, both for themselves and for the public, is not that they make money but that they make health, or safety, or knowledge, or good government or good law. They depend on it for their income, but they do not consider that any conduct which increases their income is on that account good. And while a boot-manufacturer who retires with half a million is counted to have achieved success, whether the boots which he made were of leather or brown paper, a civil servant who did the same would be impeached.

So, if they are doctors, they recognize that there are certain kinds of conduct which cannot be practised, however large the fee offered for them, because they are unprofessional; if scholars and teachers, that it is wrong to make money by deliberately deceiving the public, as is done by makers of patent medicines, however much the public may clamor to be deceived; if judges or public servants, that they must not increase their incomes by selling justice for money; if soldiers, that the service comes first, and their private inclinations, even the reasonable preference of life to death, second. Every country has its traitors, every army its deserters, and every profession its blacklegs. To idealize the professional spirit would be very absurd; it has its sordid side, and, if it is to be fostered in industry, safeguards will be needed to check its excesses. But there is all the difference between maintaining a standard which is occasionally abandoned, and affirming as the central truth of existence that there is no standard to maintain. The meaning of a profession is that it makes the traitors the exception, not as they are in industry, the rule. It makes them the exception by upholding as the criterion of success the end for which the profession, whatever it may be, is carried on, and subordinating the inclination, appetites and ambitions of individuals to the rules of an organization which has as its object to promote the performance of function.

There is no sharp line between the professions and the industries. A hundred years ago the trade of teaching, which to-day is on the whole an honorable public service, was rather a vulgar speculation upon public credulity; if Mr. Squeers was a caricature, the Oxford of Gibbon and Adam Smith was a solid port-fed reality; no local authority could have performed one-tenth of the duties which are carried out by a modern municipal corporation every day, because there was no body of public servants to perform them, and such as there were took bribes. It is conceivable, at least, that some branches of medicine might have developed on the lines of industrial capitalism, with hospitals as factories, doctors hired at competitive wages as their "hands," large dividends paid to shareholders by catering for the rich, and the poor, who do not offer a profitable market, supplied with an inferior service or with no service at all.

The idea that there is some mysterious difference between making munitions of war and firing them, between building schools and teaching in them when built, between providing food and providing health, which makes it at once inevitable and laudable that the former should be carried on with a single eye to pecuniary gain, while the latter are conducted by professional men who expect to be paid for service but who neither watch for windfalls nor raise their fees merely because there are more sick to be cured, more children to be taught, or more enemies to be resisted, is an illusion only less astonishing than that the leaders of industry should welcome the insult as an honor and wear their humiliation as a kind of halo. The work of making boots or building a house is in itself no more degrading than that of curing the sick or teaching the ignorant. It is as necessary and therefore as honorable. It should be at least equally bound by rules which have as their object to maintain the standards of professional service. It should be at least equally free from the vulgar subordination of moral standards to financial interests.

If industry is to be organized as a profession, two changes are requisite, one negative and one positive. The first, is that it should cease to be conducted by the agents of property-owners for the advantage of property-owners, and should be carried on, instead, for the service of the public. The second, is that, subject to rigorous public supervision, the responsibility for the maintenance of the service should rest upon the shoulders of those, from organizer and scientist to laborer, by whom, in effect, the work is conducted.

The first change is necessary because the conduct of industry for the public advantage is impossible as long as the ultimate authority over its management is vested in those whose only connection with it, and interest in it, is the pursuit of gain. As industry is at present organized, its profits and its control belong by law to that element in it which has least to do with its success. Under the joint-stock organization which has become normal in all the more important industries except agriculture, it is managed by the salaried agents of those by whom the property is owned. It is successful if it returns large sums to shareholders, and unsuccessful if it does not. If an opportunity presents itself to increase dividends by practices which deteriorate the service or degrade the workers, the officials who administer industry act strictly within their duty if they seize it, for they are the servants of their employers, and their obligation to their employers is to provide dividends not to provide service. But the owners of the property are, qua property-owners functionless, not in the sense, of course, that the tools of which they are proprietors are not useful, but in the sense that since work and ownership are increasingly separated, the efficient use of the tools is not dependent on the maintenance of the proprietary rights exercised over them. Of course there are many managing directors who both own capital and administer the business. But it is none the less the case that most shareholders in most large industries are normally shareholders and nothing more.

Nor is their economic interest identical, as is sometimes assumed, with that of the general public. A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and human beings dear: indeed the word "riches" has no other meaning. The interest of those who own the property used in industry, though not, of course, of the managers who administer industry and who themselves are servants, and often very ill-paid servants at that, is that their capital should be dear and human beings cheap. Hence, if the industry is such as to yield a considerable return, or if one unit in the industry, owing to some special advantage, produces more cheaply than its neighbors, while selling at the same price, or if a revival of trade raises prices, or if supplies are controlled by one of the combines which are now the rule in many of the more important industries, the resulting surplus normally passes neither to the managers, nor to the other employees, nor to the public, but to the shareholders. Such an arrangement is preposterous in the literal sense of being the reverse of that which would be established by considerations of equity and common sense, and gives rise (among other things) to what is called "the struggle between labor and capital." The phrase is apposite, since it is as absurd as the relations of which it is intended to be a description. To deplore "ill-feeling" or to advocate "harmony" between "labor and capital" is as rational as to lament the bitterness between carpenters and hammers or to promote a mission for restoring amity between mankind and its boots. The only significance of these clichés is that their repetition tends to muffle their inanity, even to the point of persuading sensible men that capital "employs" labor, much as our pagan ancestors imagined that the other pieces of wood and iron, which they deified in their day, sent their crops and won their battles. When men have gone so far as to talk as though their idols have come to life, it is time that some one broke them. Labor consists of persons, capital of things. The only use of things is to be applied to the service of persons. The business of persons is to see that they are there to use, and that no more than need be is paid for using them.

Thus the application to industry of the principle of function involves an alteration of proprietary rights, because those rights do not contribute, as they now are, to the end which industry exists to serve. What gives unity to any activity, what alone can reconcile the conflicting claims of the different groups engaged in it, is the purpose for which it is carried on. If men have no common goal it is no wonder that they should fall out by the way, nor are they likely to be reconciled by a redistribution of their provisions. If they are not content both to be servants, one or other must be master, and it is idle to suppose that mastership can be held in a state of suspense between the two. There can be a division of functions between different grades of workers, or between worker and consumer, and each can have in his own sphere the authority needed to enable him to fill it. But there cannot be a division of functions between the worker and the owner who is owner and nothing else, for what function does such an owner perform? The provision of capital? Then pay him the sum needed to secure the use of his capital, but neither pay him more nor admit him to a position of authority over production for which merely as an owner he is not qualified. For this reason, while an equilibrium between worker and manager is possible, because both are workers, that which it is sought to establish between worker and owner is not. It is like the proposal of the Germans to negotiate with Belgium from Brussels. Their proposals may be excellent: but it is not evident why they are where they are, or how, since they do not contribute to production, they come to be putting forward proposals at all. As long as they are in territory where they have no business to be, their excellence as individuals will be overlooked in annoyance at the system which puts them where they are.