Abstract
This article sets Christianity and Social Order into the context of William Temple’s contemporaries at Balliol College, with a focus on Beveridge and Tawney, and Arnold Toynbee in a previous generation. It explores who first developed the concept of the ‘welfare state’.
William Temple and William Beveridge laid the intellectual foundations of the ‘welfare state’ with their famous 1942 publications, neither of which mentioned that expression. Temple had coined the term, rendering it as ‘Welfare-State’, in the 1920s. Beveridge disliked its connotations, preferring national or social insurance. In celebrating the eightieth anniversary of Temple’s Christianity and Social Order and the Beveridge Report, it is timely to reflect on their influences.
It helps to see Temple and Beveridge alongside R. H. Tawney, the foremost Christian Socialist thinker. All three were students at Balliol College, Oxford, at the turn of the twentieth century. This trio also links to a Balliol student from the 1870s, who became a lecturer and fellow there. Arnold Toynbee invented the phrase ‘Industrial Revolution’. Tawney, Beveridge and Temple all lived and worked in Toynbee Hall in London, in the years after their time at Balliol. The Hall was named after Arnold Toynbee because he epitomized its spirit of privileged students living alongside and seeking to support, while learning from, the poorest in society.
This ethos was part of the reform movement in universities in the Victorian era, especially in Balliol, where Benjamin Jowett became a student in 1836, a fellow in 1840 and master in 1870, serving until his death in 1893. By the time Toynbee came up, Jowett’s Balliol had the outstanding Idealist philosopher T. H. Green as a fellow. Jowett and Green cultivated a liberal Christian ethos.
Peter Hinchliff notes that: William Temple died in 1944, almost exactly a hundred years after Jowett and Stanley had set out on their campaign to make the university of Oxford conform, even in the study of theology, to the principle that education was an enquiry after truth not the transmission of correct answers.
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New ideas are normally produced by unimportant people; the holders of important posts disseminate the ideas they acquired in their comparatively unimportant youth.
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At Oxford in the early 1880s the historian Arnold Toynbee lectured to large audiences on the evils wrought by the ‘Industrial Revolution’ (a concept newly invented by Toynbee at this time) and on the falsity of the mechanistic equation between public and private interests proclaimed by Adam Smith. Toynbee’s teaching led many of his hearers very easily into the orbit of the idealist system of political philosophy taught by the Balliol philosopher T. H. Green.
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Education of the citizen. By this I mean the education of each member of the community as regards the relation in which he stands to other individual citizens, and to the community as a whole … Only through associations like yours can effective citizenship-education be given to the great masses of the working people.
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As I sat on that Sunday afternoon in the chapel, one of the few women among the crowd of strong-brained, clean-living men, the thought flashed to me: ‘Let us call the Settlement Toynbee Hall.’
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R. H. Tawney, born in Calcutta, came to Balliol from Rugby school in 1899, studying History, and then lived and worked in Toynbee Hall. He followed Toynbee’s commitment to the co-operative movement and was one of the pioneers of the similar Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). He fought in the First World War, which affected him deeply. He wrote famously about equality. He taught workers around the country before settling into a long career at the LSE. Tawney was on a committee chaired by A. L. Smith, then master of Balliol, on adult education for the Ministry of Reconstruction after the war, largely drafting its 1919 report. Tawney gave the inaugural Henry Scott Holland lectures at King’s College London exactly 100 years ago. Canon Scott Holland was another Balliol-educated giant of Christian social reform. In 1926, he published those 1922 lectures as Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. 9 Tawney was a committed Christian and the intellectual powerhouse of the left in British politics. He read Temple’s Christianity and Social Order in draft.
Pimlott, writing a history of Toynbee Hall in 1935, reports: An interesting experiment in 1905 was an attempt to organize a course of study which would arise directly out of the lives of the students. In the winter term two residents, Tawney and Beveridge, lectured concurrently on the ‘Social Aspects of Industry’ and ‘Labour and the Law’, and in the spring term Graham Wallas gave a course on the ‘Government of an English City’, accompanied by a tutorial class conducted by the lecturers of the previous term.
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Beveridge worked in the civil service throughout the First World War, not being medically fit to enlist. He was knighted for his contributions as a government economist, becoming director of the LSE in 1919 and master of University College, Oxford, in 1937. Like Tawney and Temple, Beveridge found reports an influential way of reforming society. In the Second World War, Beveridge’s report on Social Insurance and Allied Services captured the public’s imagination by identifying and linking the five giant evils which the welfare state was intended to slay: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. 11 A summary was translated and air-dropped behind enemy lines, explaining the kind of future for which the Allies, whose model Temple called the Welfare-State, were fighting, boosting morale at home and, to judge by the reactions of senior Nazis, undermining the morale of the Power-State. Two copies were found in Hitler’s bunker.
William Temple knew Tawney when they were both pupils at Rugby. He met Beveridge at Balliol, coming up in 1900, a year after Tawney and Beveridge. Temple was president of the Oxford Union, followed his first in Greats with an Oxford fellowship, and went on to Toynbee Hall. He was ordained a priest in 1909 and officiated at Tawney’s wedding to Jeannette Beveridge.
Temple became the first president of the WEA in 1908, serving until 1924. He was invited to become headmaster of Repton in 1910. He married Frances Anson in 1916, becoming Bishop of Manchester in 1921, Archbishop of York in 1929 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942. He died in 1944. He was prolific in preaching, speaking, writing, convening and chairing groups, and drafting reports.
Historians and theologians have struggled to decide if Temple coined the phrase ‘welfare state’. There are three books to consider and it is significant that each was the second in a series. Temple naturally varied what he said or wrote depending on the context of the invitation.
The historian Peter Hennessy is wrong in Never Again to say that William Temple first used ‘welfare state’ in 1941 in Citizen and Churchman and so was not the first to coin the term because Zimmern had used it in 1934 and Schuster in 1937.
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In Christ in All Things, Stephen Spencer points out that Temple first deployed the term in his Scott Holland lectures in 1928, published that same year as Christianity and the State, dedicated ‘To my friend, R. H. Tawney’.
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This is when Temple contrasted a Welfare-State with a Power-State. Why this odd format, with capital letters and a hyphen? In the wake of Russia’s war on, and invasion of, Ukraine, it is worth examining this contrast between the two kinds of states, which in turn makes it important to note the dates and to understand the context of the different publications. In his 1928 lectures, Temple explained that the First World War: was a struggle between the idea of the State as essentially Power – Power over its own community and against other communities – and of the State as the organ of community, maintaining its solidarity by law designed to safeguard the interests of the community. The Power-State might have yielded to sheer pressure of circumstances in course of time; but it is contrary to the psychology of the Power-State to suffer conversion; it was likely to fight before it let a Welfare-State take its place.
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Temple explains in the 1941 book Citizen and Churchman that it was the second in another series. He created this one himself and invited the then master of Balliol (later Lord) Lindsay to speak first. The Two Moralities was the inaugural Archbishop of York’s Lenten Talk in 1940. 16 In Citizen and Churchman, Temple’s sequel again mentions the idea of a Welfare-State, arguing that if certain Christian presuppositions (as you might expect in a Lenten Talk) are accepted, ‘in place of the conception of the Power-State we are led to that of the Welfare-State’. 17
The third of these books, Christianity and Social Order, was published early the following year, 1942, when he became the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was commissioned when he was still Archbishop of York – which is how he is described on the front cover. He explains in the preface that it was intended by the publishers, Penguin, as a companion volume to Christianity and World Order, by George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, published in 1940. This explains both the title’s reference to social order (rather than ‘the State’ or ‘the Welfare-State’ or ‘Society’) and why Temple did not concentrate here on his prescient Welfare-State versus Power-State analysis of international (dis)order. Bell’s book having addressed the world order, Temple – now as archbishop – took time instead to justify the Church’s right at home to contribute to progressive thinking, even so early in the war, about the reconstruction and reform of social order on the assumption of an Allied victory.
The first four footnotes in Christianity and Social Order all refer to Tawney, the fifth to Beveridge for his 1909 book Unemployment, and it is only in the sixth that he goes beyond Balliol to a text of St John’s (the Gospel, not the neighbouring college). Later footnotes draw on Tawney.
In sum, the welfare state is an expression of faith in society. The fact that Temple initially portrayed it as the ‘Welfare-State’ was not an aberration but showed the values which were worth fighting for, against Power-States, as now in Ukraine’s defence against the war being waged by the Power-State of Russia.
Finally, the genius of this quartet illustrates what I call a Paradoxbridge principle: the deeper the influence a college proves to have in your later life, the less likely you were to have noticed it when it was first happening. This is why the distinctive ethos of Jowett’s Balliol, or of any intermediate institution, matters and can make a difference after 80, 100 or 200 years.