"With great regret I am coming to think increasingly that there is not a single work which Tawney wrote which can be trusted. I think that in all his work he was so dominated by his preconceptions, unconsciously (well, partly unconsciously), that everything he wrote was written to a propaganda purpose. And the result has been very drastic. People won't believe this, but when the historian comes to write – if an historian still comes to write – an intellectual history of the early twentieth century, Tawney will be one of the figures he will really have to concern himself with. Not Toynbee, whose influence is neither here nor there (not in this country at any rate). Not Maitland, who carried very little influence in the public mind, even indirectly. But Tawney, who wrote for a purpose – wrote beautifully, and wrote history which was in great parts – I am looking for a polite word – in great parts mistaken. And it was mistaken because he meant it to be so, though he didn't know this. He was proving a point."
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Historians from EnglandAcademics from EnglandSocial criticsEconomists from EnglandEducators from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
Geoffrey Elton, The Future of the Past: An Inaugural Lecture (1968), in Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (1991), p. 86
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._H._Tawney
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R. H. Tawney
Richard Henry Tawney (30 November 1880 – 16 January 1962) was an English academic, economist, historian, and a leading advocate of Christian socialism.
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