He was educated at Rugby School, arriving on the same day as William Temple, a future Archbishop of Canterbury; they remained friends for life.

[14] After graduating from Oxford in 1903, he and his friend William Beveridge lived at Toynbee Hall, then the home of the recently formed Workers' Educational Association (WEA).

[17] For three years from January 1908, Tawney taught the first Workers' Educational Association tutorial classes at Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, and Rochdale, Lancashire.

[18] For a time, until he moved to Manchester after marrying Jeannette (William Beveridge's sister and a Somerville graduate), Tawney was working as part-time economics lecturer at Glasgow University.

"The friendly smitings of weavers, potters, miners and engineers, have taught me much about the problem of political and economic sciences which cannot easily be learned from books".

He had initially opposed the war on political grounds, however he decided to enlist following reports of atrocities committed during the German Army's invasion of Belgium.

In 1918, he largely wrote Christianity and Industrial Problems, the fifth report (the other four were on more ecclesiastical matters) from a Church of England commission which included a number of bishops.

He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the 16th and 17th centuries and in Max Weber's thesis on the connection between the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism.

Tawney "bemoaned the division between commerce and social morality brought about by the Protestant Reformation, leading as it did to the subordination of Christian teaching to the pursuit of material wealth".

Both works reflected Tawney's Christian moral values, "exercised a profound influence" in Britain and abroad, and "anticipated the Welfare state".

Nevertheless, the same author also argues that "Tawney's importance lies in his ability to propose a malleable yet coherent socialist philosophy which transcends any particular political situation.

In 1919, he and Sidney Webb were among the trade union side representatives on the Royal Commission on the Coal Mining Industry, chaired by Sir John Sankey.

[27] Geoffrey Foote has claimed that Tawney's importance in the realm of political thought, and his contribution to the Labour Party, cannot be overestimated.

However, the reforms in the social services which were eventually to be put into effect by the 1945 Labour government took place within the confines of the acquisitive society condemned by Tawney.

[42] Leveraging his base among intellectuals in the Labour Party, he spent years in making a lasting impact on democratising higher education.