Resisting the enormous condescension of posterity: Richard Henry Tawney, Raymond Williams and the long struggle for a democratic education

Abstract

Peter Jarvis emphasised relationships in education: people in the West assumed we were born as individuals but we are relationally embedded from the outset and learn to become social beings. This paper is concerned with how we learn democratic sensibilities with a prime focus on ‘liberal’ workers’ education in the United Kingdom and the building of social democracy. It helps us to think about present crises of representative democracy and troubled relations between different ethnic groups. Strengthening our humanity by cultivating I/thou experience, across difference, was the contribution of forms of workers’ education in the United Kingdom. This involved an unusual alliance, in European terms, between progressives in universities and workers’ organisations. Tawney, a Christian Socialist, and Williams, a humanistic Marxist, have more in common when rescued from the condescension of certain historical analysis, and when their contribution is interrogated through life writing, auto/biographical research and the psychosocial concept of recognition.

Keywords:

• Learning democracy
• relationships
• recognition
• psychosocial

Notes on contributor

Linden West is a professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University where he directs the PhD programme. He began his academic career as an historian and now uses autobiographical narrative research methods, and psychosocial perspectives, to illuminate and theorise change, transitional and transformational processes as well as the motivation to learn. He has written extensively on these topics while a recent preoccupation is how people might ‘learn democracy’, experientially, at a time when democracy, both formal and informal, is in crisis. His latest book is Distress in the city: racism, fundamentalism and a democratic education (Trentham/UCL Press). Previous books include Beyond Fragments, adults and motivation (Taylor and Francis) and Doctors on the Edge (FABooks). And with Barbara Merrill), Using Biographical Methods in Social Research (Sage). Linden jointly coordinates a European biographical research network and is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

Notes

1. Stockingers operated stocking handlooms which were expensive machines. They worked in their own homes or in small workshops, but after 1800 they came more under the control of speculators leading to wage cutting and greater exploitation. Joanna Southcott was a prophetess whose appeal was to supernatural agency. She published a pamphlet in 1801 during the Revolutionary Wars. She was a peasant’s daughter and embodied the idea that revelation might fall equally on her as upon a King. See Thompson (1963/1980, pp. 579, 580; 420–422).