Tawney vehemently attacked capitalism for subordinating human relationships to economic productivity and argued that man cannot be whole or dignified until he lives in a community where his private motives lead him to seek the public good. In 1926, in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, he dealt with the origins of 'acquisitive individualism' and the elaborate ethical support given to this creed by religious opinion. He argued that by the abuse of the Puritan ethic, which placed a premium on individualism, thrift and hard work, capitalism had clothed itself in unquestioned respectability. Writing with great moral purpose, he deprecated modern economic ethics for their selfishness and praised the medieval view of economics which condemned as sinful the relentless increase of wealth for its own sake. Tawney believed man had been degraded from a spiritual being into an animal. He also believed modern capitalism to be ungodly because instead of stimulating man's desire for the divine creation, it placed a premium on the limitless exploitation of nature. The civilised world was turned into a jungle where the economic rat race took precedence over social endeavour. Tawney's vision of a Christian 'functional society' as a replacement for the 'acquisitive society', his emphasis on the value of each person before God, and his attacks on the subordination of human relationships to economic objectives finds echoes in the personalism and communitarianism of European Christian Democracy which remain largely unrepresented in the values of Britain's political parties. Tawney's view of socialism caused him strongly to disagree with the Webbs about Communism. The battle lines were drawn between the Labour Party's centralisers and decentralisers. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole34 and the social democrats who followed, tapped the rich vein of thought expounded primarily by William Morris, who had promoted Guild Socialism. They were highly critical of the Webbs and Fabianism whose arguments in favour of state control had won the day at the crucial 'Clause 4' 1929 Labour Conference. Cole said:
The familiar brands of collective socialism were somehow things one wanted for other people than oneself, in order to eradicate the deprivations and injustices of capitalism, whereas the Guild doctrine offered me a kind of socialism that I could want as well as think right ... as having personalities to be expressed as well as stomachs to be filled.35
Social democrats recognised that the human personality mattered and that Socialist four year plans, impersonalised systems and dehumanising politics destroyed the personality. Cole advocated an early form of 'subsidiarity' or decentralisation. Like Tawney, his thinking mirrored that of Christian Democrats in many European countries and his call for the establishment of the greatest amount of industrial democracy possible and practicable was not so far removed from the calls of the