From R. H. Tawney’s Commonplace Book

In the early 1970s, I taught a course at Harvard on the moral arguments for capitalism and socialism. It was easy to find readings in defense of capitalism. The rights of entrepreneurs, contractual freedom, contribution and “desert” as the basis of reward: these were topics that had long interested philosophers and philosophically inclined economists. But I had real difficulty finding any serious philosophical defenses of even statements of socialist values. Marxist historicism long ago replaced moral philosophy among committed socialists. On one level, Marxism was a science; on another level, it was a tactics. And in the (connected) worlds of scientists and tacticians, any sort of moral reflectiveness became an object of dis...