ABSTRACT
In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R. H. Tawney, the historian and Christiansocialist, focused his readers’ attention on what he called ‘capitalist civilisation’, a social system based on private property in which members of the labour force formally possess the legal freedom to contract for their work. English history, he argued, took a new turn during the early modern era, as Europe’s political, economic and cultural centre shifted away from the Mediterranean basin toward the northwest and the Atlantic and European culture experienced the advent of significant changes in economic thought as well as religious thought.2 While sixteenth-century commentators continued to display a profound scepticism derived from ancient and medieval moral philosophers and religious thinkers about the consequences of the profit economy for social relations, sixteenth-century social thought also reveals a keen understanding not only of how much economic change had affected the social and political environment of the era but also of how social welfare and the flourishing of the State depend on market exchange.
