An important work in which Tawney continued his critique of capitalism first outlined in The Acquisitive Society (1921) as an ‘irreligious system of individual and collective behaviour, since it was based on the institutionalisation of distinctions between men based on inherited or acquired wealth’ (New Palgrave). Originally delivered as the 1929 Halley Stewart Lecture, Equality ‘was a more contextualised study in which details of the social conditions and arrangements of inter-war Britain were deployed by Tawney in making a case for wholesale social reform’ (ODNB).
