The Acquisitive Society by R.H. Tawney

Rights without functions are like the shades in Homer which drank blood but scattered trembling at the voice of a man. To extinguish royalties and urban ground-rents is merely to explode a superstition. It needs as little -- and as much -- resolution as to put one's hand through any other ghost. In all industries except the diminishing number in which the capitalist is himself the manager, property in capital is almost equally passive. Almost, but not quite. For, though the majority of its owners do not themselves exercise any positive function, they appoint those who do. It is true, of course, that the question of how capital is to be owned is distinct from the question of how it is to be administered, and that the former can be settled without prejudice to the latter. To infer, because shareholders own capital which is indispensable to industry, that therefore industry is dependent upon the maintenance of capital in the hands of shareholders, to write, with some economists, as though, if private property in capital were further attenuated or abolished altogether, the constructive energy of the managers who may own capital or may not, but rarely, in the more important industries, own more than a small fraction of it, must necessarily be impaired, is to be guilty of a robust non sequitur and to ignore the most obvious facts of contemporary industry. The less the mere capitalist talks about the necessity for the consumer of an efficient organization of industry, the better; for, whatever the future of industry may be, an efficient organization is likely to have no room for him. But though shareholders do not govern, they reign, at least to the extent of saying once a year "le roy le veult. " If their rights are pared down or extinguished, the necessity for some organ to exercise them will still remain. And the question of the ownership of capital has this much in common with the question of industrial organization, that the problem of the constitution under which industry is to be conducted is common to both.

That constitution must be sought by considering how industry can be organized to express most perfectly the principle of purpose. The application to industry of the principle of purpose is simple, however difficult it may be to give effect to it. It is to turn it into a Profession. A Profession may be defined most simply as a trade which is organized, incompletely, no doubt, but genuinely, for the performance of function. It is not simply a collection of individuals who get a living for themselves by the same kind of work. Nor is it merely a group which is organized exclusively for the economic protection of its members, though that is normally among its purposes. It is a body of men who carry on their work in accordance with rules designed to enforce certain standards both for the better protection of its members and for the better service of the public. The standards which it maintains may be high or low: all professions have some rules which protect the interests of the community and others which are an imposition on it. Its essence is that it assumes certain responsibilities for the competence of its members or the quality of its wares, and that it deliberately prohibits certain kinds of conduct on the ground that, though they may be profitable to the individual, they are calculated to bring into disrepute the organization to which he belongs. While some of its rules are trade union regulations designed primarily to prevent the economic standards of the profession being lowered by unscrupulous competition, others have as their main object to secure that no member of the profession shall have any but a purely professional interest in his work, by excluding the incentive of speculative profit.