The “Lost Festschrift”: Christian Social Ethics and Intellectual Collaboration in Wartime Reconstruction

This article examines a largely overlooked episode in wartime Britain: a proposed Festschrift in honor of R. H. Tawney that brought into collaboration figures such as William Temple and Harold Laski. Drawing on previously unexamined archival correspondence, it argues that the initiative developed beyond an initial commemorative proposal into a structured collaborative enterprise that brought theological and secular intellectual perspectives into a shared institutional framework. Situated within broader wartime debates over social reconstruction, this episode offers a small but revealing instance of the interaction between distinct sources of moral and intellectual authority. Rather than implying doctrinal convergence, their collaboration brought Temple's Christian social ethics, Tawney's ethical socialism, and Laski's political thought into relation within a common institutional setting—a process that this article interprets as a form of ethical negotiation. In doing so, the article contributes to historiographical debates in which Christian social thought, ethical socialism, and political reconstruction have often been examined through distinct analytical frameworks. By recovering this episode, it draws attention to an ethical dimension of wartime reconstruction that can be obscured by accounts centered primarily on policy formation and institutional design.