1 of 2

One night in 1900, deep within one of those gray British metropolises that he once called "the interior of a labyrinth of lifeless things," G.K. Chesterton discovered a kindred spirit. At the Mont Blanc Restaurant in London's Soho district, a man approached him and opened a decades-long conversation with the remark, "You write very well, Chesterton."

As the evening progressed, Chesterton became increasingly excited. He had discovered in this man—the cantankerous, visionary historian and author Hilaire Belloc—a lifelong friend and intellectual partner.

George Bernard Shaw imagined this partnership as a monstrous quadruped, the "Chesterbelloc," whose best-known idea issued from the Belloc half and was blithely accepted by the Chesterton half. That idea was distributism, a "third economic solution" distinct from both capitalism and communism.

Chesterton saw capitalism as legalized pickpocketing, for it channeled wealth from many workers to a few capitalists. Communism was hardly an improvement, Chesterton wrote, for it only "reform[ed] the pickpocket by forbidding pockets."

Both systems effectively abolished private property, a move that Chesterton insisted damaged the Christian dignity of the common man. "Every man," he said, "should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven."

To restore common dignity, then, a Christian nation should give individual workers control over their own land, labor, and finances. To fulfill this progressive ideal, the nation should look back to the Middle Ages.

Hilaire Belloc was indeed the original theorizer of distributism. Born in France in 1870, Belloc spent a brief period in his youth at the feet of Cardinal Henry Manning. The aged cardinal's tireless social activism inspired Pope Leo XIII's De Rerum Novarum (1891), the encyclical that launched a century of Catholic action on behalf of the poor.

Manning's chief intellectual contribution to that encyclical was his teaching of "subsidiarity," the principle that no area of a people's social life should be administered by any larger body than necessary, lest administration become oppression.

Two decades later, Belloc feared that just such oppression was beginning to swallow up England. He sounded the alarm in The Servile State (1912), the first clear statement of distributism's principles.

He argued that the essentially capitalist British establishment was absorbing the age's widespread socialist concern for the poor, and that the result was a distorted charity that amounted to slavery. Already captive to wage labor and to the usury of the big banks, workers now faced, in Liberal social legislation, oppressive regulations that extended into their homes and families.

George Orwell, author of 1984, later said that Belloc had foretold "with remarkable insight" the development of the modern welfare state. But Belloc did not stop at prophecy. He went on to insist that the solution to this oppression lay in England's history—in the serfs, freeholders, and guildsmen of centuries past.

These laborers had enjoyed, in the view of Belloc and Chesterton, virtually untrammeled freedom, because they owed no more than token dues to those over them. The English could recapture that freedom if their government distributed land more equitably and supported shared-ownership models of labor.

In 1926 the "Chesterbelloc" and a group of earnest compatriots established the Distributist League. A think tank and political agitation group, the league spread its message through pamphlets, raucous public debates, and the pages of Chesterton's frequently insolvent publication G.K.'s Weekly.

next page... |  1 of 2

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help