G. K. Chesterton
Reprint ed., 1926; Norfolk, Va.: IHS Press, 2001
$23.9
183 pp.
John Attarian
Monterey, Va.: American Immigration Control Foundation, 2001
$6.00
72 pp.
Hilaire Belloc
Reprint ed., 1918; Norfolk, Va.: IHS Press, 2002
$11.95
95 pp.
Reviewed by Samuel Francis
G. K. Chesterton, like his friend Hilaire Belloc, is today best known as a polemicist for Roman Catholicism, but both writers were also prominent in their day as social critics, especially of modern capitalism. Unlike the socialist left, they and their followers defended an economic system known as “distributism,” which promised a third way between the path of Marx on the left and von Mises on the right. Today, despite the quite dated references in much of their work on this subject, what they had to say is more relevant than ever, as what is called capitalism (which includes a good deal of socialism) lurches across the globe, wiping out traditional cultures, national boundaries, and racial and ethnic identities.
Distributism, unlike socialism, champions private property, but, unlike capitalism, it also rejects the unlimited accumulation of wealth and the centralization of economic power that attends it. The ideal for distributists is an economy in which the small firm (ideally a shop selling products its owners manufacture themselves) or farm owned and operated by the same persons is prevalent—the kind of peasant economy that prevailed in many medieval settings and has been systematically obliterated by the rise of modern capitalism and its twin brother, the modern centralized state.
The result is cultural and economic (as well as racial) dispossession of the bulk of the population, which is reduced to what is really a kind of proletarian status. Workers, whether in mass factories or mass offices, may retain a good deal of material affluence, but they have entirely lost their independence as they become locked into “career paths” working for giant, anonymous organizations often known only by a set of meaningless letters or fabricated acronyms (“Exxon,” “CVS,” “IBM,” “Amoco,” “Verizon,” “Cingular,” etc.). They thereby lose any ability to mount even the simplest resistance to whatever the masters of the state and the mass economy demand of them in either thought or action, and since the bureaucratized “culture” permeates their minds, any inclination to resist soon vanishes.
This process of proletarianization goes far to explain why virtually no one today dares to question those subjects the system does not want questioned or even discussed, and the end result of proletarianization, of course, is slavery— the “Servile State” that Belloc discussed in another book, the “Friendly Fascism” of more recent writers. It is well beyond high time that someone wrote a book that offers a serious exposition of distributism as a critique of modern global capitalism and its political and cultural analogues as well as a practical plan for moving toward a distributist order.
Today, Belloc’s belief that the independent sector of the media would be successful in instigating significant reforms seems naďve―certainly, whatever its other accomplishments, the free press of Belloc’s time failed to do so. Still, if the Western world today is ever to be steered away from its present course of disaster, it will be because men of the courage and honesty of Chesterton, Belloc, and John Attarian demanded that it do so. Toward the end of The Free Press, Belloc writes what should be the motto of the men and women of the free press whenever and wherever they lift their heads.
No man who has the truth to tell and the power to tell it can long remain hiding it from fear or even from despair without ignominy. To release the truth against whatever odds, even if so doing can no longer help the Commonwealth, is a necessity for the soul.