As a member of the Chesterton Review‘s board, I should mention to you the publication of the latest issue, the Spring-Summer 2010 double issue. It includes Allan Carlson on a family-based economy, and articles on the philospher Slavoj Zizek’s view of Chesterton and paradox, Hilaire Belloc’s idea of the “servile state,” and reflections on Chesterton’s social philosophy of “distributism,” as well as book reviews and the like.
Our editor Robert P. George describes the Review this way: “Serious and lively, scholarly and popular, ecumenical and artisan, it is a rebuke of those who suppose that serious writing cannot be fun to read, or that an orthodox viewpoint must be a narrow one.”
Update: The Chesterton Institute asked me to post its e-mail address, which is chestertoninstitute@shu.edu.
July 29th, 2010 | 6:26 pm
One of the really curious things about Chesterton and his acolytes is the idea of Distributism. More than a political philosophy, it is presented as a full-fledged proposal for political economy.
Chesterton was a manifestly brilliant man and defender of orthodoxy. And many of his admirers are as well. It is a mystery, then, why such a misguided idea as Distributism could have such currency (so to speak) even up to the present day.
One can excuse Chesterton for the mistake, given his time and life in near-post-industrial revolution Britain, when the early fallout from the industrial revolution, combined with a rigid social structure and the centuries-old idea that land and wealth are synonymous. One can also excuse Chesterton for this mistake: he mistook a glimpse of heaven for a glimpse of an economic system.
It is a system which has never been tried. One reason it has never been tried, to be a bit Chestertonian about it, is that it does not and cannot exist. The “system” is too fraught with self-contradictions and misinformation about the nature of man and the nature of economics. In practice, this “third way” alternative to the free market on the one hand and socialism on the other (as it bills itself) reduces to a form of socialism spelled differently.
July 30th, 2010 | 9:11 am
Not only has distributism been tried, it has been fabulously successful in creating a stable and just economic order. It has been successful in the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation of Spain, with its 100,000 worker-owners and its 60-year history. The worker-owners do $24B/annum, run their own school system, training institutes, R&D institutes, University, social safety networks, all from their own resources and and without gov’t help. It is successful in the cooperative economy of Emilia-Romagna, where 40% of the GDP is from worker coops, and where the average wage is twice that of Italy and the living standard among the highest in Europe. It is successful in the “land to the tiller” program of Taiwan, which is the basis of that island’s remarkable transformation from a feudal backwater to an industrial powerhouse in but one generation.
It is successful in thousands of ESOPs, cooperatives, mutual banks and insurance companies, etc. In fact, distributism goes from success to success, while capitalism goes from bailout to bailout.
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