Editor's Introduction

Distributism, roughly put, is the view that productive property ought to be widely distributed. It is sometimes held to be a sort of "third way" between capitalism and socialism. G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were two of its early advocates—in defending Distributism, they took themselves to be simply expounding Catholic Social Teaching (CST), particularly as found in the works of Pope Leo XIII.

G. K. Chesterton is a well-loved figure in Catholic intellectual circles. But my impression—correct me if I'm wrong—is that many of us read things like Orthodoxy and St. Thomas Aquinas and maybe some Father Brown stories and simply ignore things like What's Wrong with the World and Utopia of Usurers and the Outline of Sanity. Maybe we just never run across the latter. Maybe we assume that social commentary from that era must be out of date by now. Maybe we hear just enough about Chesterton's naïve and romantic economic views to prompt us to indulgently thumb through those works without any expectation of really learning anything from them. This much is certain: if you decide to devote any time reading literature about Distributism, you'll run into words like romantic and naïve, and especially nostalgic immediately, and then repeatedly. Even among those who revere Chesterton, his Distributism seems to be taken as a kind of embarrassing little quirk—cute, maybe, and excusable because, after all, he really was just a journalist—but not a serious contribution to thought.

But that raises the question of whether Chesterton made any serious intellectual contributions. Did he? It's immensely difficult—probably impossible—to take the true measure of people who live in our own times. But Chesterton died eighty years ago. We can now start to get a real sense of his merits. And when we do so, we find a true giant. His intellectual (and yes, even his artistic) contributions are mighty. I am surely not the first to point out that Chesterton will be a Doctor of the Church one day. Disagree with me on that point if you must, but it surely can't be seriously denied that Chesterton had a genuinely great mind. Think of what he wrote about St. Thomas and Martin Luther: "On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible."¹ Surely that same point applies if we swap the names: "On a great map like the mind of Chesterton's, the mind of the ordinary, plodding professional philosopher would be almost invisible." No offense to my current readership is intended.

That obviously doesn't mean that Chesterton is right about everything he says, or even that he's nearly right (any more than St. Thomas himself is correct about everything he says—even according to those of us who still accept Pope Leo XIII's assertions about the proper place of St. Thomas in the mind of the Church). But it does, at least, suggest that we ought to listen to him humbly. And it might even suggest that we should listen to him humbly even when he's talking about Distributism.

For in his thoughts on Distributism, one can see the kind of golden thread that runs throughout his work—that special feature that will perhaps one day be hit upon as his descriptor—not the "Angelic Doctor" or the "Doctor of Grace" but the "Doctor of Creation" or the "Doctor of Gratitude." He writes,

God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, then, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to be half controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely. … Property is merely the art of Democracy. It means that...