The Philosophically Peculiar Members of a Distributist Culture: An Essay in Chestertonian Platonism

Since its inception and in its various permutations, Marxism has raised questions about the nature and status of individual persons as authentic individual, valuable free agents. At its worst, Soviet Marxism under Stalin vigorously opposed societies in which educated, freethinking individual identity and creativity are valued. And even at its best—in, say, Marx's early writings—the individual was valued but ominously threatened (conceptually) not as a fundamentally real, concrete individual (valuable for his or her own sake) but as constituting "an ensemble of social relations" (a phrase Marx borrowed from Feuerbach). More recent Marxists, such as Louis Althusser, have blasted late twentieth-century Western culture for seeming to applaud individuality, but falsely so, for the net result is more conformity such that many apparently freethinking individuals wind up being part of "a herd of independent minds" (to use the expression of Harold Rosenberg).

I propose that G. K. Chesterton's distributism offers us a different, enthusiastic approach to the genuine individuality and value of persons that avoids the kinds of cultural forces that worried Marxists like Althusser. In the ideal form of distributism, as found preeminently in the work of Chesterton, we see a Christian case made for economic and cultural conditions that invite a celebration of an almost riotous flowering of uniquely individual persons.

In the first section of this essay, I begin with some general observations about the background to Chesterton's sense of the individual in Victorian Britain. While Chesterton survived Queen Victoria, living through the reign of George V (both the king and Chesterton died the same year, 1936), I believe that the Victorian celebration of the individual is as important to consider as the cultural climate in which Chesterton was born and came of age. I then document Chesterton's proposal about the conditions that would promote persons in developing their own peculiar identity. I am here using the word peculiar in the King James's Bible sense, in which peculiar means "special." When we read that "ye are a chosen generation, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2:9), the people of God are praised not for being weird or freakish but for being special. In the first section, then, I highlight the kind of valuable peculiarity that Chesterton, in my view, rightly praises. I tie in this celebration of the individual with the Christian recognition of the value of each distinct person as irreplaceable and distinctive. In the second section, I draw on the bonum variationis Platonic Christian tradition in providing cultural grounds for celebrating a fecundity of differences among individual persons. The third section takes up three critical objections.

Distributism and the Individual

I suggest that Chesterton and distributists like Hilaire Belloc should be seen as emerging from the background of Victorian Britain, in which there was a robust celebration of the individual. In Victorian Britain, the lives and accomplishments of individuals with "larger-than-life" personalities were celebrated, including Queen Victoria herself and her prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli; Charles Dickens; Isambard Brunel; David Livingston; Richard Burton (the adventurer); George Eliot; Lewis Carroll; John Henry Newman; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and Florence Nightingale. This was the age when "the great man of history" was made popular by Thomas Carlyle, who contended that human history was very much shaped by towering individuals (heroes and villains). While there were secular grounds for prizing the individual (see, e.g., J. S. Mill's case for social pluralism in On Liberty), valuing individuals was also a vital element in nineteenth-century British Christianity with the Oxford movement, intensive missionary work, the building of churches, and so on.

A vivid literary portrayal of the immensely interesting peculiarities of the individual during the Victorian era may be found in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes's cajoling of his friend and companion Dr. Watson to appreciate the great details of persons' lives that are often concealed from us: "Life is infinitely stranger than anything which...