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  • Distributism and Natural Law
  • Chris Tollefsen

Distributism and natural law thought seem like they should be natural allies: the early architects of distributism, Chesterton and Belloc, must to some extent have been influenced by Aquinas—Chesterton, of course, wrote a book about St Thomas.1 And so must have been the architects of the Catholic Church's Social Teaching (CST), as it was developed in and from Rerum Novarum. I suspect most distributists would say that distributism is an application of the natural law as well as CST. But certainly not every natural law thinker would identify as a distributist, including those deeply shaped by the Thomistic strand of natural law. Moreover, in the work of contemporary natural law theorists such as John Finnis and Germain Grisez, distributism is not mentioned even in passing, and the indexes of Natural Law and Natural Rights, and Grisez's three-volume Way of the Lord Jesus Christ contain not a single reference to distributism, to Chesterton, or to Belloc.

In consequence, I think it is worth exploring the relationship between natural law theory (including, and perhaps especially, "new" natural law theory) and distributism, understood in a very broad way, as encompassing not just Chesterton and Belloc and those directly influenced by them but also agrarians, localists, and conservatives—Burkean and Kirkian—where these seem to overlap with distributism. I'll proceed in the following way: I'll identify a cluster of ideas I take to be important to distributism and allied forms of thought and then I'll say something about how natural law theory addresses these ideas, or could, or should address them and, occasionally, how such treatment does or might diverge from characteristically distributist treatment.

Here are the ideas I take to be centrally important: (1) private property, (2) localism, (3) agrarianism, (4) the family, (5) an antipathy toward war (at least modern war), and (6) beauty and the imagination. Numbers five and six are perhaps a little more peripheral but nevertheless interesting. In what follows, I'll try to identify some characteristic claims made by distributists about these ideas and, in each case, then address them from the natural law standpoint. As will be clear, I have varying degrees of sympathy with the claims I'll discuss. [End Page 108]

Property

The central claims of distributism are about property: that there is a right—indeed, a "natural" right—to it, that property should be widely distributed, and that ownership is important, and perhaps essential, for certain kinds of freedoms that are necessary for a flourishing human life. Related to these theses is a favoring of a free market, though not of business so-called; in particular, there is a suspicion of "big" business, which tends among other things to accumulate property at the expense of more widespread possible distributions of it. Capitalism is used as a term of opprobrium and is linked to big business; for Chesterton, capitalism is specifically an economic regime in which capital is held in few hands and many work for a few.2 It is not specifically linked to a regime of private property and free commerce. As I'll note later on, distributist claims about property taken in conjunction with its agrarian, localist, and familial claims result in further assertions about what a reasonable or humanly appropriate regime of private property would look like.

What does the natural law view say about all this? Let's start with Aquinas. St. Thomas begins his treatment in II-II, q 66, a. 1 by arguing that humankind has dominion over the things of the world as to their use; property is thus not private in its natural state or purposes.3 But it is lawful that people hold property individually (and thus have authority over it) for three reasons. First, if property is held in common, people will care for it less than they ought, whereas people tend to care more for what is their own. Second, unless individuals are charged with particular things to care for, there will be confusion. And third, there will be quarrels in the absence of division; private property is thus conducive to peace.

Each of Aquinas's reasons makes reference...

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