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  • The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950
  • Adam Schwartz
The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950. By James R. Lothian. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2009. Pp. xxiii, 487. $60.00. ISBN 978-0-268-03382-8.)

In 1956, Christopher Dawson declared that "during my lifetime Catholicism has come back into English literature, so that the literary critic can no longer afford to ignore it." Most scholars, however, did neglect this renaissance for another half-century. Although the Catholic literary revival is now a burgeoning academic field, few studies of it have yet focused on its political dimension. James Lothian makes an admirable attempt to fill this lucana. Borrowing a term from Orwell, Lothian traces the trajectory of "political Catholicism" in early-twentieth-century Britain. He maintains that a self-consciously Catholic community of discourse emerged with the efforts of Hilaire Belloc and his followers, was modified by Dawson and his associates, and dissipated under the pressures of World War II and postwar social changes. Although this monograph should be more sensitive to key continuities in Catholic social criticism during this period, it is a weighty contribution to the intellectual history of British Catholicism.

Lothian contends that an "articulate counterculture" was forged initially by the mature Belloc's populism, which rebelled against parliamentary democracy, industrial capitalism, and the Whig interpretation of history. Belloc proposed instead a distributist polity of decentralized government and widespread property ownership, along with a revisionist reading of history that saw England's true heritage as Latin and Catholic, making its modern political and economic miseries an ultimate ramification of the Reformation. Lothian claims that interwar British Catholics largely accepted this sociohistorical model. Even when figures like Dawson criticized its historiography as parochial and amateurish, they frequently adopted its political and economic tenets, including Belloc's hopes that rightist dictators like Mussolini and Franco would provide a viable alternative to aggressive communism and putatively moribund liberal democracy.

Yet as World War II impended and proceeded, Dawson especially gained greater respect for political liberalism, and hence began nurturing hitherto marginalized Christian Democratic Catholics such as Barbara Ward. Lothian's most absorbing analysis recounts Dawson's and Ward's wartime campaigns to unite all defenders of the West against totalitarianism of every kind on behalf of the principles of individual dignity, limited government, and the need for a private sphere that Catholics and old-style liberals both upheld. Lothian concludes that the Allies' victory vindicated the Dawsonian-Wardean worldview, but that it did not become the new Catholic paradigm, due to the residual sway of unreconstructed Bellocians (like Douglas Jerrold) and the opposing tendency of most postwar British Catholics to assimilate culturally and accommodate the welfare state. As a distinctively Catholic social vision and subculture disappeared, an identifiably Catholic intellectual community dissolved as well. [End Page 852]

Lothian's judgment about the fate of British political Catholicism requires a crucial caveat. He posits that these wartime and postwar centrifugal forces discredited all the components of Bellocianism. Belloc's philoauthoritarianism and triumphalist view of history surely lost purchase among Catholics, but distributism proved more resilient. Indeed, its advocacy of a devolved polity made distributism more compatible with the baptized liberalism of Dawson and Ward than with Bellocian autocracy. Lothian overlooks how this preference for small-scale government and proprietorship drove Dawson to censure often the welfare state's centralizing bent; nor does he note the precocious postwar ecological activism of Ward and her friend E. F. Schumacher, whose Small Is Beautiful (New York, 1973) gave distributism its highest public profile ever. Distributism thus outlasted the other facets of Bellocianism.

This misprision notwithstanding, The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community deserves respectful consideration. Its artful pen portraits rehabilitate undervalued writers like Barbara Ward. Its assertion of a Bellocian-Dawsonian tension as the dynamic of twentieth-century British Catholic social thought is piquant. Its assessment of this community's destiny, if not dispositive, should nonetheless inspire keener appraisals of the postwar transformation of Catholic identity. Above all, Lothian makes it harder to ignore Catholicism's resurgence in the British public mind, a salutary reminder that...

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