Gilbert Keith Chesterton is well known and loved as a delightfully original writer, heavily influenced by his Christian religiosity and love for the paradox. George Bernard Shaw called him “a man of colossal genius,” and in this case he was not saying it for fun. Chesterton was a consummate philosophizer, spiritually akin to the Russian intelligent. He saw himself as an “orthodox” Christian, in the sense that would be best conveyed by the word “consistent.” Finding more “orthodoxy” in Catholicism, he became a convert to it from original Anglicanism, into which he had been born.
As befits any consistent Christian, he questioned the morality of capitalism and found it lacking. But he was not satisfied with the morality of socialism either, believing that under socialism the State becomes a capitalist of sorts, whereas the people lose out just as much as under capitalism. “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists,” he famously quipped, and, according to his thinking, socialism was reducing their number to just one. (This is of course a consistent view, as long as the role of the State is seen through Chestertonian eyes. It may be a sincere belief, with just a tad of posturing, perhaps, but even if I disagree with Chesterton on the moral evaluation of the socialist idea, his thinking in this case is certainly interesting and well worth taking note of.)
He, therefore, nonchalantly dismissed both these unsatisfactory socio-economic systems, in favor of a third one, his choice, which he, together with the French-born British writer and philosopher Hilaire Belloc (who was his collaborator on matters of economic philosophy) called distributism. According to their theory, the ownership of the means of production should not be taken away from the owners (which is supposedly the case under socialism), but should not be left in the hands of the few, either, as is obviously the case under capitalism. On the contrary, ownership should be encouraged and, most significantly, expanded to include all!
Distributism, in other words, distinguishes itself by the way it distributes property. It does not extend to all property, but only to productive property, which produces the necessities of life. Such property, obviously, includes land, tools, and other things.
The idea behind this “third economic way,” which can be suitably called “people’s capitalism,” smacks of a hopeless case of wishful thinking, and for this reason should properly belong in that eponymous section. But I am interested in its ethical component, first and foremost, seeing it as a rebellion of consistent Christianity against the immoral practices of capitalism. For this reason, the present discussion may be most suitable for this Contradiction section, especially under its original title Capitalism And Christianity.
But there is still more to it, and in a limited sense the idea of Distributism may not be so outlandish after all. An American Chestertonian follower, the unorthodox political economist Louis O. Kelso, gets the credit for inventing the so-called “ESOP” (Employee Stock Ownership Plan, 1956), a spinoff of the Distributism idea, soon followed by the “CSOP” (Consumer Stock Ownership Plan, 1958), both these ideas further developed in later years, and still in use today. One can argue that Chesterton’s idea gets diluted in both these plans and polluted through its implementation in an unaltered capitalistic environment, but the fact itself is remarkable that from a seed of patently wishful thinking certain decent practical results could thus sprout.
Incidentally, I am quite impressed by an incredibly apt representation of capitalist immorality by Kelso (who was also co-author, with Mortimer J. Adler, of the Capitalist Manifesto (1958), and of The New Capitalists (1961); and of a very influential 1986 book, coauthored with his wife Patricia Hetter Kelso, Democracy and Economic Power, translated into several languages, including Russian and Chinese.) Here is his metaphor of capitalist “equality,” which I find stunning, in the context of Capitalism and Christianity.---
"The Roman arena was technically a level playing field. But on one side were the lions with all the weapons, and on the other the Christians with all the blood. That’s not a level playing field. That’s a slaughter. And so is putting people into the economy without equipping them with capital, while equipping a tiny handful of people with hundreds and thousands of times more than they can use." [Quoted in Bill Moyers’s A World of Ideas (1990).]
It must be noted that Kelso was writing in the politically charged years of the coldwar hysteria. He could not easily dismiss capitalism in favor of socialism; therefore his choice had to be the Chestertonian third way, a utopian idea on a large scale, but a reasonably practicable idea when applied on a smaller scale, such as was his California-oriented ESOP, and his other similar plans.
As an afterthought: it would have been good for America, as she is throwing her weight around the world, to throw some ESOP’s and CSOP’s around as well, particularly, in the Third World nations, where a few doses of Chestertonian goodwill may do more good for the American image than the billions of dollars squandered on buying bloody dictators and catastrophically unreliable opposition movements.
As befits any consistent Christian, he questioned the morality of capitalism and found it lacking. But he was not satisfied with the morality of socialism either, believing that under socialism the State becomes a capitalist of sorts, whereas the people lose out just as much as under capitalism. “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists,” he famously quipped, and, according to his thinking, socialism was reducing their number to just one. (This is of course a consistent view, as long as the role of the State is seen through Chestertonian eyes. It may be a sincere belief, with just a tad of posturing, perhaps, but even if I disagree with Chesterton on the moral evaluation of the socialist idea, his thinking in this case is certainly interesting and well worth taking note of.)
He, therefore, nonchalantly dismissed both these unsatisfactory socio-economic systems, in favor of a third one, his choice, which he, together with the French-born British writer and philosopher Hilaire Belloc (who was his collaborator on matters of economic philosophy) called distributism. According to their theory, the ownership of the means of production should not be taken away from the owners (which is supposedly the case under socialism), but should not be left in the hands of the few, either, as is obviously the case under capitalism. On the contrary, ownership should be encouraged and, most significantly, expanded to include all!
Distributism, in other words, distinguishes itself by the way it distributes property. It does not extend to all property, but only to productive property, which produces the necessities of life. Such property, obviously, includes land, tools, and other things.
The idea behind this “third economic way,” which can be suitably called “people’s capitalism,” smacks of a hopeless case of wishful thinking, and for this reason should properly belong in that eponymous section. But I am interested in its ethical component, first and foremost, seeing it as a rebellion of consistent Christianity against the immoral practices of capitalism. For this reason, the present discussion may be most suitable for this Contradiction section, especially under its original title Capitalism And Christianity.
But there is still more to it, and in a limited sense the idea of Distributism may not be so outlandish after all. An American Chestertonian follower, the unorthodox political economist Louis O. Kelso, gets the credit for inventing the so-called “ESOP” (Employee Stock Ownership Plan, 1956), a spinoff of the Distributism idea, soon followed by the “CSOP” (Consumer Stock Ownership Plan, 1958), both these ideas further developed in later years, and still in use today. One can argue that Chesterton’s idea gets diluted in both these plans and polluted through its implementation in an unaltered capitalistic environment, but the fact itself is remarkable that from a seed of patently wishful thinking certain decent practical results could thus sprout.
Incidentally, I am quite impressed by an incredibly apt representation of capitalist immorality by Kelso (who was also co-author, with Mortimer J. Adler, of the Capitalist Manifesto (1958), and of The New Capitalists (1961); and of a very influential 1986 book, coauthored with his wife Patricia Hetter Kelso, Democracy and Economic Power, translated into several languages, including Russian and Chinese.) Here is his metaphor of capitalist “equality,” which I find stunning, in the context of Capitalism and Christianity.---
"The Roman arena was technically a level playing field. But on one side were the lions with all the weapons, and on the other the Christians with all the blood. That’s not a level playing field. That’s a slaughter. And so is putting people into the economy without equipping them with capital, while equipping a tiny handful of people with hundreds and thousands of times more than they can use." [Quoted in Bill Moyers’s A World of Ideas (1990).]
It must be noted that Kelso was writing in the politically charged years of the coldwar hysteria. He could not easily dismiss capitalism in favor of socialism; therefore his choice had to be the Chestertonian third way, a utopian idea on a large scale, but a reasonably practicable idea when applied on a smaller scale, such as was his California-oriented ESOP, and his other similar plans.
As an afterthought: it would have been good for America, as she is throwing her weight around the world, to throw some ESOP’s and CSOP’s around as well, particularly, in the Third World nations, where a few doses of Chestertonian goodwill may do more good for the American image than the billions of dollars squandered on buying bloody dictators and catastrophically unreliable opposition movements.
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