Now, Chesterton was not a capitalist; far from it.

He understood capitalism as an offshoot of the

same philosophical errors that led to the rise of the cosmopolitan gigantism that he so much
hated. Shortly after the conclusion of the Great War, when Chesterton set off to tour the Holy
Land, he had this to say of the moral and intellectual confusion that plagued the modern West:
The whole industrial world symbolised by London had reached a curious
complication and confusion, not easy to parallel in human history. It is not a
question of controversies, but rather of cross-purposes. As I went by Charing
Cross my eye caught a poster about Labour politics, with something about the
threat of Direct Action and a demand for Nationalisation. And quite apart from
the merits of the case, it struck me that after all the direct action is very
indirect, and the thing demanded is many steps away from the thing desired. It
is all part of a sort of tangle, in which terms and things cut across each other.
The employers talk about "private enterprise," as if there were anything
private about modern enterprise. Its combines are as big as many
commonwealths; and things advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead
the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need
to "nationalise" the mines or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a
plutocracy to nationalise the Government, or even to nationalise the nation.
The Capitalists praise competition while they create monopoly; the Socialists
urge a strike to turn workmen into soldiers and state officials; which is
logically a strike against strikes. I merely mention it as an example of the
bewildering inconsistency, and for no controversial purpose.1

Chestertons own sympathies lay with Labour;2 perhaps it is accurate to say that his sympathies
lay with a number of their policies but he refused to accept Labours statist solution to the
problems plaguing post-Great War Britain.3 Now the socialists solutions to the economic
problems of the day have been rejected by many, many intellectuals since, indeed, the very
inception of socialism, and for a variety of reasons. For the present paper, only those reasons that
object either directly or via implications to the anthropology that most varieties of socialism
subscribe to.
It would be good if we now state a number of these philosophical objections, and see what
Chesterton had in common with these, and how his position, once placed within the framework
of Catholic thought on the subject, is uniquely important. It would be as well to say that
Chestertons thoughts on the topic were shaped to a great degree by the Anglo-French Catholic
Hilaire Belloc (the two were referred to by George Bernard Shaw as Chesterbelloc), and the
one cannot be understood without the other. Indeed, if we consider this statement by Chesterton,
we can see that he himself regarded Belloc as his intellectual and philosophical superior in this
regard; indeed, he credited Belloc with founding the very idea of distributism: We were the
converts but you were the missionary. [] You first revealed the truth both to its greater and its
lesser servants. [] Great will be your glory if England breathes again.4 Of course, this was not
true to the degree that Chesterton seems to think: Belloc was only developing and propagating
1 G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem, London: George H. Doran Company, 1921: pp. 17-18.
2 Ibid., p. 18.
3 One intellectual that Chesterton often locked horns with was Robert Blatchford; cf. G. K. Chesterton, The
Blatchford Controversies, London: Macmillan and Co., 1904 (first published in 1903): see introduction by Maisie
Ward in Gilbert Keith Chesterton, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943: ch. XII.
4 G. K. Chesterton, Open Letter to Hilaire Belloc, New Witness, 27th April, 1923; published in Great Britain; cited
in Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc, USA: Ignatius Press, 2002: p. 133.

the Catholic social doctrine that Pope Leo XIII expounded in his 1891 encyclical Rerum
novarum. Bur more on this in a bit.
So, then, let us begin: before we can engage with the philosophical and metaphysical vision of
Chestertonian distributism and see what exactly they derive from their Catholic context and how
they deal with the two categories of the local and the global, we must first briefly speak about the
political and economic career of distributism and about its central tenets. Concisely put,
distributism was the name that Chesterton (and Belloc) gave to their vision of subsidiarity5 as
expressed and advocated in their writings. Due to their efforts (dated, from the salient
publications, 1912-1936) and that of such others as Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and Fr. Vincent
McNabb, the Distributist League was able to establish strongholds on both sides of the Atlantic.
It would perhaps be inaccurate to say that distributism was ever successful or even merely
popular; but that it was very influential in certain circles in the interbellum years cannot be
denied.
Distributism as a label is rather awkward: the question that first comes to mind is: what exactly
do its advocates advocate distributing? Because Chesterton was opposed to capitalism, it could
not be that he was arguing for the concentration of significant amounts of capital in the hands of
a few. What, then? Distribution of wealth? Socialists do that, do they not? But no, of course not;
this is not what Chesterton or Belloc meant at all.
We can hear from Chesterton himself what he thought of the programmes of the socialists:
The mob howls before the palace gates, Hateful tyrant, we demand that you
assume more despotic powers; and the tyrant thunders from the balcony,
Vile rebels, do you dare to suggest that my powers should be extended?
There seems to be a little misunderstanding somewhere.6

To thresh out this misunderstanding, Chesterton suggests, a metaphysical reappraisal of the

problems is needed.
---- to follow ---Chesterton and the Real
The seemingly obvious but immensely important assertion, an assertion that nowadays takes a
lot of courage and honesty to make that a thing is what it is, and not another, lay at the root of
Chestertons ontology.7

5 Consult the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the issue: CCC, items 1878-1885; see especially item 1885. The
section of the CCC mentioned is archived at: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P6G.HTM (last accessed:
21st October, 2015).
6 Chesterton, The New Jerusalem: p. 19.
7 Most poignantly described in Orthodoxy: pp. 81-83; 87-98.