Product Description
Written by one of the great late 19th-century/early-20th-century spiritual and social writers of England, this is a collection of essays addressing the problems of the Industrial Revolution with Christian philosophy and social thought. Among the topics included are industrialism and the rise of unemployment; the evil of the wage system; the importance of land ownership and the restoration of craft production; the necessary connection between real work and spiritual salvation. It is intended for anyone studying social and economic thought as well as Catholic and Christian studies.
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This little book is made up of several dozen short essays on various aspects of economic life, written from an unabashedly distributist viewpoint. This viewpoint, which encompasses the notions of (a) the importance of wide-spread private ownership, (b) the shortcomings of the wage slave system, (c) the inadequacies of socialism and capitalism, (d) the ideal of peasant proprietership, is set forthin tiny bite-size pieces.
The result is a shotgun-like treatment rather than an organized step-by-step layout of distributist principles. In that regard, it’s a little bit like the jumbled and excited words of a man describing his lover — jumping from one highlight to another, with much repetition and without a lot of apparent organization.
The reader may be put off by the fact that most of the “contemporary examples” were drawn from England in the 1920s — the time and place of the writing. But that is not a showstopper, in my opinion. While there are some important differences between that setting and the situation in which we find ourselves today, the similarities are more striking than the dis-similarities.
If you lean toward distributism, you will read these pages and shout: “Yes! Yes!” If you are not, you will at least begin to understand distributism, and perhaps be less confident in the capacity of modern conservatism or modern liberalism to come up with adequate answers to today’s social and economic questions.