Chesterton and Belloc: a critique.

• Author: Epstein, Marcus
• Position: PREDECESSORS - Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton

Ever since Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1830 reply in the Edinburgh Review to Robert Southey's Colloquies on Society (1829), the Industrial Revolution and its effects on the ordinary person's standard of living have attracted ongoing scholarly attention. Macaulay was among the first of those who have sometimes been called the optimists, who believed industrialization had on balance improved the material well-being of the English working class, whereas Southey, unconvinced, planted himself firmly in the camp of the pessimists. This standard-of-living debate continued in fits and starts in the decades that followed. The optimists gained significant ground from the 1940s onward--even if the idea of the Industrial Revolution as a catastrophe for workers remained fixed in the popular mind--owing in large part to the work of historians such as T. S. Ashton and R. M. Hartwell. In fact, Hartwell all but declared victory in 1970: "Is the controversy over? As regards the standard of living--the bundle of goods--it should be, and, indeed, appears to be. Even E. P. Thompson, the most convinced pessimist, now agrees that 'no serious scholar is willing to argue that everything got worse'" (1970, 178).

Although Catholic apologists Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton appear to have sided with the pessimists, their complaints about industrialization went well beyond factors that could be easily quantified. The significant aspect of industrialization, as they saw it, was that a nation of small landowners had been converted in relatively short order into a nation of wage earners. Because wage earners relied on employers for their well-being, they were in important ways less secure than small property holders, who in the last resort could always fall back on their own production of necessities to see them through difficult times. According to Belloc, "A family possessed of the means of production--the simplest form of which is the possession of land and of the implements and capital for working the land--cannot be controlled by others. Of course, various producers specialize, and through exchange one with the other they become more or less interdependent, but still, each one can live 'on his own': each one can stand out, if necessary, from pressure exercised against him by another. He can say: 'If you will not take my surplus as against your surplus I shall be the poorer; but at least I can live'" (1924, 125).

Even serfdom was preferable to the situation of the proletariat following industrialization, Belloc argued, for the serf or peasant working on the lord's plot could still say of it, "This is my land." "He could not be evicted from it. The dues which he was customarily bound to pay were but a fraction of its total produce. He could not always sell it, but ... the slave had become a free man for all the ordinary purposes of society" ([1913] 1977, 78).

According to Belloc, industrialization in and of itself was not responsible for this unfortunate situation. In The Servile State ([1913] 1977), he contended that English society had been substantially deformed in the sixteenth century by Henry VIII's confiscation of the monastic lands and the artificial enrichment of a class of landowners that benefited from this expropriation. This disparity in wealth persisted into the Industrial Revolution. These wealthy and powerful families used their influence to push legislation their way. We are therefore not entitled to assume, in standard libertarian fashion, that people's decision to go to the factories constituted prima facie evidence that they were making a voluntary decision aimed at the improvement of their well-being. They had been forced into this situation, Belloc argued, by an artificially created class of rich men who exploited the machinery of state to foreclose all options for them other than becoming wage earners in a factory.

Chesterton and Belloc, to reverse what they perceived as these negative effects of industrialization as it was carried out in England, advocated a system that came to be known as distributism, in which large accumulations of land and wealth would be discouraged through various means, not excluding state prohibitions of wealth concentration, and in which a society of small property holders would instead be the norm. Belloc called for breaking up land "trusts" and big businesses and redistributing property to an extent "that assures social sanity" ([1913] 1977, 120). Then, the distributists, to preserve their system, would support the enactment of numerous measures, such as subsidized private savings, laws against usury, antitrust laws, and laws against great wealth or land accumulation. Chesterton and Belloc were convinced that this regime, rather than a system in which property was concentrated in the hands of a relative few and the great bulk of the population found itself at the mercy of employers and plutocrats, constituted a far healthier model for social order.

We argue here that the creation and maintenance of a distributist economy would have required state action on a scale that, given Chesterton's and Belloc's arguments against socialism, would have violated their own principles. Moreover, the distributist argument, although superficially plausible, advanced a number of key claims in a manner that suggested they were beyond debate, when in fact they were quite debatable--and in some cases flatly false. An enormous body of scholarly work published since the time Chesterton and Belloc wrote has undermined their narrative in virtually every particular.

When Hilaire Belloc recalled the Middle Ages, he saw not simply the system of widespread property (if not full ownership) he hoped to see restored in his own day, but also a system that amounted in all its particulars to a rejection of the economic liberalism he so despised. He and Chesterton were heirs of the romantics, who condemned the society (and, in this case, the economy) of their day, which they contrasted unfavorably with the utopia they imagined to have existed in the Middle Ages. Thus, for instance, Belloc spoke favorably of the medieval guilds. Unlike the Scholastics, who criticized the guilds for their monopolistic behavior (De Roover 1955, 186), Belloc looked on them quite uncritically as examples of fruitful cooperation among producers, in contrast to the cutthroat competition of capitalism. The guild system, said Belloc, was "designed to check competition between its members: to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. Above all, most jealously did the guild safeguard the division of property, so that there should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the one side, and no monopolizing capitalist upon the other" ([1913] 1977, 79). Nowhere in Belloc, however, do we read that the guilds "were frankly institutions in restraint of trade. They usually persuaded their towns to keep out, by a high protective tariff or elsewise, goods competitive with their own; such alien goods, if allowed to enter the town, were sold at prices fixed by the affected guild.... By city ordinance or economic pressure the guild usually compelled craftsmen to work only for the guild or with its consent, and to sell its products only to or through the guild" (Durant 1950, 634). (1) Neither do we hear from Belloc about the restrictions on sneezing in front of one's shop (because it might attract undue attention to that shop vis-a-vis others) or about the guild rule in medieval Flanders that anyone caught varying the formula for a particular scarlet dye could be "condemned to the crushing fine of 105 £ or, failing payment, to the loss of his tight hand" (Stark 2005, 133).

In Belloc's view, "capitalism" was the enemy of the premodern economy he described. He did not define capitalism as laissez-faire or identify it with the Industrial Revolution. In fact, he believed that industrialism could have been quite beneficial to mankind were it not for its capitalistic elements. Similarly, Chesterton did not object to industrialism or urbanization in and of themselves: "Even while we may remain industrial, we can work towards industrial distribution and away from industrial monopoly" (1927, 170). Instead, Belloc prejudiced the discussion from the beginning by tendentiously defining capitalism as the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few: the "capitalist state," he said, was "a society in which the ownership of the means of production is confined to a body of free citizens not large enough to make up properly a general character of that society, while the rest are dispossessed of the means of production and are therefore proletarian" ([1913] 1977, 107). Chesterton wrote that "the truth is that what we call Capitalism ought to be called proletarianism. The point of it is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital" (1927x, 7). What was wrong with capitalism was that wealth, the means of production, land, and capital were held in the hands of the few and that the majority of the population was composed of "wage slaves," deprived of the independence that property ownership could bring and dependent on cold and remote capitalists for their sustenance and well-being.

Distributists have sometimes pointed to the enclosure movement as an important example of large landowners' use of state power to dispossess others of their property and rights and thereby to contribute to this unhappy outcome. Such measures, the argument goes, enriched the larger landowners at the expense of smaller, marginal ones and thus artificially created a body of people with no alternative but to flock to the cities for employment (Belloc [1913] 1977, 103-4).

Enclosures involved the transformation of lands over which common rights once existed--open fields, commons, and wastes--into property held in severalty. Scholars long underestimated, however, the extent to which enclosure had been carried out...