For Human Flourishing

At a time when most see capitalist liberalism and socialism as the only possible ordering ideas for human societies, and the former as the de facto selection in the West, Alexander William Salter has penned an important reminder that there is more under the sun than is dreamt of in either ideology.  Distributism offers an alternative to capitalist liberalism and socialism as an ordering ideal to economic and political arrangements.  Salter’s work is timely and needed.  Liberalism and capitalism are facing increasing criticism; socialism has been a demonstrably false ideology since the twentieth century but persists anyway.  The two forms of order have been looking more and more like one another since FDR, and neither produces, in the post-industrial age of megalopolises and globalism, robust flourishing for anyone but the “one percent.”  Salter shows why this is the case and argues that an economic-political arrangement that creates widespread human flourishing at the individual level could be cultivated by relying on the idea of distributism, an economic and political system in which property ownership and political power are widely distributed.  To develop this case, he first summarizes the Catholic basis to distributism, and then carefully reviews the arguments of two early twentieth century thinkers who grappled with the changing economic order created by the Industrial Revolution, Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, and one mid-twentieth century thinker who grappled with the rise of totalitarianism and mass politics, Wilhelm Roepke.  Salter’s exegesis of their texts explains the basic failures of both ideologies, but especially capitalism and liberalism, to produce true freedom for most individuals.  Salter then reviews contemporary political economy literature to demonstrate that even though many of the specific economic propositions put forward by them have been proven inaccurate by today’s economists, they ring true in a deeper sense.  Even if prices do not fluctuate precisely as these thinkers suggested, that capitalistic liberalism and socialism both produce a less-than-ideal experience for individuals remains a problem.  The idea of distributism is put forward as an alternative that should stimulate human flourishing, creating more freedom and happiness for individuals, even if some temporary economic and material costs must be incurred.

Though written from a Catholic perspective, Salter’s presentation of distributism is accessible to all readers.  A merit of the work is its ability to speak across doctrinal lines.  Salter spends one chapter reviewing the Catholic teachings on the moral underpinning of economic matters, and though this forms the basis of distributist thought, it is not a doctrinal presentation, and the remainder of the book avoids Catholic jargon.  Pope Leo XIII’s 1897 Rerum Novarum argued that “employees and employers each have rights and duties commensurate with social justice.”^[1]  Pope Pius XI’s 1931 Quadragesimo Anno further developed the notion of subsidiarity, “the duty of higher-order communities, such as national governments, not to interfere with the operation of lower-order communities, such as families and local governments, without just cause.”^[2]   Pius affirmed the importance of private property in achieving subsidiarity.  Through these two encyclicals, the idea that social justice matters and is supported through a robust distribution of private property is developed.  Both ideas have been incorporated into the Catechism of the Catholic Church.^[3] First, it restricts property rights to the interest of the common good.  One must relinquish one’s unused clothes to cloth the needy, and likewise, selfish uses of property (like paying unjust wages or profiting from another’s hardship) are forbidden.^[4]  Second, though contracts must be honored, “property rights or contractual arrangements that infringe on human dignity are not permissible.”^[5]  And “moral order in the economy requires moral order in the polity.”  Thus, governing arrangements must be consistent with this vision of moral welfare, which means that subsidiarity must be honored in the political sphere.  Salter detects that this framing was a reaction to the totalitarian regimes of the time, but the remainder of his book shows that the Catholic ideas for distributism might remediate the woes of capitalist societies today.

Salter next reviews the writings of his three exemplars of distributism.  Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1912) provides a macro-level review of why capitalism produces an unsavory human experience.  I found this chapter to be the most compelling in Salter’s book due to Belloc’s ability to explain through a historical lens why the Lockean view of property had become antiquated even before Locke wrote.  Essentially, the ostensible spontaneity and freedom of capitalism is anything but spontaneous and produces servility instead of freedom for individuals.  Even if citizens are free politically, Belloc argues that individuals are fundamentally divided between capitalist and proletarian classes.  The basic inability for bargaining during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution meant that despite possessing the political right to refuse work or to bargain about the terms of work, the economic realities of the time denied proletarians any good mechanism to elevate themselves above their station.  To develop this case, Belloc reviews the evolution of European societies from the Roman Empire.  The fall of the Western Roman Empire facilitated the breakdown of the villa, and over the course of several centuries, resulted in the emancipation of the slave labor into a free peasantry.  While serfs had many of the basic obligations of slaves on villas, they gained the ability to occupy themselves with different work once their dues to the lords were paid.  Thus, a free peasantry emerged in the High Middle Ages.^[6]  Belloc praises and romanticizes the High Middle Ages because well-distributed property obtained under this system: “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.”^[7]  

The rise of capitalism brought an end to the system of well-distributed property.  The process began with the confiscation of church property under Henry VIII, who sold the land off and thereby generated the large country estates of the English gentry.^[8]  Belloc argues that “England embraced capitalism before she embraced industrialization.”^[9]  Salter summarizes his view this way: “Belloc recognizes that the new productive processes of the eighteenth century had to acquire financing, and because of the concentration of existing wealth in the hands of the aristocracy, the great magnates were an important source of capital.”^[10]   He moreover noticed that small business owners were thereby denied the opportunity to participate in the Industrial Revolution because of this system.  As Salter puts it: “industrialization would have proceeded with or without the rise of the great landed magnates, but the distribution of the new wealth could have been radically different, benefitting the many instead of just the few.”^[11]  Consequently, the resulting order of capitalism is unstable for two reasons.  First, capitalism places a moral strain on society.  Essentially, the laws and institutional orders of England were developed under the Middle Age system of well-distributed property; the protection afforded to private property under common law, however, only advantages the magnates.  The law in England became “an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow citizens.”^[12]  And second, a related point, this system left the proletarian class feeling very insecure.  As Belloc put it, “The possessors have no direct incentive to keep men alive.”^[13]  Whatever benefits accrue to a society under a capitalist system, they will not be felt evenly and they might even be counter-productive, hiding a deep and pervasive insensitivity to the suffering of the proletarians by the capitalists.

Belloc’s An Essay on the Restoration of Property (1936) offered a potential therapy for the malady of capitalism.  All suggestions turn on the distributist idea of reallocating large, concentrated property into more widely and equally distributed property.  The tension between distributism and capitalism manifests in this area, as many of his suggestions would be rejected by libertarians and progressives.  Perhaps such knee-jerk rejection is a mistake, as his suggestions would plausibly use state mechanisms to effectively empower a widespread middle class – the very individuals whom both libertarians and progressives mean to empower might be more effectively empowered through distributism.  First, however, Belloc iterates that a few things would be necessary to foment such an order.  One is a change of heart.  Distributism would not produce a bottom line equal to capitalism; the benefits of human flourishing would come with some economic costs in terms of GDP.  But “economic freedom is [not] a lesser good than economic abundance.”^[14]  Indeed, Belloc argues that individuals must rediscover an “appetite for freedom” before distributism could manifest.^[15]  The sad effect of industrialization and the centralizing tendencies summarized in Servile State is that “the only difference between a herd of subservient Russians and a mob of free Englishmen pouring into a factory … is that the latter are exploited for private profit, the former by the State in a communal fashion.”^[16]  Once the ground is psychologically prepared, if it can be (a theme to which I will return), Belloc offers some practical mechanisms to create distributism through public policy.  A deep problem of capitalism (and socialism) is the problem of size.  Economies of scale mean that larger players thrive, and small entrepreneurs struggle, a phenomenon that remains a problem but was evident to Belloc. 

Thus, many of his proposals focus on fighting the bigness of industrial society.  In retail, Belloc argues against chain stores and multiple stores, for reasons that Americans living in the Walmart and Amazon era understand – smaller players cannot compete and end up as greeters at Walmart or delivery drivers for Amazon.  Ideas to remedy this problem include requiring licenses for all shopkeepers, in a system in which the first license is very affordable, but additional licenses increase exponentially in cost.  A similar scheme would apply to tax rates (and taxes or real estate): low taxes for small shops (and actively used real estate), and increasingly burdensome tax rates for big stores (and idle real estate).^[17]  Essentially, it would become too expensive to develop especially large stores or chain stores (or to own vast amounts of idle land, depriving others of the chance to productively use it).^[18]  Guilds could remedy the tendency for wholesale to concentrate retail in large firms.^[19]  Banking, challenged by the monopolizing tendency of the big banks, could be reorganized around smaller credit unions.^[20]

G.K. Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World (1910) reviews the role of the family in economic and political welfare.  Family, property, and human flourishing are complimentary to Chesterton.  The family is, in Salter’s words, “the cornerstone of a free state.  Productive households promote liberty, equality, and democracy.”^[21] This recipe produces human flourishing, due to human nature: “every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of Heaven.”^[22]  Moreover, the home is the location in which individuals are truly kings of their own castle; both liberty and anarchy potentially reside there, whereas both concepts are inherently limited by the state when applied to society writ large.  Homes are therefore the locus of social welfare, according to Chesterton.  Within the household, the universalist needs of society and the particular needs of a family are reconciled, and this is especially achieved by the domesticity of women: “woman stands for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion or extravagance.”^[23]  Though antiquated, his arguments against women’s suffrage follow from the need for each family to be the locus of their own identity; the woman’s role as summarized by Chesterton is a very important one.  A dogmatic education that venerates tradition should accompany this view of family.  If families are particular or unique, but society is universal, education serves to reconcile the two.  Free, orderly, and productive families are the gateway to the same conditions occurring in society.  

He follows Belloc in arguing that the Industrial Revolution enslaved families by depriving them of property; the “great nobles [mine owners and railway directors] assured everybody that [their oligarchic behavior was owed] to a newly discovered Economic Law …. [but] the ordinary Englishman had been duped.”^[24]  The societal arrangements of the Industrial Revolution, while making a few incredibly rich, harmed the ability of most humans to flourish: “He has been offered bribes of worlds and systems: he has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house; and that has been refused to him.”^[25]  Socialists are just as bad as capitalists, for similar reasons.  The plight to make all property public does not comport with the view of human nature just quoted; no one may shape anything when all goods are communal.  But even worse, and predicting some of today’s critiques of liberalism, Chesterton argues that even liberals who wish the family to remain intact must take political measures to “try to equalize property [because] the overwhelming mass of the English people are … too poor to be domestic.” Thus, the war between Tories and socialists conceals that they “are secretly in partnership: that the quarrel they keep up in public is very much a put-up-job.”^[26]  The bottom-line commonality is that “between them they still keep the common man homeless.”^[27]  Chesterton’s dismay with both capitalism and socialism is indicative of his therapy for the problems of industrialization.  He felt that top-down political programs would not suffice, that the family was the sufficient and necessary mechanism to cultivate flourishing.  Indeed, contrary to Belloc, who offered several specific governmental and policy mechanisms to create a distributist order, Chesterton argues that such an order can only be cultivated by “a revolution.”^[28]

Salter also analyzes Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity (1926), which provides the connection between the micro-economic role of the family in facilitating macro-economic social welfare under the proper conditions.  Like Belloc, Chesterton sees bigness as the crux of the problem.  In politics, “the central power needs lesser powers to check and balance it.”^[29]  In economics, bigness produces sloppy work and bad products (as all contemporary readers who have purchased any mass-produced trinket readily understand): “it is not true that you must have a long rigid line of people trimming hats or tying bouquet ….  The work is much more likely to be neat if it is done by a particular craftsman for a particular customer…”^[30]  In this text he offers smaller remedies: boycotts, subsidies, anti-trust laws, and tax schemes could remedy the maladies of bigness.^[31]  His most radical suggestion is the reinstitution of a yeomanry, because “living with the land helps men to remember that they are stewards.”^[32]  Most individuals would be better off in such a situation because they would have traded cheap trinkets, “merely comforts and conveniences,” for a way of life that cultivates virtue and thereby human welfare.^[33]   Chesterton is wise to the radical nature of his suggestions, and following the revolution argument in What’s Wrong, he here argues that this way of life requires “something of a hero,” that it must be cultivated spontaneously without the aid of the state, and that to find such individuals the vagabond class must be recruited.^[34]  I will return to the practicability of these suggestions later.

Salter’s third thinker, Wilhelm Roepke, contributed to distributist thought in his The Economics of the Free Society (1937), The Social Crisis of our Time (1942), and A Humane Economy (1960).  In this review, I will focus on Ropke’s additions to Belloc and Chesterton; many of Roepke’s ideas were derivative from them, but some were unique contributions.  I found little in Salter’s review of Social Crisis and Humane Economy that was unique to Roepke.  He too chagrins bigness in economics and politics and does so because of the tendency to proletarianize the population, he refers to this as “enmassment.”^[35].  Enmassment is essentially bad because, as reviewed already, it renders the population propertyless and therefore unable to exercise virtue or to lead a fully human life. 

Roepke conceives political prescriptions for the malady of enmassment.  He notes that the political effect of proletarianism renders the population unfit to rule and to be ruled in turn within a pluralistic political system “with many sources of authority.”^[36]  One can understand that these strains are amplified in today’s radically multiculturalist pluralist systems.   Salter argues through Roepke that “countervailing authorities help citizens develop their potentials and practice virtue.  They are crucial for resisting abuses of power – a kind of social checks-and-balances…”^[37]  Indeed, Roepke shared Eric Voegelin’s insight that the ideological habits of liberalism had debilitating effects on the ideas of liberty: “I do not belong … to the liberal camp in so far as I dissociate myself from … utilitarianism, progressivism, secularism, rationalism, optimism, and what Eric Voegelin aptly calls ‘immanentism’ or ‘social gnosticism.”^[38]  Liberal societies are increasingly sensitive to the notion that an elite class of globalists who think they know best is often quite insensitive to the needs and welfare of the enmassed.  Roepke aptly demonstrates how the industrialization era demeaned the spontaneity of liberal economics.  The primary economic virtue of markets, according to Roepke, is their spontaneous nature, hallmarked by “free competition.”^[39] Roepke shows that the economic and political arrangements created by World War II were ersatz liberal regimes.  While a pure communist system would contain very little freedom or economic spontaneity, the “mixed systems” of the liberal regimes (i.e., some spontaneity, but checked by subsidies and tax incentives) frustrated the supply and demand balances.  Prices were artificially restrained, meaning that excess demand had to be satisfied by things like black markets and under-the-counter deals.  The influence of the mob and gangs in the industrialized, enmassed world created serious side effects that deeply frustrated the plight for social justice under FDR’s new liberalism.  Thus, the ideological push for social equality through the new social contract contained mechanisms that would harm the plight to create true equality because they fundamentally violated the basic principle of economics, that markets are spontaneous mechanisms that can and do correct imbalances in supply, demand, and pricing.  Though it is vogue to say today, it has been true for some time now, that liberal leaders are picking winners and losers within our system, instead of allowing market and price forces to determine outcomes as per capitalist theory.

Specific means to curb this special interest liberalism are predictable to today’s readers.  The breaking up of monopolies is suggested because Roepke understood that monopolies in the industrial liberal world were state-supported.^[40]  The redistribution of wealth to assure social justice is chagrined for similar reasons – the redistributing will be selecting winners and losers, and will therefore harm the system writ large: “Every attempt to alter such data by force will produce disorder in the economic system, which, in turn, will engender even greater counter-forces.”^[41] Consistent with distributism, however, Roepke is no advocate of laissez-faire economics but rather advocates for “small adjustments” that might produce a greater distribution of wealth.^[42]  Essentially, the problem with liberalism is that has begun to look too much like socialism, where state-guided adjustments are large in scale.  Instead, liberal leaders might exercise the maxim of finding the smallest changes that can produce the greatest amount of good.  State intervention under both systems is a metaphorical defibrillator, shocking economic systems to stimulate them back to life.  Distributist thinkers consistently call for standard economic policy tools to be implemented subtly and surgically.  Or as Salter puts it, the state should work “at the margin.”^[43]

Each thinker reviewed gets some economic specifics wrong, but Salter argues that these errors are trivial in the grand scheme of things.  For example, “the most profitable reading of Belloc,” he writes, “is as a social philosopher whose concern is freedom and human flourishing.”^[44]  Contemporary economists understand that some of his arguments are technically wrong.  Large firms do not have as much pricing power as he suspected, and small firms are less disadvantaged in savings than he suspected, for example.^[45]  And, as mentioned earlier, he is certainly correct about many of the fundamentals of his argument, as anyone who drives through a small town in America, observing many shuttered stores and one busy Walmart, understands without conducting a formal economic analysis.   As Salter puts it:

“If the costs to human freedom, and hence human flourishing, were reflected in prices, consumers would be much less likely to purchase goods produced by capitalist methods.  Similar goods produced by distributist methods entail higher economic costs, but lower political costs, since widely dispersed property supports liberty.”^[46]

All three of Salter’s exemplars of distributism understood that individuals were not disposed for freedom in industrial England.  They did not value freedom more than cheap commodities.   Their therapies require a peria goge to occur in the souls of liberals, but more than a century later, the cave is even darker.  When we consider Chesterton’s arguments for a heroic revolution to arise from the dispossessed class, we run into the problem that these ideas are truly great for human flourishing but profoundly difficult to sell to people today.  At one point, attacking the need for machinery, he argues philosophers should “say frankly that men never needed to have cars at all.”^[47]  Today, this argument would include that we do not need computers, the internet, social media, etc.  In my home in Texas, it would also stipulate that we do not need air conditioners.  This argument would be correct but would be met with widespread and deep resistance on a prolific scale.  The idea of sweating through a Texas summer, even if only temporarily until local manufacturers develop in my locale small-scale production of air conditioners, deeply challenges the promise that I will fare better without that air conditioner.   While working on this review, I have summarized these distributist arguments to several friends who are neither political philosophers nor dyed-in-the-wool ideologues, and each of them has retorted, “we cannot go backwards.”  If I press, reminding them that might become kings of their own castle and owners of their own small-scale firm, they retort again, “we cannot go backwards.”   While the argument is that distributism would not be taking us backward at all – Roepke addresses this concern by arguing that we would merely be “set[ting] the clock … right,” not back – the challenge of selling this vision to today’s cave dwellers is daunting.^[48]  Big is good, bigger is better, and more stuff is better than less stuff – and, to our collective misfortune, that’s all there is to it.

The daunting challenge is complicated by many social realities.  Families must increasingly fight the state for control over their children’s education and sexuality – only some of them are engaged in this fight.  Homeless populations and immigration patterns reflect an increasing vagabond class who are wholly dependent on state support.  Education quality in the United States has been deteriorating for some time, and the humanities that teach the virtues necessary for human flourishing are out of fashion.  The very folks needed to be the heroes of distributism are profoundly unprepared for heroic tasks at present.  Even the best-meaning friends of human flourishing will offer a four-word full stop: “we cannot go backwards,” that will remind Voegelinian scholars of Marx’s prohibition of questions: “do not think, do not question [us, the many].”  As an observer of social reality who has spent my career warning of the direction our society is heading, I struggle to identify easy solutions to this problem.  Hopefully, it is darkest just before dawn but hope in dawn is a poor therapy for cave dwellers.  Salter’s work is important for several reasons, amongst them is that it might stimulate a deeper discussion about what appropriate therapies entail.  But this begins with the monumental task of turning souls, and as the allegory makes clear, resistance should be expected.  The only weakness of Salter’s work is its dearth on this point, even though each of his thinkers points to it, and it is a point upon which the entire distributist scheme depends.  This may be forgiven, for I too struggle to offer smart practical advice for the cultivation of philosophical depth to those in a free society who do not wish to engage in religion, do not wish to enroll in a humanity class, and do neither because they believe that maximizing their bottom line is all that really matters in life.

Salter’s book is valuable, though I could not review every argument within it here.  I encourage you to read it for yourself and to assign it to your students.  Its value derives most fundamentally from the fact that it offers alternative suggestions to the blasé and over-the-hill ideologies of capitalist liberalism and socialism.  This value is priceless.  Perhaps there is some appropriate irony in this.  For surely distributism would drive prices higher.  Short-term (whatever that means) economic pain would be a widespread reality.  Some commodities that we believe have made our lives better would be temporarily lost or more difficult to procure.  But as distributist policy and practices take shape, local entrepreneurs would seize opportunities on smaller scales than a Tesla or an Apple.  Regardless, the invaluable gains in human flourishing, in virtue, and in freedom, cannot and should not be translated to dollars and cents.  The cliché, after all, is true: freedom is not free.

The Political Economy of Distributism
By Alexander William Salter
Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2023; 228pp

NOTES:

[1] Alexander William Salter, The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good (Catholic University Press, Washington DC: 2023), 18

[2] Ibid., 18

[3] Ibid., 19-21

[4] Ibid., 22

[5] Ibid., 23

[6] Ibid., 31-4

[7] Ibid., 34

[8] Ibid., 35

[9] Ibid., 36

[10] Ibid., 36

[11] Ibid., 36

[12] Ibid., 38

[13] Ibid., 38

[14] Ibid., 52

[15] Ibid., 52

[16] Ibid., 64

[17] Ibid., 54-61

[18] Ibid., 52

[19] Ibid., 63

[20] Ibid., 64

[21] Ibid., 94

[22] Ibid., 75

[23] Ibid., 83

[24] Ibid., 77

[25] Ibid., 77

[26] Ibid., 92

[27] Ibid., 93

[28] Ibid., 94

[29] Ibid., 104

[30] Ibid., 105

[31] Ibid., 106-8

[32] Ibid., 109

[33] Ibid., 110

[34] Ibid., 110

[35] Ibid., see 165-170

[36] Ibid., 156

[37] Ibid., 156

[38] Ibid., 166

[39] Ibid., 182

[40] Ibid., 190

[41] Ibid., 194

[42] Ibid., 194

[43] Ibid., 197

[44] Ibid., 68

[45] Ibid., 66-7

[46] Ibid., 79

[47] Ibid., 115

[48] Ibid., 170

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