The Distributist
Chesterton, G. K.
THE DISTRIBUTIST By G. K. CHESTERTON DISTRIBUTISM is an approximate name for an approximate thing. That, to begin with, is where it is something more and less than socialism, or the optimist...
...but the duties of modern scientific discussion require us to begin at the dead end...
...But the Distributist does not necessarily think that one tendency is to be trusted forever at the expense of everything else...
...Above all, he says that this is not the same thing as buying eggs easily at the stores or getting them from that great store called the state...
...It is almost as abnormal as anarchy...
...only the kitchen garden and the fowl run are held ultimately under the mercy of God...
...The Capitalists, or rather Monopolists, who are now maintaining it, are in the most exact sense of the word Extremists...
...I can perfectly well imagine a community in which there is too little Communism...
...the statesman, if he is a higher thinker, may think it is immoral to eat anything except ducks' eggs...
...To use a more homely and fitting figure, the Distributist, like his friend the peasant, begins with a profound suspicion about the wisdom of putting all his eggs in one basket...
...And it wants pushing, not because it is the only idea that now needs to be considered, but because it is the only idea that is blankly and utterly ignored...
...We do not so much wish the world to be Distributist as wish it to be more Distributist...
...Property in houses and shops and tools counts for a great deal...
...he is quite willing to agree that many of them are rotten eggs, and do not so much come from the politician as return upon him in showers...
...Just as we wish economic power balanced between various citizens, and not trusted blindly to one monopolist, so we want social and moral power balanced between different types and tenures, and not all blindly trusted to one monotonous ideal...
...But it does not necessarily expect to cut up the country into the precise pattern of a chessboard...
...I say that it badly wants pushing now...
...or how far he may be already succeeding...
...He does not believe that they are golden eggs, laid by some silly goose of a politician or plutocrat...
...Distributism, so far, is a tendency to reverse a tendency...
...or else that some one idea, such as Centralization, can be pushed further and further forever...
...Chesterton replied by sending us the following paper which is intended to be the first of two...
...They recognize that there must be a gradation and a difference of application in their test of a state...
...In an older and more human language, he is so eccentric as to feel more affection for a fountain than for a whirlpool...
...and that the fountain, in comparison, is liable to splash people rather indiscriminately...
...He explains that "the Distributist believes that the modern movement should be centrifugal, and perceives that the modern movement is solely and exclusively centripetal...
...It is for us a matter of proportion rather than perfection...
...Or rather, to come to the core of the conception, he wishes as many families as possible to have their own eggs in the sense of keeping their own chickens...
...It aims at the more equal distribution of private property, especially in the primary forms of property such as land...
...but, if once we accept the real idea of property, we must agree that recent progress has not the very vaguest idea of proportion...
...Like the peasant, he is notably cold when it is made clear that it will not even be his own basket...
...They are free in the perfectly practical sense that they cannot be instantly starved out, if they oppose the powers of the world on any point of justice or self-respect...
...even the coinage is at the mercy of the crown or government...
...Distributism, so far, is a tendency to reverse a tendency...
...and he is firmly convinced that the heart of the modern whirlpool is hollow and is the dwellingplace of death...
...And we start by saying that the total loss of this true economic independence, as a basis for political and spiritual independence, is one vast blunder to which the world is bound and to which the world is blind...
...He recognizes that the whirlpool is a most exact and exquisite spiral curve, very scientific when recorded in charts and diagrams...
...It is specially and peculiarly without the elements of balance, of criticism and a consideration of both sides...
...The stocks are at the mercy of the stock exchange...
...But he would rather be splashed than drowned...
...In short, in so far as most families, or many families, or even a few families, have access to actual production, independent of the new centralized organizations, those families alone are free...
...The man who could live on his own eggs or vegetables is the standard of that state...
...One of the queerest jests in human history is that in which a politician once described this extraordinary condition of Capitalism as "normalcy...
...I hope to say something about these more practical prospects in another article...
...but not necessarily more and more Distributist...
...It is making no attempt of any sort to preserve property from being entirely swallowed up in the whirpools of commercial or civic Centralization...
...I do not say that Distributism can be pushed further and further forever...
...But the list is enough to show that property gets further and further from liberty, as it gets nearer and nearer to the conveniences and conventions of current finance...
...Thus it is that the Distributists occupy an important place as critics of the existing order—or disorder...
...For common sense does not come with simplicity, in the sense of mere simplification...
...It takes all sorts to make a church...
...the first Distributists in the modern English group, if not necessarily Catholics, were men with that sort of common sense which is actually produced by the complexity of Catholicism...
...even property in money for much...
...But he wants the average output of eggs, good or bad, distributed into all the different baskets of different families...
...Now what we remark about this form of freedom is that the world has apparently forgotten all about it...
...property in stocks and shares, if they are honest, for something...
...in one sense it includes those who are not Distributists...
...He only points out that Centralization is now in fact being trusted at the expense of everything else...
...He represents the ideal to which it approximates...
...Bowing my head to this ritual, I would explain with all solemnity that the Distributist believes that the modern movement should be centrifugal, and perceives that the modern movement is solely and exclusively centripetal...
...Indeed, there has actually been such a community, ever since the destruction of the monasteries...
...Whereas the Utopian Capitalist or Collectivist does expect that his pattern of concentric rings will remain exactly as it is, with its rings unbroken...
...tions and the rest...
...He feels this as equally true, whether it is the big basket of Capitalist or Communist organization...
...For the store, if it is a ring, may choose to sell nothing but small eggs or bad eggs...
...That, to begin with, is where it is something more and less than socialism, or the optimist organizing forms of Capitalism...
...The difference between the ideas lies deep in the moral philosophies from which they sprang...
...that the world is engaged in strengthening and tightening up vast centralized systems under which it cannot exist at all, anywhere, anyhow or for anybody...
...I mean that there is now an unavoidable custom of describing all human things in material or mathematical formulas: margins and multiples and mechanical reacRequested by The Commonweal to outline the economic views he had defended, Mr...
...but there are many other forms of property which, each in its degree, can be approximations...
...This distinction must be kept in mind when we consider whether he has any chances of success...
...A subsequent paper will outline the practical hopes of the movement.—The Editors...
...But the Distributists are not Extremists...
...But in all these things we recognize that we are in one sense supporting a relative truth, and do not expect more than a relative triumph...
...Intellectual simplification is never far from fanaticism...
...not that the world fails to perfect it or universalize it, but that the world utterly despises and destroys it...
...or the state may impose a law of total prohibition of eggs, because of the notorious excesses of niggers in stealing chickens...
...and not all trusted to the gigantic bag of the carpet-bagger...
...We may begin any such explanation either at the live end or the dead end...
...But the moral philosophy behind most modern experiments means one of two things: either the theory that a centralized plan can be so perfect that we need never criticize the action of the centre...
...it takes all sorts to make a Distributist state...
...He wishes them to have, as far as possible, several ownerships of the means of production...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 23
