All the gluttony of today’s age gnaws at the little temperance that remains. In our increasingly consumptive condition, our virtues are continuously undermined through our transactions. Not only is our moral character compromised through mindless consumption, but our economic positions are greatly weakened.

In the absence of strong virtues and economic freedom, we find ourselves feeding like animals from a trough. Fattening ourselves on comforts and distraction as our muscles and brains wither, leaving us weak. A diet has become necessary for our current survival and future flourishing.

For quite some time now, “voting with your dollar” has been praised by those across the political spectrum. Too often, this phrase is mostly associated with partisan politics or never leaves the parking lot of a farmers’ market. At best, it pushes some folks to buy local, but most of the time, it is simply the shifting of consumption towards whichever company may be virtue signaling the best at the time. A more extreme phrase should be adopted that conveys the same message and then some. One that not only seeks to explicitly acknowledge how spending influences society, but also how it influences oneself.

Rather than vote with one’s dollar, one should command with it. Voters accept the possibility that they go unheard or that they may lose. Those who command have an implicit expectation that their standards be met, or they will go elsewhere. Commanding with your dollar is the aim of the hyper-conscious consumer. Through this proposed form of consumption, every purchase is evaluated on its moral, social, and economic consequences in relation to the consumer, their community, and their faith.

The hyper-conscious consumer is a consumer who has weaponized their behavior to direct production’s behavior, making it so that their capital is a governing force, rather than a democratic tool. Weaponization in this context should be interpreted as the disciplined and deliberate action of a knight, not the reckless aggression of a barbarian. Acting alone, the hyper-conscious consumer enriches themselves and their families through the cultivation of virtue required to command with one’s dollar. En masse, hyper-conscious demand is a force to be used by a society to bring about a more just world.

How does one weaponize their consumption? Ideally, the hyper-conscious consumer asks themselves a series of questions prior to purchasing anything. Is this necessary? How was this produced? Is it produced in accordance with the standards of the world I’d like to live in? By supporting this product, is my dignity upheld? Is the same true for my family and community? Does this work against or in support of my long-term economic freedom? Only by asking these questions can one’s virtue be applied to one’s consumptive behavior.

Rooted in the cardinal virtues, hyper-conscious consumption is the practice of exercising reasonable judgement upon spending. Temperance restrains the consumer from excessive consumption, guiding moderation that bolsters the spiritual, physical, and mental health of the consumer. Through prudence, needs and wants are clear. The consequences of today’s spending are weighed against the bright future ahead. Discernment of right and wrong regarding the production, distribution, marketing, or intention of a product ensures that justice is carried out by the consumer. While some are more reluctant to embrace hyper-conscious consumption than others, fortitude shields from peer pressure, endures through discomfort, and strengthens one’s ethical principles.

This proposed form of consumption stretches beyond concerns with morality, justice, and economics. It should also appreciate and incentivize beauty. Hyper-conscious consumption is not only about buying less but buying better. Craftsmanship, local culture, and tradition can be appreciated through consumption. The prioritized purchasing of beauty rewards the further pursuit of beauty.

Hyper-conscious consumers must command with their dollar to create the world in which they seek to live. The unstable system that we have inherited and continue to pass on has, for too long, allowed suppliers to manufacture and shape demand. It is time for the consumer to take on a more active role in guiding markets and shaping supply.

This is not a hopeless pursuit either. Our current economic system is fragile, and it could be argued that supply has become far more dependent on a passive consumer than the passive consumer is dependent on supply. Continuous expansion of consumer credit, consumer stimulus, and “safety nets” are policy avenues to ensure that the consumer continues their passive spending. The purpose of pointing this out is to highlight that the consumer in aggregate is a powerful force that has and can continue to mold policy and how business occurs.

Short-term degrowth is perhaps unavoidable in the case of a successful hyper-conscious consumer movement. However, if acted upon, it should see the return or strengthening of local communities, dignification of labor, and prioritization of family, which the current economic environment does not care for. Only if this changes can long-term growth be truly sustainable and secured. Growth outside of financial speculation is possible, and for markets that cannot yet be scaled down, they can be better governed by the population’s individual consumer choices.

The largest barrier to achieving hyper-conscious consumption is education. Without proper exposure to morality, ethics, faith, philosophy, and knowledge on general subjects, an individual lacks the resources needed to make their best decisions. Education’s improvement has several avenues, as it is not only through class and lessons, but through life. The local empowerment of the family, the churches, other social institutions, and schooling can aid the development of the hyper-conscious consumer. Increased transparency from businesses and governments can provide the individual with information needed to best exercise their judgement and develop trust among the population they serve.

Without the emergence of hyper-conscious consumers, there is no ability to bring about the Distributive State from where we currently stand. Individuals who consume without judgement are destined for dependence. Without incentives being created by the individual consumer, rather than only the government, the aims of concentrated capital will surely overrule our society’s hopes.

The exercise of judgement through virtue not only forces one’s surroundings to reckon with the individual and their community but also paves the road to widespread property ownership. Passive or degenerate consumption’s proliferation undermines the individual and family by pillaging incomes and preventing saving. By primarily spending according to one’s needs and thoughtfully acquiring wants, one’s overall outflow of wealth will likely reduce. As the wealth of the hyper-conscious consumer builds, the prospect of owning productive property in the future becomes increasingly tangible.

Should the Distributive State be one’s desire, hyper-conscious consumption is a necessary step that can be immediately acted upon by anyone. To assume that all will radically embrace the hyper-conscious consumer mentality overnight is naïve. But it should be recognized that if a significant portion of a regional population or broader population were to apply this hyper-conscious behavior to only a quarter of their areas of spend, they’d quickly begin to shape the areas in which their actions overlap.

Through guiding morals and virtues, our economies can be reorganized to uphold justice and beauty through individuals more deliberately consuming. The nature of economics has already vested consumers with the power to determine who continues operating and who will shut down. Only by exersizing that power and consuming as if the Distributive State is already among us can the Distributive State be achieved.

Anonymous, Noble Couple at the Market, 1650

Section 6 - The Stable Solutions of This Instability

Given a capitalist state, of its nature unstable, it will tend to reach stability by some method or another.

It is the definition of unstable equilibrium that a body in unstable equilibrium is seeking a stable equilibrium. For instance, a pyramid balanced upon its apex is in unstable equilibrium; which simply means that a slight force one way or the other will make it fall into a position where it will repose. Similarly, certain chemical mixtures are said to be in unstable equilibrium when their constituent parts have such affinity one for another that a slight shock may make them combine and transform the chemical arrangement of the whole. Of this sort are explosives.

If the Capitalist State is in unstable equilibrium, this only means that it is seeking a stable equilibrium, and that Capitalism cannot but be transformed into some other arrangement wherein Society may repose.

There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism: Slavery, Socialism, and Property.

I may imagine a mixture of any two of these three or of all the three, but each is a dominant type, and from the very nature of the problem no fourth arrangement can be devised.

The problem turns, remember, upon the control of the means of production. Capitalism means that this control is vested in the hands of few, while political freedom is the appanage of all. If this anomaly cannot endure, from its insecurity and from its own contradiction with its presumed moral basis, you must either have a transformation of the one or of the other of the two elements which combined have been found unworkable. These two factors are (1) The ownership of the means of Production by a few; (2) The Freedom of all. To solve Capitalism you must get rid of restricted ownership, or of freedom, or of both. Now there is only one alternative to freedom, which is the negation of it. Either a man is free to work and not to work as he pleases, or he may be liable to a legal compulsion to work, backed by the forces of the State. In the first he is a free man; in the second he is by definition a slave. We have, therefore, so far as this factor of freedom is concerned, no choice between a number of changes, but only the opportunity of one, to wit, the establishment of slavery in place of freedom. Such a solution, the direct, immediate, and conscious re-establishment of slavery, would provide a true solution of the problems which Capitalism offers. It would guarantee, under workable regulations, sufficiency and security for the dispossessed. Such a solution, as I shall show, is the probable goal which our society will in fact approach. To its immediate and conscious acceptance, however, there is an obstacle.

A direct and conscious establishment of slavery as a solution to the problem of Capitalism, the surviving Christian tradition of our civilisation compels men to reject. No reformer will advocate it; no prophet dares take it as yet for granted. All theories of a reformed society will therefore attempt, at first, to leave untouched the factor of Freedom among the elements which make up Capitalism, and will concern themselves with some change in the factor of Property.⁴

Now, in attempting to remedy the evils of Capitalism by remedying that one of its two factors which consists in an ill distribution of property, you have two, and only two, courses open to you.

If you are suffering because property is restricted to a few, you can alter that factor in the problem either by putting property into the hands of many, or by putting it into the hands of none. There is no third course.

In the concrete, to put property in the hands of “none” means to vest it as a trust in the hands of political officers. If you say that the evils proceeding from Capitalism are due to the institution of property itself, and not to the dispossession of the many by the few, then you must forbid the private possession of the means of production by any particular and private part of the community: but someone must control the means of production, or we should have nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine means the management of the means of production by those who are the public officers of the community. Whether these public officers are themselves controlled by the community or no has nothing to do with this solution on its economic side. The essential point to grasp is that the only alternative to private property is public property. Somebody must see to the ploughing and must control the ploughs; otherwise no ploughing will be done.

It is equally obvious that if you conclude property in itself to be no evil but only the small number of its owners, then your remedy is to increase the number of those owners.

So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and say that a society like ours, disliking the name of “slavery,” and avoiding a direct and conscious re-establishment of the slave status, will necessarily contemplate the reform of its ill-distributed ownership on one of two models. The first is the negation of private property and the establishment of what is called Collectivism: that is, the management of the means of production by the political officers of the community. The second is the wider distribution of property until that institution shall become the mark of the whole State, and until free citizens are normally found to be possessors of capital or land, or both.

The first model we call Socialism or the Collectivist State; the second we call the Proprietary or Distributive State.

With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show in my next section why the second model, involving the redistribution of property, is rejected as impracticable by our existing Capitalist Society, and why, therefore, the model chosen by reformers is the first model, that of a Collectivist State.

I shall then proceed to show that at its first inception all Collectivist Reform is necessarily deflected and evolves, in the place of what it had intended, a new thing: a society wherein the owners remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accepts security at the expense of servitude.

Have I made myself clear?

If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its briefest terms, the formula which is the kernel of my whole thesis.

The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory which in action produces something utterly different from Collectivism: to wit, the Servile State.

Section 7 - Socialism Is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux

I say that the line of least resistance, if it be followed, leads a Capitalist State to transform itself into a Servile State.

I propose to show that this comes about from the fact that not a Distributive but a Collectivist solution is the easiest for a Capitalist State to aim at, and that yet, in the very act of attempting Collectivism, what results is not Collectivism at all, but the servitude of the many, and the confirmation in their present privilege of the few; that is, the Servile State.

Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhorrent propose for the remedy of Capitalism one of two reforms.

Either they would put property into the hands of most citizens, so dividing land and capital that a determining number of families in the State were possessed of the means of production; or they would put those means of production into the hands of the political officers of the community, to be held in trust for the advantage of all.

The first solution may be called the attempted establishment of the Distributive State. The second may be called the attempted establishment of the Collectivist State.

Those who favour the first course are the Conservatives or Traditionalists. They are men who respect and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of Christian European life. They know that property was thus distributed throughout the State during the happiest periods of our past history; they also know that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have greater social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In general, those who would re-establish, if possible, the Distributive State in the place of, and as a remedy for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men concerned with known realities, and having for their ideal a condition of society which experience has tested and proved both stable and good. They are then, of the two schools of reformers, the more practical in the sense that they deal more than do the Collectivists (called also Socialists) with things which either are or have been in actual existence. But they are less practical in another sense (as we shall see in a moment) from the fact that the stage of the disease with which they are dealing does not readily lend itself to such a reaction as they propose.

The Collectivist, on the other hand, proposes to put land and capital into the hands of the political officers of the community, and this on the understanding that they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the advantage of the community. In making this proposal he is evidently dealing with a state of things hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that has been tested by experience, nor one of which our race and history can furnish instances. In this sense, therefore, he is the less practical of the two reformers. His ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine Socialism in actual working, nor can we say (as we can say of well-divided property): “On such and such an occasion, in such and such a period of European history, Collectivism was established and produced both stability and happiness in society.”

In this sense, therefore, the Collectivist is far less practical than the reformer who desires well-distributed property.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which this Socialist is more practical than that other type of reformer, from the fact that the stage of the disease into which we have fallen apparently admits of his remedy with less shock than it admits of a reaction towards well-divided property.

For example: the operation of buying out some great tract of private ownership to-day (as a railway or a harbour company) with public funds, continuing its administration by publicly paid officials and converting its revenue to public use, is a thing with which we are familiar and which seemingly might be indefinitely multiplied. Individual examples of such transformation of waterworks, gas, tramways, from a Capitalist to a Collectivist basis are common, and the change does not disturb any fundamental thing in our society. When a private Water company or Tramway line is bought by some town and worked thereafter in the interests of the public, the transaction is effected without any perceptible friction, disturbs the life of no private citizen, and seems in every way normal to the society in which it takes place.

Upon the contrary, the attempt to create a large number of shareholders in such enterprises and artificially to substitute many partners, distributed throughout a great number of the population, in the place of the original few capitalist owners, would prove lengthy and at every step would arouse opposition, would create disturbance, would work at an expense of great friction, and would be imperilled by the power of the new and many owners to sell again to a few.

In a word, the man who desires to re-establish property as an institution normal to most citizens in the State is working against the grain of our existing Capitalist society, while a man who desires to establish Socialism—that is Collectivism—is working with the grain of that society. The first is like a physician who should say to a man whose limbs were partially atrophied from disuse: “Do this and that, take such and such exercise, and you will recover the use of your limbs.” The second is like a physician who should say: “You cannot go on as you are. Your limbs are atrophied from lack of use. Your attempt to conduct yourself as though they were not is useless and painful; you had better make up your mind to be wheeled about in a fashion consonant to your disease.” The Physician is the Reformer, his Patient the Proletariat.

It is not the purpose of this book to show how and under what difficulties a condition of well-divided property might be restored and might take the place (even in England) of that Capitalism which is now no longer either stable or tolerable; but for the purposes of contrast and to emphasise my argument I will proceed, before showing how the Collectivist unconsciously makes for the Servile State, to show what difficulties surround the Distributive solution and why, therefore, the Collectivist solution appeals so much more readily to men living under Capitalism.

If I desire to substitute a number of small owners for a few large ones in some particular enterprise, how shall I set to work?

I might boldly confiscate and redistribute at a blow. But by what process should I choose the new owners? Even supposing that there was some machinery whereby the justice of the new distribution could be assured, how could I avoid the enormous and innumerable separate acts of injustice that would attach to general redistributions? To say “none shall own” and to confiscate is one thing; to say “all should own” and apportion ownership is another. Action of this kind would so disturb the whole network of economic relations as to bring ruin at once to the whole body politic, and particularly to the smaller interests indirectly affected. In a society such as ours a catastrophe falling upon the State from outside might indirectly do good by making such a redistribution possible. But no one working from within the State could provoke that catastrophe without ruining his own cause.

If, then, I proceed more slowly and more rationally and canalise the economic life of society so that small property shall gradually be built up within it, see against what forces of inertia and custom I have to work to-day in a Capitalist society!

If I desire to benefit small savings at the expense of large, I must reverse the whole economy under which interest is paid upon deposits to-day. It is far easier to save £100 out of a revenue of £1,000 than to save £10 out of a revenue of £100. It is infinitely easier to save £10 out of a revenue of £100 than £5 out of a revenue of £50. To build up small property through thrift when once the Mass have fallen into the proletarian trough is impossible unless you deliberately subsidise small savings, offering them a reward which, in competition, they could never obtain; and to do this the whole vast arrangement of credit must be worked backwards. Or, let the policy be pursued of penalising undertakings with few owners, of heavily taxing large blocks of shares and of subsidising with the produce small holders in proportion to the smallness of their holding. Here again you are met with the difficulty of a vast majority who cannot even bid for the smallest share.

One might multiply instances of the sort indefinitely, but the strongest force against the distribution of ownership in a society already permeated with Capitalist modes of thought is still the moral one: Will men want to own? Will officials, administrators, and lawmakers be able to shake off the power which under Capitalism seems normal to the rich? If I approach, for instance, the works of one of our great Trusts, purchase it with public money, bestow, even as a gift, the shares thereof to its workmen, can I count upon any tradition of property in their midst which will prevent their squandering the new wealth? Can I discover any relics of the co-operative instinct among such men? Could I get managers and organisers to take a group of poor men seriously or to serve them as they would serve rich men? Is not the whole psychology of a Capitalist society divided between the proletarian mass which thinks in terms not of property but of “employment,” and the few owners who are alone familiar with the machinery of administration?

I have touched but very briefly and superficially upon this matter, because it needs no elaboration. Though it is evident that with a sufficient will and a sufficient social vitality property could be restored, it is evident that all efforts to restore it have in a Capitalist society such as our own a note of oddity, of doubtful experiment, of being uncoordinated with other social things around them, which marks the heavy handicap under which any such attempt must proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the aged.

On the other hand, the Collectivist experiment is thoroughly suited (in appearance at least) to the Capitalist society which it proposes to replace. It works with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and thinks in the existing terms of Capitalism, appeals to just those appetites which Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed among men wherever the blight of it has spread.

So true is all this that the stupider kind of Collectivist will often talk of a “Capitalist phase” of society as the necessary precedent to a “Collectivist phase.” A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it “furnishes a mode of transition from private to public ownership.” Collectivism promises employment to the great mass who think of production only in terms of employment. It promises to its workmen the security which a great and well-organised industrial Capitalist unit (like one of our railways) can give through a system of pensions, regular promotion, etc., but that security vastly increased through the fact that it is the State and not a mere unit of the State which guarantees it. Collectivism would administer, would pay wages, would promote, would pension off, would fine—and all the rest of it—exactly as the Capitalist State does to-day. The proletarian, when the Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, perceives nothing in the picture save certain ameliorations of his present position. Who can imagine that if, say, two of our great industries, Coal and Railways, were handed over to the State tomorrow, the armies of men organised therein would find any change in the character of their lives, save in some increase of security and possibly in a very slight increase of earnings?

The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far as the proletarian mass of a Capitalist State is concerned, nothing unknown at all, but a promise of some increment in wages and a certainty of far greater ease of mind.

To that small minority of a Capitalist society which owns the means of production, Collectivism will of course appear as an enemy, but, even so, it is an enemy which they understand and an enemy with whom they can treat in terms common both to that enemy and to themselves. If, for instance, the State proposes to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 per cent. and believes that under State management it will make the trust pay 5 per cent. then the transference takes the form of a business proposition: the State is no harder to the Capitalists taken over than was Mr Yerkes to the Underground. Again, the State, having greater credit and longevity, can (it would seem)⁵ “buy out” any existing Capitalist body upon favourable terms. Again, the discipline by which the State would enforce its rules upon the proletariat it employed would be the same rules as those by which the Capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests to-day.

There is in the whole scheme which proposes to transform the Capitalist into the Collectivist State no element of reaction, the use of no term with which a Capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no instinct, whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or mechanical regulation, with which a Capitalist community is not amply familiar.

In general, if modern Capitalist England were made by magic a State of small owners, we should all suffer an enormous revolution. We should marvel at the insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, at the strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, vigorous personalities discernible upon every side. But if this modern Capitalist England could, by a process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjustment of individual interests, be transformed into a Collectivist State, the apparent change at the end of that transition would not be conspicuous to the most of us, and the transition itself should have met with no shocks that theory can discover. The insecure and hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks of labour would have disappeared into isolated workplaces of a penal kind: we should hardly miss them. Many incomes now involving considerable duties to the State would have been replaced by incomes as large or larger, involving much the same duties and bearing only the newer name of salaries. The small shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed under public schemes at a salary, in part engaged in the old work of distribution at secure incomes; and such small owners as are left, of boats, of farms, even of machinery, would perhaps know the new state of things into which they had survived through nothing more novel than some increase in the irritating system of inspection and of onerous petty taxation: they are already fairly used to both.

This picture of the natural transition from Capitalism to Collectivism seems so obvious that many Collectivists in a generation immediately past believed that nothing stood between them and the realisation of their ideal save the unintelligence of mankind. They had only to argue and expound patiently and systematically for the great transformation to become possible. They had only to continue arguing and expounding for it at last to be realised.

I say, “of the last generation.” To-day that simple and superficial judgment is getting woefully disturbed. The most sincere and single-minded of Collectivists cannot but note that the practical effect of their propaganda is not an approach towards the Collectivist State at all, but towards something very different. It is becoming more and more evident that with every new reform—and those reforms commonly promoted by particular Socialists, and in a puzzled way blessed by Socialists in general—another state emerges more and more clearly. It is becoming increasingly certain that the attempted transformation of Capitalism into Collectivism is resulting not in Collectivism at all, but in some third thing which the Collectivist never dreamt of, or the Capitalist either; and that third thing is the Servile State: a State, that is, in which the mass of men shall be constrained by law to labour to the profit of a minority, but, as the price of such constraint, shall enjoy a security which the old Capitalism did not give them.

Why is the apparently simple and direct action of Collectivist reform diverted into so unexpected a channel? And in what new laws and institutions does modern England in particular and industrial society in general show that this new form of the State is upon us?

To these two questions I will attempt an answer in the two concluding divisions of this book.

Anonymous, River Landscape, 1600-1635

Aiming to secure economic freedom through the widespread ownership of productive property, Distributism envisions a world where humans are dignified, families are recognized as the primary social unit, and authority is vested at the most local order possible. This is upheld and spurred onward by the moral order desired, one where solidarity among people directs them towards the common good at a local level that, in aggregate, forms a unified collection of communities. A moral order rooted in virtue’s cultivation and perpetuation is the pillar that upholds the Distributist economic, political, and moral vision.

This noble framework, while having influenced several facets of our society today without much recognition, is still far from becoming a lived reality. Despite its distance, it remains a highly compelling vision to strive for. Its problem is that it currently lacks significant modern direction on how to reach it.

Realistically, two paths of implementation can be taken, one significantly more powerful than the other. The necessary but insufficient of the two paths, the institutional one, seeks new perspectives on tax policy, antitrust, bank reform, and more. Implementation by the path of the institution is only insufficient because it does not create a Distributist person and can only create conditions favorable to distributism. If individuals are not well prepared for policy, the aim of the institution fails. Additionally, until there is a great number of Distributists, great caution should be exercised with institutional power so that the state does not drift into becoming what Distributists fear.

The other, more powerful, path of implementation is the one that begins at the individual and their family. Rather than infiltrate a blistering bureaucracy to spend decades to pass a handful of policies via higher institutions, creating pockets of the Distributive State within the existing economic and political system through individual pursuits should be preferred. Not only does the implementation by the individual neatly align with Distributism’s key principles, but it also allows those who choose to take this path to see a sliver of this vision’s realization in their lifetime. Should they succeed, that sliver will be widened by their children and those that they encounter, until far from now that sliver becomes the whole vision.

In the final part of the Introduction to Distributism series, the two paths to implementation will be examined. Specific institutional ideas to aid implementation will be outlined, while also being coupled with concerns regarding the reliance on high institutions to achieve Distributist aims. The effectiveness of implementation by the individual and the family will be shown, highlighting the existing opportunity to pursue productive property, the need for hyper-conscious consumption, and prioritizing family. Most practically, a hybrid route is to be taken, where these paths do not exist separately. Distributism’s vision is noble, and because of that, how it is achieved should share that quality.

Path of the Institution

As mentioned, the institution’s role in the Distributist vision is to create conditions that encourage and uphold its principles, facilitating Distributism. Institutions at all levels are inherently centralized to a degree, and because of this, they are top-down in orientation. Distributism has the opposite orientation, so attempting to construct Distributism from the top-down is antithetical to the vision, undermining the freedom sustaining a Distributive State.

Implementation through institutions should not mandate or attempt to design a Distributist world. Existing institutional power should only be wielded to create conditions that allow lower orders of institutions and individuals access to the economic and political principles of Distributism. The restrained and morally guided use of institutions should make it so that the individual and family are the ones to ultimately design the Distributive state. Institutional implementation broadly consists of protection, incentivization, and prevention.

The initial responsibility of institutions in a Distributive State is to protect the conditions that are required for it to function. Property rights must be upheld by the state, contracts must be enforceable, crimes must be punished, and justice must be handed down impartially. Legal enshrinement of local self-government and limits to centralized power are required. This should ring a bell for American readers because it is closely aligned with early American constitutional tradition, especially among the Anti-Federalists. American tradition does not however aim to do this so that property may be widely owned, only protecting these things for the sake of individual liberty. Distributism protects these things so that widely distributed productive property can be maintained, so that economic freedom, family independence, and the common good may be secured.

Diverging from the American tradition further, protections for the establishment and recognition of cooperatives, guilds, and other mutual organizations should be made. Further protections for families are also essential so that they can truly become the primary social unit within the Distributive State. Through all of these protections, stable conditions are created where human flourishing can be achieved through labor, investment, and planning for future generations.

While remaining somewhat market-oriented but differing from the laissez faire approach of much of the modern world, institutional implementation should incentivize behavior that aligns with Distributist principles. Rather than mandate three acres and a cow and forcibly redistributing assets through confiscation, things like widespread productive property ownership should simply be made easier to attain, or conversely, make concentrated property ownership less attractive.

Should these incentives be properly designed, the Distributive State can be built gradually and through the aggregation of free choice to engage in Distributist arrangements. Through incentivization, the institution is a force of encouragement, rather than one of engineering. Distributist incentives can take on several forms and are worthy as long as they uphold and tie back to Distributist principles.

Taxes are a primary tool for Distributists to utilize. Taxes can be used to penalize various things. Economies of scale can be made more expensive to reach and maintain, encouraging local craftsmanship, quality, local business ownership, cultural preservation, and more. To disincentivize concentrated productive property ownership, taxes can be based on the amount of land over a certain threshold or by the proportion of land that is being idled, leaning into Georgist land value tax schemes. Conversely, taxes can be used to reward various things. Cooperatives, employee-owned businesses, family businesses, and other mutual organizations could have tax advantages. Local production and local purchasing could see taxes waived. Intergenerational business succession could even be tax-advantaged. Taxes can be more noble than how they are commonly deployed today.

Institutions can also incentivize people by supporting the development of preferential lending by local banks and credit unions, and making usurious lending practices uncompetitive. However, in Distributist circles, the outright banishment of usury would be a rare exception to its general aversion to mandates by institutional powers. But the point is that it can be incentivized to not be practiced rather than outright banning, because an outright ban is more than likely politically unfeasible today. Incentivization is perhaps the most important arm of Distributism’s institutional implementation because it is easier to achieve democratically than amending the constitution for protections or trust-busting monopolies through prevention in today’s environment.

Prevention is the third aim of implementation by the institution so that concentrated economic and political power that undermines the Distributive State is being actively devolved and stifled. This is the most coercive responsibility of institutions, contrasting with the rule-setting nature of protection and the managerial approach to incentivization. It is under prevention that items like a ban on usury, antitrust enforcement, merger restrictions, reducing regulatory capture, and active decentralization of government fall. Prevention is rather straightforward but has the greatest capacity for abuse by those entrusted to carry it out. Distributism’s moral order, achieved by the individual, and existing institutional protections can balance this power.

Fortunately for Americans and others around the globe, many protections a Distributive State seeks are partially present in our modern societies. How these protections are enforced is unfortunately inconsistent through time and place, but their existence provides grounds for Distributists to create the society they want on their own. Because so many necessary protections are already secured, modern Distributists should focus on incentivization when assessing institutional implementation. Pursuing tax incentives at state/provincial or lower institutional levels through the democratic process is likely the most feasible. To do this, though, requires Distributists. This is why Distributist implementation must begin at the individual and the family, then flow into institutional implementation. Distributive freedoms cannot be protected, Distributive behavior cannot be rewarded, and threats to Distributism cannot be prevented, without a body of Distributists.

Path of the Individual and Family

Every political philosophy has a plan for its implementation through institutions. Seldom does a political philosophy tell ordinary people what they can go out and do tomorrow to start building the world that would support its desired outcomes. Distributism starts with ordinary people living Distributist lives. To begin creating the Distributive State, the individual and family are where its foundations must begin.

Individuals and families’ initial interest should be in pursuing the ownership of productive property. With it being assumed that property ownership is a primary agent of virtue cultivation and its widespread goal being paramount for the Distributist vision, its pursuit is essential to building towards economic independence. It is our duty to ask ourselves: “How can I own something productive?”

A farm is not readily achievable for all, just like starting a business may not be immediately possible. One does not need to drop everything and farm or quit their day job to try to be the next big startup to own productive property. A small workshop in one’s garage filled with tools used for a specific craft or category of work is ownership of productive property. Anything that allows one to work independently is productive property. This pursuit of ownership is necessary because the small craftsman, shopkeeper, designer, etc., will not emerge from thin air. We must actively rebuild widespread ownership of productive property in accordance with our interests so that there may be widespread development of skills.

While farming or land ownership is often not immediately attainable, it should be strongly considered by all on how to do so. Even if the individual does not seek to become a farmer, having the ability to sustain oneself and family in times of need and to root oneself in a community is important. A plot of land should exist for each family to fall back on and pass down. Even if one is unable to use the land in their lifetime, it is the greatest gift one can bestow on their children and remains a primary vehicle of wealth generation.

Coupling with the pursuit of productive property is the rebuilding of the family economy. Firstly, families require children, so we ought to have them. Now that the obvious is out of the way, we can focus on what the family can do today to act beyond multiplication. The family should teach its children useful skills. For most modern families, homeschooling and keeping your kid by your side in the workshop is not something that can be done tomorrow. But being deliberate about how you raise your children and cultivate their skills along with virtue can give them the resources so that their children can do what they could not.

Family gardens are essential in both nourishing the family from the land they inhabit, creating a deep connection to it, and teaching people how to take care of living things. Family gardens, no matter how small, cultivate stewardship and force humanity to be confronted with the realities of nature, building virtue through patience, fortitude, temperance, and more. Tied into food production, but slightly different, is the need for families to ensure meals are being shared. The nuclear family should eat together, acknowledging each other’s work in the garden and the kitchen, and the extended family and neighbors should be frequently welcomed to join them. This creates an opportunity to strengthen familial and community bonds, associate those bonds with their locations, and support one another.

Families should also be constantly engaging in intergenerational planning. One of the key contributors to the lack of widespread productive property ownership and the erasure of wealth in a family after a few generations is the lack of leadership cultivation, effective succession planning, and saving. The classic farm or business succession story is Grandpa ran it for decades and then when he passed, it got divided up equally and everyone sold out to the highest bidder, severing ties to an identity, land, and long-term path to independence. Active conversations regarding the future of a family’s productive property must be taking place in households to avoid this.

What if you are yet to start a family, or are far away from being in a position to attain productive property? What are you to do to help bring about the Distributive State? Firstly, you ought to save the earnings from your labor as best as you can, and secondly all ought to practice hyper-conscious consumption. Rather than saying “every dollar is a vote”, we shall say that every dollar determines the future of other people, organizations, systems, and the direction of your own life.

Who made what you are consuming? Where was it made? How was it made? Is money leaving the community or staying by purchasing this? Are there local alternatives? These are some of the questions a hyper-conscious consumer must learn to ask. Mindless consumption is a debilitating force that not only weakens the individual through careless spend and empowering actors who may not have your wellbeing in their best interest. The hyper-conscious consumer has an awareness of how they are influencing the future with their spending. Logically, by being a hyper-conscious consumer and sharing distributist principles, one will redirect their spend towards their local communities, through relationships, and reduce consumption from distant and/or malicious suppliers where possible. For practical application, one does not need to be overly dogmatic in their more intentional consumption. Go to the farmers market when you can, buy a gift for someone off Etsy, look up from the phone more, or drink a pint at a local brewery.

Similar to being hyper-conscious when consuming, one should be aware of how they show up in their community too. Knowing one’s neighbors, joining civic organizations, banking locally, staying up to date with local news, volunteering, attending weekly service, and being present is localism in practice. Localism is much more than just buying locally; it’s how you invest in the life you are living with the people you share it with. Communities cannot be sustained just by living close to one another; they require active participation and relationships among their members. This is additionally how local institutions can be changed with time to implement Distributist policy.

The path of Distributist implementation by individuals and families consists of many things that many have said before inside and outside the Distributist movement. Some parts even seem somewhat cliché to the more jaded modern mind. The beauty of implementation by the individual is that one has agency and direction to act upon today. If done diligently, it will inspire others and raise children to do the same, and then, with time, we may see Distributism acted out broadly. Ordinary people will simply live their ordinary lives.

This article foreshadows what The Hound will cover in future articles. Ideas and efforts for implementation are listed like a catalog in this article in order to highlight options Distributists have, rather than thoroughly explaining each one and quickly swelling the final installment of this series. In future pieces relating to implementation, we will do just that, tying in Distributist theory, theology, natural law, ethics, and history.

Since beginning this series, The Hound has received incredible support. The Hound appreciates all of it and looks forward to continuing to build a community of people who want to prioritize human flourishing.

As The Hound continues to explore implementation in future articles, it should be stated that there will be a common message. That message is that we have individual agency; it is through us that changes will be made that prioritize humanity, and that without exercising the agency ourselves, conditions will not improve.

Thank you,

The Hound’s Editor

John Frederick Herring, Sr. (1795 - 1865), The Harvest, 1857

Section 5 - The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable

From the historical digression which I have introduced by way of illustrating my subject in the last two sections I now return to the general discussion of my thesis and to the logical process by which it may be established.

The Capitalist State is unstable, and indeed more properly a transitory phase lying between two permanent and stable states of society.

In order to appreciate why this is so, let us recall the definition of the Capitalist State:—

“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, we call Capitalist.”

Note the several points of such a state of affairs. You have private ownership; but it is not private ownership distributed in many hands and thus familiar as an institution to society as a whole. Again, you have the great majority dispossessed but at the same time citizens, that is, men politically free to act, though economically impotent; again, though it is but an inference from our definition, it is a necessary inference that there will be under Capitalism a conscious, direct, and planned exploitation of the majority, the free citizens who do not own by the minority who are owners. For wealth must be produced: the whole of that community must live: and the possessors can make such terms with the non-possessors as shall make it certain that a portion of what the non-possessors have produced shall go to the possessors.

A society thus constituted cannot endure. It cannot endure because it is subject to two very severe strains: strains which increase in severity in proportion as that society becomes more thoroughly Capitalist. The first of these strains arises from the divergence between the moral theories upon which the State reposes and the social facts which those moral theories attempt to govern. The second strain arises from the insecurity to which Capitalism condemns the great mass of society, and the general character of anxiety and peril which it imposes upon all citizens, but in particular upon the majority, which consists, under Capitalism, of dispossessed free men.

Of these two strains it is impossible to say which is the gravest. Either would be enough to destroy a social arrangement in which it was long present. The two combined make that destruction certain; and there is no longer any doubt that Capitalist society must transform itself into some other and more stable arrangement. It is the object of these pages to discover what that stable arrangement will probably be.

We say that there is a moral strain already intolerably severe and growing more severe with every perfection of Capitalism.

This moral strain comes from a contradiction between the realities of Capitalist and the moral base of our laws and traditions.

The moral base upon which our laws are still administered and our conventions raised presupposes a state composed of free citizens. Our laws defend property as a normal institution with which all citizens are acquainted, and which all citizens respect. It punishes theft as an abnormal incident only occurring when, through evil motives, one free citizen acquires the property of another without his knowledge and against his will. It punishes fraud as another abnormal incident in which, from evil motives, one free citizen induces another to part with his property upon false representations. It enforces contract, the sole moral base of which is the freedom of the two contracting parties, and the power of either, if it so please him, not to enter into a contract which, once entered into, must be enforced. It gives to an owner the power to leave his property by will, under the conception that such ownership and such passage of property (to natural heirs as a rule, but exceptionally to any other whom the testator may point out) is the normal operation of a society generally familiar with such things, and finding them part of the domestic life lived by the mass of its citizens. It casts one citizen in damages if by any wilful action he has caused loss to another—for it presupposes him able to pay.

The sanction upon which social life reposes is, in our moral theory, the legal punishment enforceable in our Courts, and the basis presupposed for the security and material happiness of our citizens is the possession of goods which shall guarantee us from anxiety and permit us an independence of action in the midst of our fellowmen.

Now contrast all this, the moral theory upon which society is still perilously conducted, the moral theory to which Capitalism itself turns for succour when it is attacked, contrast, I say, its formulæ and its presuppositions with the social reality of a Capitalist State such as is England to-day.

Property remains as an instinct perhaps with most of the citizens; as an experience and a reality it is unknown to nineteen out of twenty. One hundred forms of fraud, the necessary corollary of unrestrained competition between a few and of unrestrained avarice as the motive controlling production, are not or cannot be punished: petty forms of violence in theft and of cunning in fraud the laws can deal with, but they cannot deal with these alone. Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens. The vast bulk of so-called “free” contracts are to-day leonine contracts: arrangements which one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation.

Most important of all, the fundamental social fact of our movement, far more important than any security afforded by law, or than any machinery which the State can put into action, is the fact that livelihood is at the will of the possessors. It can be granted by the possessors to the non-possessors, or it can be withheld. The real sanction in our society for the arrangements by which it is conducted is not punishment enforceable by the Courts, but the withholding of livelihood from the dispossessed by the possessors. Most men now fear the loss of employment more than they fear legal punishment, and the discipline under which men are coerced in their modern forms of activity in England is the fear of dismissal. The true master of the Englishman to-day is not the Sovereign nor the officers of State, nor, save indirectly, the laws; his true master is the Capitalist.

Of these main truths everyone is aware; and anyone who sets out to deny them does so to-day at the peril of his reputation either for honesty or for intelligence.

If it be asked why things have come to a head so late (Capitalism having been in growth for so long), the answer is that England, even now the most completely Capitalist State of the modern world, did not itself become a completely Capitalist State until the present generation. Within the memory of men now living half England was agricultural, with relations domestic rather than competitive between the various human factors to production.

This moral strain, therefore, arising from the divergence between what our laws and moral phrases pretend, and what our society actually is, makes of that society an utterly unstable thing.

This spiritual thesis is of far greater gravity than the narrow materialism of a generation now passing might imagine. Spiritual conflict is more fruitful of instability in the State than conflict of any other kind, and there is acute spiritual conflict, conflict in every man’s conscience and ill-ease throughout the commonwealth when the realities of society are divorced from the moral base of its institution.

The second strain which we have noted in Capitalism, its second element of instability, consists in the fact that Capitalism destroys security.

Experience is enough to save us any delay upon this main point of our matter. But even without experience we could reason with absolute certitude from the very nature of Capitalism that its chief effect would be the destruction of security in human life.

Combine these two elements: the ownership of the means of production by a very few; the political freedom of owners and non-owners alike. There follows immediately from that combination a competitive market wherein the labour of the non-owner fetches just what it is worth, not as full productive power, but as productive power which will leave a surplus to the Capitalist. It fetches nothing when the labourer cannot work, more in proportion to the pace at which he is driven; less in middle age than in youth; less in old age than in middle age; nothing in sickness; nothing in despair.

A man in a position to accumulate (the normal result of human labour), a man founded upon property in sufficient amount and in established form is no more productive in his non-productive moments than is a proletarian; but his life is balanced and regulated by his reception of rent and interest as well as wages. Surplus values come to him, and are the fly-wheel balancing the extremes of his life and carrying him over his bad times. With a proletarian it cannot be so. The aspect from Capital looks at a human being whose labour it proposes to purchase cuts right across that normal aspect of human life from which we all regard our own affections, duties, and character. A man thinks of himself, of his chances and of his security along the line of his own individual existence from birth to death. Capital purchasing his labour (and not the man himself) purchases but a cross-section of his life, his moments of activity. For the rest, he must fend for himself; but to fend for yourself when you have nothing is to starve.

As a matter of fact, where a few possess the means of production perfectly free political conditions are impossible. A perfect Capitalist State cannot exist, though we have come nearer to it in modern England than other and more fortunate nations had thought possible. In the perfect Capitalist State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement. If you left men completely free under a Capitalist system, there would be so heavy a mortality from starvation as would dry up the sources of labour in a very short time.

Imagine the dispossessed to be ideally perfect cowards, the possessors to consider nothing whatsoever except the buying of their labour in the cheapest market—and the system would break down from the death of children and of out-o’-works and of women. You would not have a State in mere decline such as ours is. You would have a State manifestly and patently perishing.

As a fact, of course, Capitalism cannot proceed to its own logical extreme. So long as the political freedom of all citizens is granted the freedom of the few possessors of food to grant or withhold it, of the many non-possessors to strike any bargain at all, lest they lack it: to exercise such freedom fully is to starve the very young, the old, the impotent, and the despairing to death. Capitalism must keep alive, by non Capitalist methods, great masses of the population who would otherwise starve to death; and that is what Capitalism was careful to do to an increasing extent as it got a stronger and a stronger grip upon the English people. Elizabeth’s Poor Law at the beginning of the business, the Poor Law of 1834, coming at a moment when nearly half England had passed into the grip of Capitalism, are original and primitive instances: there are to-day a hundred others.

Though this cause of insecurity—the fact that the possessors have no direct incentive to keep men alive—is logically the most obvious, and always the most enduring under a Capitalist system, there is another cause more poignant in its effect upon human life. That other cause is the competitive anarchy in production which restricted ownership coupled with freedom involves. Consider what is involved by the very process of production where the implements and the soil are in the hands of a few whose motive for causing the proletariat to produce is not the use of the wealth created but the enjoyment by those possessors of surplus value or “profit.”

If full political freedom be allowed to any two such possessors of implements and stores, each will actively watch his market, attempt to undersell the other, tend to overproduce at the end of some season of extra demand for his article, thus glut the market only to suffer a period of depression afterwards—and so forth. Again, the Capitalist, free, individual director of production, will miscalculate; sometimes he will fail, and his works will be shut down. Again, a mass of isolated, imperfectly instructed competing units cannot but direct their clashing efforts at an enormous waste, and that waste will fluctuate. Most commissions, most advertisements, most parades, are examples of this waste. If this waste of effort could be made a constant, the parasitical employment it afforded would be a constant too. But of its nature it is a most inconstant thing, and the employment it affords is therefore necessarily precarious. The concrete translation of this is the insecurity of the commercial traveller, the advertising agent, the insurance agent, and every form of touting and cozening which competitive Capitalism carries with it.

Now here again, as in the case of the insecurity produced by age and sickness, Capitalism cannot be pursued to its logical conclusion, and it is the element of freedom which suffers. Competition is, as a fact, restricted to an increasing extent by an understanding between the competitors, accompanied, especially in this country, by the ruin of the smaller competitor through secret conspiracies entered into by the larger men, and supported by the secret political forces of the State.³ In a word, Capitalism, proving almost as unstable to the owners as to the non-owners, is tending towards stability by losing its essential character of political freedom. No better proof of the instability of Capitalism as a system could be desired.

Take any one of the numerous Trusts which now control English industry, and have made of modern England the type, quoted throughout the Continent, of artificial monopolies. If the full formula of Capitalism were accepted by our Courts and our executive statesmen, anyone could start a rival business, undersell those Trusts and shatter the comparative security they afford to industry within their field. The reason that no one does this is that political freedom is not, as a fact, protected here by the Courts in commercial affairs. A man attempting to compete with one of our great English Trusts would find himself at once undersold. He might, by all the spirit of European law for centuries, indict those who would ruin him, citing them for a conspiracy in restraint of trade; of this conspiracy he would find the judge and the politicians most heartily in support.

But it must always be remembered that these conspiracies in restraint of trade which are the mark of modern England are in themselves a mark of the transition from the true Capitalist phase to another.

Under the essential conditions of Capitalism—under a perfect political freedom—such conspiracies would be punished by the Courts for what they are: to wit, a contravention of the fundamental doctrine of political liberty. For this doctrine, while it gives any man the right to make any contract he chooses with any labourer and offer the produce at such prices as he sees fit, also involves the protection of that liberty by the punishment of any conspiracy that may have monopoly for its object. If such perfect freedom is no longer attempted, if monopolies are permitted and fostered, it is because the unnatural strain to which freedom, coupled with restricted ownership, gives rise, the insecurity of its mere competition, the anarchy of its productive methods have at last proved intolerable.

I have already delayed more than was necessary in this section upon the causes which render a Capitalist State essentially unstable.

I might have treated the matter empirically, taking for granted the observation which all my readers must have made, that Capitalism is as a fact doomed, and that the Capitalist State has already passed into its first phase of transition.

We are clearly no longer possessed of that absolutely political freedom which true Capitalism essentially demands. The insecurity involved, coupled with the divorce between our traditional morals and the facts of society, have already introduced such novel features as the permission of conspiracy among both possessors and non-possessors, the compulsory provision of security through State action, and all these reforms, implicit or explicit, the tendency of which I am about to examine.

Vincent Van Gogh

Factories at Asnieres Seen from the Quai de Clichy, 1887

The freedom afforded by these principles grants the individual the ability to choose what it is they wish to do. This is where the libertarian idealist stops in their framework. The Distributist continues further, with moral principles that help the individual do what it is they ought to do. Freedom alone has the potential to produce prosperity but has equal capacity for destitution and destruction. Without a moral order to guide our freedoms, we are likely destined to recreate the world we exist in today.

This article will explain the moral order proposed by the Distributists so that its collaboration with its other principles produces a prosperous world. First, the concept of solidarity will be examined, which establishes unity and fellowship among people with common interests. Then we will define the common good, towards which the duties established by solidarity are aimed. Localism will explain how solidarity is to be lived out under the Distributist perspective. Finally, the discussion of virtue will round out the article, explaining that the Distributive State is reliant on a virtuous population.

After exploring the moral order that Distributism calls for, it will be clear how the economic principles establish who should own what, the political principles establish who should exercise authority and how, and the moral order answers how free people ought to live in order to remain free. It will be evident to the reader that a distributive society cannot be reached through only institutions, markets, and law, but through virtuous individuals and families who love their neighbors, pursue the common good, act locally, and instill virtue among their offspring.

Solidarity

Independence does not mean isolation. In a world of isolated families, who are disconnected, disconcerted, and distrustful of one another, the human dignity that Distributism cherishes would be in grave danger. Through solidarity, the moral order of the Distributist begins to inform what we ought to do with our freedoms and to whom our duty is owed.

Though rooted in traditions from much earlier, Pope John Paul II introduced solidarity to Catholic Social Teaching in 1987. Solidarity can be explained as the recognition that every individual shares responsibility for every other individual. Solidarity establishes that the world is not simply individuals pursuing private interests, but a collection of communities pursuing common ends. Natural law suggests that because humans are social by nature, no one can flourish alone, making this cooperation toward common ends a natural and necessary phenomenon.

Solidarity gives purpose to Distributism’s economic and political principles by directing the freedoms derived from them towards the aid of others. Widespread productive property ownership makes it so that members of a community are economically secure and able to participate in society. Dignity of labor is not championed only for one’s fulfillment, but because the contributions to society through labor ought to be dignified. Families are not strengthened only for the family, but so that society’s future citizenry is secured. Subsidiarity does not seek decentralization so that each community can ignore one another; instead, it empowers them to fulfill their own responsibilities as a part of a greater whole.

Solidarity, like other aspects of the moral order, is what enables these economic and political principles to persist. Because owners and families live in the communities they serve, their decision-making should naturally prioritize the long-term health of the community. This appears as honest exchange, fair dealings, paying just wages, and more. It also affects how people organize to reach economic and political aims. This is where ideas like cooperatives, guilds, mutual aid, and charity are essential.

The capitalist system assumes that the common good can be achieved without solidarity, via private interest alone. The socialist feels that the state can determine and then achieve the common good at any cost. We know that neither is sufficient in doing so. Achievement of the common good is dependent upon morally responsible people acting in and for their communities. The common good is dependent upon solidarity. Solidarity answers how a community is to achieve the common good, but the next principle, the common good itself, answers what they ought to pursue in solidarity.

The Common Good

Through solidarity, it is clear that our duties extend beyond ourselves and our families. It points out that we are members of a community and not alone on the journey that is life. We are together, but together in hopes of achieving what? What is it that, as a community, we should diligently aim to accomplish? The common good should be the aim, claims the Distributist.

The common good can be defined as what allows individuals, their families, and communities to reach their full human potential in accordance with their nature. It makes it possible for the individual to flourish by creating the social and economic conditions for the community to thrive. The common good consists of protecting the fundamental rights of each human being, ensuring access to necessities, and maintaining a stable and just order where freedom can be exercised.

Since these things are theoretically secured through the economic and political aims of Distributism, the pursuit of the common good can be thought of as the actions that maintain the order that delivers and enhances these conditions. Free people are able to achieve this through moral action rooted in solidarity within their communities. And should subsidiarity be respected, the community and its lower orders of power should have the agency to do so according to their own circumstances.

A community pursuing the common good’s efforts typically engages in policies that stabilize families, promote honest commerce, facilitate access and preservation of widespread productive property ownership, educate and enable its citizenry to engage civically, strengthen local institutions, care for the needy, and cultivate virtue among future generations. A lengthy list that fails to encompass everything, yes. The common good is something that is highly intentional, requires holistic efforts, and has never been produced by accident.

Our duties are owed to our neighbors and communities, and they aim to support the common good, but at what scale should they be lived out? It should be of no shock that the Distributist argues that these duties should be fulfilled close to home if you have been following along. Localism is what provides the guidance on what scale the lofty goals of this framework can be reached.

Localism

Subsidiarity provides the political organization in which power is vested as close to the individual and family as possible. Solidarity tells us that our duty is to one another and that those duties are in support of the common good. Localism is how both concepts are truly lived. Human scale is hyper-local. Responsibility for one another decreases with distance as the happenings of the faraway become less tangible. Love for one another begins locally, and thus action in support of the common good must do the same.

People not only come to know and love one another but come to know and love particular places. There is a deep bond established between man, his peers, and the land from which they come, which allows it so that even when one is not near their front door, they may be home in their community. Chesterton argues that true patriotism begins with the love of one’s own street before one’s nation.

By recognizing that human capacity to be responsible or grow affection towards others begins with those nearest to us, localism prefers to solve problems, engage in commerce, and build relationships at the most local level. Localism echoes the political principle of subsidiarity, but guides the action needed to support it.

G.K. Chesterton’s contributions to the Distributist movement are most pronounced when discussing localism. While Belloc wrote on economic theory and analyzed the consequences of concentrated property ownership, Chesterton illustrated to all a world where people knew each other and all that occurred was rooted in meaningful relationship. One where every town bustled with lives interconnected through faith, commerce, culture, and duty. It is through localism that Chesterton believed the ordinary man was empowered to be exactly what he is, ordinary.

Localism is not preferred primarily for economic benefit, but for the benefit it brings to humanity. It provides human agency within communities and a sense of identity. Localism in action appears as purchasing from local suppliers and producers, food feeding those near its original production, local and small-scale banking, and the list goes on. Not only does this reduce wealth outflow from the community by encouraging its circulation, it also makes it so that decision-making related to commerce are close to the people affected by them. Even in cases where economies of scale may outperform the local producer, the Distributist may argue that it is more beneficial to have the inefficient but just local producer than a potentially morally ambivalent and distant producer of scale.

Localism’s critics point out that localism is overly romanticized and local communities do have the capacity to fail. It is true that local communities fail. Whether it be from pressures in or out of the community’s control, localism does not make any community invincible. Sometimes support from larger institutions is required to prevent the failure of local communities. For example, should a drought ravage a region’s crop, it’d be reasonable for the state to take measures to prevent the widespread suffering and death associated with it. When it is public information that a businessman is caught bribing local officials to turn the other way while he endangers the community, there should be measures in place where the next highest institution can intervene. Localism is not an absolute, but a strong preference.

Virtue

Underpinning all that has been discussed so far and simultaneously being the product of much of it, is the idea of virtue. No institution can substitute for the virtue that every human being is able to uphold, but they may help it flourish. In the absence of virtue, productive property, no matter how dispersed, wreaks havoc, freedom is left to fester into license, subsidiarity erodes with neglect, and solidarity declines into sentimentality.

Yes, the economic and political principles create conditions where virtue can be better cultivated and exercised, but it is up to each and every one to choose to be virtuous to see those principles maintained. Should they fail, society will dive again into the depths of Capitalism and/or Socialism. The Distributive State is entirely dependent on consisting of a virtuous people. This perhaps is the most daunting fact that Distributists face, since it is the most difficult to bring about. A free society is dependent upon the moral character of its population.

Ownership is what is believed to cultivate virtue most effectively. Owners think long-term, assessing their decisions based on the impact it has on their families, communities, and environment. Referred to as Cardinal Virtues by Christians or the Cardinal Principles by the Stoics who came before, these are the virtues that ownership inspires.

Virtue’s cultivation should not only be a target for the owner of a productive asset, but all. Children should be led to live virtuous lives. Workers, merchants, and politicians should exercise virtue as if they are quite literally the respective owners of where they work, producers of the goods they sell, or outright kings of what they govern. While we will certainly fail from time to time, since we are flawed beings, the key is that all seek to carry out virtue intentionally and consciously. Man should act with virtue because he understands why it is important, not exclusively because he is told to. Distributism seeks to create the conditions where virtue is to be developed naturally through ownership so that Distributism itself may maintain should it succeed in building the virtuous.

Through solidarity, the common good, localism, and virtues, a moral order inspires and sustains Distributism. Although the economic and political principles are noble and create the conditions for this moral order to better flourish, they alone are unable to make a society just. Institutions can only do so much, but cannot come close to creating love between neighbors that supports a people. Only a free man or woman may choose to do this, and through the moral order, they are empowered to do so.

The moral order of Distributism shows that this framework asks much more than how productive property should be distributed. Distributism also asks what type of people should own it. Encompassing much more than an economy of owners, it desires owners who are stewards, communities capable of governing themselves, and humans prospering together with dignity and virtue.

A distributive state cannot be built or secured by law alone. It requires renewal each generation. Families must cultivate virtue among their offspring. Communities must prioritize the common good. Individuals need to realize that freedom is not the ability to do whatever one wishes on any whim one has, but the liberty to do what one should do. Only through people is the Distributive State secured. While policy can certainly help, people must lead the way.

Village Festival, by David Teniers (1610-1690)

Section 4 - How the Distributive State Failed

With the close of the middle ages the societies of Western Christendom and England among the rest were economically free.

Property was an institution native to the State and enjoyed by the great mass of its citizens. Co-operative institutions, voluntary regulations of labour, restricted the completely independent use of property by its owners only in order to keep that institution intact and to prevent the absorption of small property by great.

This excellent state of affairs which we had reached after many centuries of Christian development, and in which the old institution of slavery had been finally eliminated from Christendom, did not everywhere survive. In England in particular it was ruined. The seeds of the disaster were sown in the sixteenth century. Its first apparent effects came to light in the seventeenth. During the eighteenth century England came to be finally, though insecurely, established upon a proletarian basis, that is, it had already become a society of rich men possessed of the means of production on the one hand, and a majority dispossessed of those means upon the other. With the nineteenth century the evil plant had come to its maturity, and England had become before the close of that period a purely Capitalist State, the type and model of Capitalism for the whole world: with the means of production tightly held by a very small group of citizens, and the whole determining mass of the nation dispossessed of capital and land, and dispossessed, therefore, in all cases of security, and in many of sufficiency as well. The mass of Englishmen, still possessed of political, lacked more and more the elements of economic, freedom, and were in a worse posture than free citizens have ever found themselves before in the history of Europe.

By what steps did so enormous a catastrophe fall upon us?

The first step in the process consisted in the mishandling of a great economic revolution which marked the sixteenth century. The lands and the accumulated wealth of the monasteries were taken out of, the hands of their old possessors with the intention of vesting them in the Crown—but they passed, as a fact, not into the hands of the Crown, but into the hands of an already wealthy section of the community who, after the change was complete, became in the succeeding hundred years the governing power of England.

This is what happened:—

The England of the early sixteenth century, the England over which Henry VIII inherited his powerful Crown in youth, though it was an England in which the great mass of men owned the land they tilled and the houses in which they dwelt, and the implements with which they worked, was yet an England in which these goods, though widely distributed, were distributed unequally.

Then, as now, the soil and its fixtures were the basis of all wealth, but the proportion between the value of the soil and its fixtures and the value of other means of production (implements, stores of clothing and of subsistence, etc.) was different from what it is now. The land and the fixtures upon it formed a very much larger fraction of the totality of the means of production than they do to-day. They represent to-day not one-half the total means of production of this country, and though they are the necessary foundation for all wealth production, yet our great machines, our stores of food and clothing, our coal and oil, our ships and the rest of it, come to more than the true value of the land and of the fixtures upon the land: they come to more than the arable soil and the pasture, the constructional value of the houses, wharves and docks, and so forth. In the early sixteenth century the land and the fixtures upon it came, upon the contrary, to very much more than all other forms of wealth combined.

Now this form of wealth was here, more than in any other Western European country, already in the hands of a wealthy land-owning class at the end of the Middle Ages.

It is impossible to give exact statistics, because none were gathered, and we can only make general statements based upon inference and research. But, roughly speaking, we may say that of the total value of the land and its fixtures, probably rather more than a quarter, though less than a third, was in the hands of this wealthy class.

The England of that day was mainly agricultural, and consisted of more than four, but less than six million people, and in every agricultural community you would have the Lord, as he was legally called (the squire, as he was already conversationally termed), in possession of more demesne land than in any other country. On the average you found him, I say, owning in this absolute fashion rather more than a quarter, perhaps a third of the land of the village: in the towns the distribution was more even. Sometimes it was a private individual who was in this position, sometimes a corporation, but in every village you would have found this demesne land absolutely owned by the political head of the village, occupying a considerable proportion of its acreage. The rest, though distributed as property among the less fortunate of the population, and carrying with it houses and implements from which they could not be dispossessed, paid certain dues to the Lord, and, what was more, the Lord exercised local justice. This class of wealthy landowners had been also for now one hundred years the Justices upon whom local administration depended.

There was no reason why this state of affairs should not gradually have led to the rise of the Peasant and the decay of the Lord. That is what happened in France, and it might perfectly well have happened here. A peasantry eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the expense of the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, which was already fairly complete, there might have been added another excellent element, namely, the more equal possession of that property. But any such process of gradual buying by the small man from the great, such as would seem natural to the temper of us European people, and such as has since taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon their popular instincts, was interrupted in this country by an artificial revolution of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution consisted in the seizing of the monastic lands by the Crown.

It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation, for the whole economic future of England was to flow from it.

Of the demesne lands, and the power of local administration which they carried with them (a very important feature, as we shall see later), rather more than a quarter were in the hands of the Church; the Church was therefore the “Lord” of something over 25 per cent. say 28 per cent. or perhaps nearly 30 per cent. of English agricultural communities, and the overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce. The Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 per cent. of the demesne land in the villages, and the receiver of something like 30 per cent. of the customary dues, etc., paid by the smaller owners to the greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of Cathedral Chapters, communities of monks and nuns, educational establishments conducted by the clergy, and so forth.

When the Monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII, not the whole of this vast economic influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular clergy remained endowed, and most of the educational establishments, though looted, retained some revenue; but though the whole 30 per cent. did not suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent. did, and the revolution effected by this vast operation was by far the most complete, the most sudden, and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the economic history of any European people.

It was at first intended to retain this great mass of the means of production in the hands of the Crown: that must be clearly remembered by any student of the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the contrast between the old England and the new.

Had that intention been firmly maintained, the English State and its government would have been the most powerful in Europe.

The Executive (which in those days meant the King) would have had a greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing its political power with economic power, and for ordering the social life of its subjects than any other executive in Christendom.

Had Henry VIII and his successors kept the land thus confiscated, the power of the French Monarchy, at which we are astonished, would have been nothing to the power of the English.

The King of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of control of the most absolute sort. He would presumably have used it, as a strong central government always does, for the weakening of the wealthier classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people. At any rate, it would have been a very different England indeed from the England we know, if the King had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the monasteries.

Now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution appears. The King failed to keep the lands he had seized. That class of large landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said, anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England, were too strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied. Nothing that the Crown let go ever went back to the Crown, and year after year more and more of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute possession of the large landowners.

Observe the effect of this. All over England men who already held in virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of a further great section of the means of production, which turned the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra fifth. They became at a blow the owners of half the land! In many centres of capital importance they had come to own more than half the land. They were in many districts not only the unquestioned superiors, but the economic masters of the rest of the community. They could buy to the greatest advantage. They were strictly competitive, getting every shilling of due and of rent where the old clerical landlords had been customary—leaving much to the tenant. They began to fill the universities, the judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great and small. More and more the great could decide in their own favour. They soon possessed by these operations the bulk of the means of production, and they immediately began the process of eating up the small independent men and gradually forming those great estates which, in the course of a few generations, became identical with the village itself. All over England you may notice that the great squires’ houses date from this revolution or after it. The manorial house, the house of the local great man as it was in the Middle Ages, survives here and there to show of what immense effect this revolution was. The low-timbered place with its steadings and outbuildings, only a larger farmhouse among the other farmhouses, is turned after the Reformation and thenceforward into a palace. Save where great castles (which were only held of the Crown and not owned) made an exception, the pre-Reformation gentry lived as men richer than, but not the masters of, other farmers around them. After the Reformation there began to arise all over England those great “country houses” which rapidly became the typical centres of English agricultural life.

The process was in full swing before Henry died. Unfortunately for England, he left as his heir a sickly child, during the six years of whose reign, from 1547 to 1553, the loot went on at an appalling rate. When he died and Mary came to the throne it was nearly completed. A mass of new families had arisen, wealthy out of all proportion to anything which the older England had known, and bound by a common interest to the older families which had joined in the grab. Every single man who sat in Parliament for a country required his price for voting the dissolution of the monasteries; every single man received it. A list of the members of the Dissolution Parliament is enough to prove this, and, apart from their power in Parliament, this class had a hundred other ways of insisting on their will. The Howards (already of some lineage), the Cavendishes, the Cecils, the Russels, and fifty other new families thus rose upon the ruins of religion; and the process went steadily on until, about one hundred years after its inception, the whole face of England was changed.

In the place of a powerful Crown disposing of revenues far greater than that of any subject, you had a Crown at its wit’s end for money, and dominated by subjects some of whom were its equals in wealth, and who could, especially through the action of Parliament (which they now controlled), do much what they willed with Government.

In other words, by the first third of the seventeenth century, by 1630—40, the economic revolution was finally accomplished, and the new economic reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was a powerful oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and dwindled monarchy.

Other causes had contributed to this deplorable result. The change in the value of money had hit the Crown very hard;² the peculiar history of the Tudor family, their violent passions, their lack of resolution and of any continuous policy, to some extent the character of Charles I himself, and many another subsidiary cause may be quoted. But the great main fact upon which the whole thing is dependent is the fact that the Monastic Lands, at least a fifth of the wealth of the country, had been transferred to the great landowners, and that this transference had tipped the scale over entirely in their favour as against the peasantry.

The diminished and impoverished Crown could no longer stand. It fought against the new wealth, the struggle of the Civil Wars; it was utterly defeated; and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660, you have all the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy men, the King still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old power, but in practice a salaried puppet. And in that economic world which underlies all political appearances, the great dominating note was that a few wealthy families had got hold of the bulk of the means of production in England, while the same families exercised all local administrative power and were moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the Church, and the generals. They quite overshadowed what was left of central government in this country.

Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off.

Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by that date England had already become Capitalist. She had already permitted a vast section of her population to become proletarian, and it is this and not the so-called “Industrial Revolution,” a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves to-day.

How true this is what I still have to say in this section will prove.

In an England thus already cursed with a very large proletariat class, and in an England already directed by a dominating Capitalist class, possessing the means of production, there came a great industrial development.

Had that industrial development come upon a people economically free, it would have taken a co-operative form. Coming as it did upon a people which had already largely lost its economic freedom, it took at its very origin a Capitalist form, and this form it has retained, expanded, and perfected throughout two hundred years.

It was in England that the Industrial System arose. It was in England that all its traditions and habits were formed; and because the England in which it arose was already a Capitalist England, modern Industrialism, wherever you see it at work to-day, having spread from England, has proceeded upon the Capitalist model.

It was in 1705 that the first practical steam-engine, Newcomen’s, was set to work. The life of a man elapsed before this invention was made, by Watt’s introduction of the condenser, into the great instrument of production which has transformed our industry—but in those sixty years all the origins of the Industrial System are to be discovered. It was just before Watt’s patent that Hargreaves’ spinning-jenny appeared. Thirty years earlier, Abraham Darby of Colebrook Dale, at the end of a long series of experiments which had covered more than a century, smelted iron-ore successfully with coke. Not twenty years later, King introduced the flying shuttle, the first great improvement in the hand-loom; and in general the period covered by such a life as that of Dr Johnson, born just after Newcomen’s engine was first set working, and dying seventy-four years afterwards, when the Industrial System was in full blast, covers that great transformation of England. A man who, as a child, could remember the last years of Queen Anne, and who lived to the eve of the French Revolution, saw passing before his eyes the change which transformed English society and has led it to the expansion and peril in which we see it to-day.

What was the characteristic mark of that half-century and more? Why did the new inventions give us the form of society now known and hated under the name of Industrial? Why did the vast increase in the powers of production, in population and in accumulation of wealth, turn the mass of Englishmen into a poverty-stricken proletariat, cut off the rich from the rest of the nation, and develop to the full all the evils which we associate with the Capitalist State?

To that question an answer almost as universal as it is unintelligent has been given. That answer is not only unintelligent but false, and it will be my business here to show how false it is. The answer so provided in innumerable textbooks, and taken almost as commonplace in our universities, is that the new methods of production—the new machinery, the new implements—fatally and of themselves developed a Capitalist State in which a few should own the means of production and the mass should be proletariat. The new instruments, it is pointed out, were on so vastly greater a scale than the old, and were so much more expensive, that the small man could not afford them; while the rich man, who could afford them, ate up by his competition, and reduced from the position of a small owner to that of a wage-earner, his insufficiently equipped competitor who still attempted to struggle on with the older and cheaper tools. To this (we are told) the advantages of concentration were added in favour of the large owner against the small. Not only were the new instruments expensive almost in proportion to their efficiency, but, especially after the introduction of steam, they were efficient in proportion to their concentration in few places and under the direction of a few men. Under the effect of such false arguments as these we have been taught to believe that the horrors of the Industrial System were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal forces, and that wherever the steam engine, the power loom, the blast furnace and the rest were introduced, there fatally would soon appear a little group of owners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed.

It is astonishing that a statement so unhistorical should have gained so general a credence. Indeed, were the main truths of English history taught in our schools and universities to-day, were educated men familiar with the determining and major facts of the national past, such follies could never have taken root. The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of production. The evil proceeded indirect historical sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed-plot of the Industrial System, was already captured by a wealthy oligarchy before the series of great discoveries began.

Consider in what way the Industrial System developed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was already an England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was already an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand.

When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalised; that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labour in the process of production until that process should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected by co-operative guilds fenced round and supported by custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth, necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small owners. Their corporations, their little parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalisation required for the new processes, and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing the balance of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalisation of a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage. Such great discoveries coming in a society like that of the thirteenth century would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse.

To whom could the new industry turn for capitalisation? The small owner had already largely disappeared. The corporate life and mutual obligations which had supported him and confirmed him in his property had been broken to pieces by no “economic development,” but by the deliberate action of the rich. He was ignorant because his schools had been taken from him and the universities closed to him. He was the more ignorant because the common life which once nourished his social sense and the co-operative arrangements which had once been his defence had disappeared. When you sought an accumulation of corn, of clothing, of housing, of fuel as the indispensable preliminary to the launching of your new industry; when you looked round for someone who could find the accumulated wealth necessary for these considerable experiments, you had to turn to the class which had already monopolised the bulk of the means of production in England. The rich men alone could furnish you with those supplies.

Nor was this all. The supplies once found and the adventure “capitalised,” that form of human energy which lay best to hand, which was indefinitely exploitable, weak, ignorant, and desperately necessitous, ready to produce for you upon almost any terms, and glad enough if you would only keep it alive, was the existing proletariat which the new plutocracy had created when, in cornering the wealth of the country after the Reformation, they had thrust out the mass of Englishmen from the possession of implements, of houses, and of land.

The rich class, adopting some new process of production for its private gain, worked it upon those lines of mere competition which its avarice had already established. Co-operative tradition was dead. Where would it find its cheapest labour? Obviously among the proletariat—not among the remaining small owners. What class would increase under the new wealth? Obviously the proletariat again, without responsibilities, with nothing to leave to its progeny; and as they swelled the capitalist’s gain, they enabled him with increasing power to buy out the small owner and send him to swell by another tributary the proletarian mass.

It was upon this account that the Industrial Revolution, as it is called, took in its very origins the form which has made it an almost unmixed curse for the unhappy society in which it has flourished. The rich, already possessed of the accumulations by which that industrial change could alone be nourished, inherited all its succeeding accumulations of implements and all its increasing accumulations of subsistence. The factory system, starting upon a basis of capitalist and proletariat, grew in the mould which had determined its origins. With every new advance the capitalist looked for proletariat grist to feed the productive mill. Every circumstance of that society, the form in which the laws that governed ownership and profit were cast, the obligations of partners, the relations bet ween “master” and “man,” directly made for the indefinite expansion of a subject, formless, wage-earning class controlled by a small body of owners, which body would tend to become smaller and richer still, and to be possessed of power ever greater and greater as the bad business unfolded.

The spread of economic oligarchy was everywhere, and not in industry alone. The great landlords destroyed deliberately and of set purpose and to their own ad vantage the common rights over common land. The small plutocracy with which they were knit up, and with whose mercantile elements they were now fused, directed everything to its own ends. That strong central government which should protect the community against the rapacity of a few had gone generations before. Capitalism triumphant wielded all the mechanism of legislation and of information too. It still holds them; and there is not an example of so-called “Social Reform” to-day which is not demonstrably (though often subconsciously) directed to the further entrenchment and confirmation of an industrial society in which it is taken for granted that a few shall own, that the vast majority shall live at a wage under them, and that all the bulk of Englishmen may hope for is the amelioration of their lot by regulations and by control from above—but not by property; not by freedom.

We all feel—and those few of us who have analysed the matter not only feel but know—that the Capitalist society thus gradually developed from its origins in the capture of the land four hundred years ago has reached its term. It is almost self-evident that it cannot continue in the form which now three generations have known, and it is equally self-evident that some solution must be found for the intolerable and increasing instability with which it has poisoned our lives. But before considering the solutions variously presented by various schools of thought, I shall in my next section show how and why the English Capitalist Industrial System is thus intolerably unstable and consequently presents an acute problem which must be solved under pain of social death.

It must be noted that modern Industrialism has spread to many other centres from England. It bears everywhere the features stamped upon it by its origin in this country.

ABRAHAM BLOEMAERT (Utrecht 1566 – Utrecht 1651)

Farmstead with a Fire

In this part of the series, I will outline the foundational economic and political principles of Distributism, which have kept their relevance despite the rapid social, economic, and political changes that have occurred since its inception in the early 1900’s. It should be made clear that Distributism is not a collection of specific policies and is not explicitly aimed at directly maximizing material prosperity as Capitalism and Socialism are. Distributism is a philosophy concerned with the question of who should own productive property and why.

Underlying Assumptions

Before one can begin to answer the question of who should own what and why, one must first understand the premises that support Distributism’s main principles. At the foundation of the Distributist worldview is the notion that every human has inherent dignity due to their creation by God. For the more secular Distributists, inherent dignity is derived from humanity’s rational nature in accordance with natural law. Because of inherent dignity of all, society and the economy must consequently serve mankind and not the other way around. In order for them to best serve mankind, they must free the individual and strengthen the family.

Pre-existing the society, economy, and polity, there existed the family. All people are born into families, and it is in them that their duties, education, and virtues are developed. Society, economy, and polity are viewed as the reflection of our families’ prosperity, stability, and independence. The family is understood as the fundamental social unit under the Distributist view. For the family to flourish, and all things flowing from it, families require measures to shield them from becoming dependent on external forces or, in the worst case, breaking down. In combination with the inherent dignity each person possesses and the family being from where all human activity is organized, Distributists look to property rights for a solution.

Distributists conclude that all have a natural right to private productive property because it is what enables the individual and family unit to derive independence from capital and the state, thus dignifying them. Productive property can be understood as and is equivalent to “the means of production” as popularized by Marx and Engels. This is in reference to assets that generate wealth and provide sustenance, like land, tools, workshops, and more. Today, the means of production’s definition has broadened to encompass intellectual property, digital infrastructure, and algorithms. Whether some Distributists seek to continue the use of these new means of production is an entirely different article for another day.

The ability to generate wealth from productive property allows the family a buffer from coming under the control of employers or the state. Pope Leo XII’s Rerum Novarum was key in introducing this idea; however, this conclusion has been reached time and time again prior to this philosophy’s emergence.

Aristotle stated that private property is a necessary condition for human flourishing and freedom. Cicero of Rome argued that the state should only exist to protect private property, as property is a natural right. Thomas Jefferson believed that land was the key to economic independence and the virtues required to participate in democracy, making one independent from capture by the elite and industrial classes. Friend of Jefferson turned rival, John Adams, famously said: “Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist”.

Distributism draws upon this long-cherished ideal that seeks to ensure that one is not forced into servitude of others, degrading their dignity. Concluding that productive property ownership is a condition that must be satisfied to be free, the Distributist argues that the condition ought to be widely distributed so that as many as possible can be economically independent. Where many own productive property, it is assumed that human dignity will be best respected, the family best positioned to be sustained, and the individual and family empowered to fulfill their responsibility to one another.

It is from the belief of inherent dignity in all humans, the family as the primary social unit, and freedom requiring an economic basis alongside its political basis, that all Distributist principles are built upon. Each principle of Distributism stems from this foundation in an effort to maximize independence of the many in order to avoid dependence on the few. This maximization of independence is not for the sake of independence alone. Millions of isolated families would be a lonely and futile system. Independence is simply the condition that makes it so that individuals and families can fulfill their duties to one another and the communities in which they exist, on their own terms.

Widespread Productive Property Ownership

The Distributist is concerned with productive property rather than ownership of unproductive private property because economic independence is not achieved through ownership of personal items, but through wealth generation. If ownership of productive property is absent from the individual or family, they are then forced into selling their labor to survive. To be free, one must own the means by which they provide a livelihood.

Based on the assumptions previously outlined, productive property’s ownership being widespread would result in the maximization of human dignity and family health. Spreading the ownership of land, tools, and businesses widely results in conditions that resist the dangers brought on by monopolies held by capitalists or the state.

In Hilaire Belloc’s primary Distributist work, The Servile State (1912), the treatise title describes the outcome of which both capitalist and socialist monopolies produce. A state of servitude, where ownership controlled by the few forces the citizenry into wage slavery. As used by Belloc, the wage slave is entirely dependent on wages for survival and has no path to economic independence. This distinction is not to claim that all wage labor destroys freedom; if one has access to ownership via the means of their wage labor, then that would be more tolerable. It would be erroneous to claim that someone like a hospital’s anesthesiologist is a wage slave because it is clear that they have a way to access ownership from their very high wages.

Belloc also argues that due to the lack of economic security held by a propertyless population, the capitalist system is thus severely unstable and vulnerable to crisis. To stabilize itself, the capitalist pushes reforms like minimum wages and mandated insurance, entrenching themselves as masters of the propertyless under the guise of security. The worker trades their freedoms for state-mandated securities, eventually resulting in a society where the propertyless are over time legally obligated to work for the benefit of the capitalist class. This is the Servile State, a society where law coerces or dictates the obligation to labor rather through truly free contracts.

Belloc critiques that socialism’s fix for the issues brought by capitalism is not sufficient because it does not seek to restore property ownership to the average citizen, but transfer (or sometimes rebrand) from the capitalists to the state. Concentrated production in the hands of politicians is hardly any different from the hands of the capitalist elite.

What is to be built by the Distributists is a society that is actively being secured against the dangers of capitalist or state monopoly by dispersing ownership of productive property widely. Many challenge the Distributists on this principle with the question, even if we assume we can achieve a Distributive State, how can it be maintained generation to generation without the reemergence of Capitalism or Socialism? While the principles yet to be discussed do work to secure the distributive state long-term, it is in policy proposals (which we will explore in the future) that prioritize the common good, sacrifice some efficiencies of scale, and consider benefit beyond profit alone. For the modern mind, the conditioning towards profit maximization is the largest tendency for us to break.

Widespread property ownership is the primary means by which Distributism secures economic independence, but this alone does not create a healthy relationship between mankind and the economy. As stated, the economy exists to serve mankind, and because of this, the labor that makes up the economy must be understood in reference to the dignity of the laborer, extending the question of who owns productive property to how labor is itself is valued and performed.

Dignity of Labor

Under a purely economic understanding of labor, labor is reduced to the hours exchanged for compensation. Labor is a cost of production or an input to be wielded. This understanding fails because labor is not being considered for what it is entirely, an activity being done by a person. If one believes that the economy exists to serve man, then labor cannot be understood as merely a commodity. The laborer does not produce like that of a machine; a laborer works.

Work is a human activity that is both fueled by our creativity and ability to rationalize the world around us, and an avenue for these same characteristics to be exercised. This implies that working has meaning beyond its economic output. Work is valuable because it is productive, but also because it is a human activity. Moving beyond the secular natural-law perspective, to the one rooted in Christendom, work is how humans share in the creation of our world, acting as stewards of the Earth and aiming to perfect the world in accordance with its design. An exclusively economic view of labor ignores all of this great responsibility we bear.

A farmer tending his land produces a crop for his family and his community, but he also chooses how densely he sows, how early he wakes, and how swiftly he harvests. The smith produces the hammer, but he shapes the metal, carves the wooden handle, and imprints his maker’s mark upon it. The entrepreneur runs a business, but it is he who styles the brand, forms its mission, and determines how it serves its community.

Where the economic understanding of labor also falls short is that, in its commodity view of labor, it reduces labor’s value to a market price. In our current system of operation, a person’s worth is often defined by their wage, reducing human activity to a mere market value. The Distributist position is not that wages are unimportant and should be tossed, but that because the dignity of labor presupposes compensation, wages ought to be just and not determine human worth.

Distributists do not demand that workers be paid more for the sake of them being workers. Distributists propose the proliferation of worker agency, which could take various forms. Worker agency is where a worker has the ability to make decisions, participate in the management of their labor, and express themselves through skills and craftsmanship. Tied back into widespread productive property ownership, worker agency can also be categorized as having an ownership stake in their operation or an accessible path towards ownership. Through enhanced worker agency, labor can better align with its fruits. This prevents the alienation of workers and hopes to reduce settings where they are compensated for performing tasks with little to no creativity or judgment.

With respect to labor, the distributist economic order seeks a world where labor is fulfilling, independent, and where pathways to ownership of productive property exist widely. Distributism aims to ensure that employment is not the only economic condition for the majority of people. Yet it does not cast all wage labor as slavery and does believe that employment can be beneficial. Should one choose to engage in selling their labor for their entire life but still have access to ownership, wage labor is fine. Where the worker must sell their labor indefinitely because ownership is inaccessible is wrong.

The Family Economy

With the family unit predating the existence of economy, society, and polity, it should be the aim of these things to support the family. Through widespread productive property ownership and the dignity of labor, the family is strengthened. The economic independence afforded by these principles in practice allows families to engage with economies, societies, and governments as they choose, rather than being subject to them as they are today.

Only when the family is economically independent, and its labor is dignified, is the family able to provide for its future. It becomes shielded from external crisis, is not swept up by institutional aims, and they may rear children according to their values. Property ownership secures future generations’ inheritance and provides pathways for the accumulation of wealth that avoid engaging in employment alone. Ownership cultivates virtue among families that can then be instilled within successive generations through learning and partaking in dignified labor that supports the family unit.

Beyond the productive property that the family unit is preferred to have under Distributism, the family unit (or household) is also viewed as a productive unit. Under our current framework, the household is commonly relegated to the status of a consumptive unit. The Distributist worldview recognizes that the household contributes far more to society than just income to eventually tax and a group of consumers. The family is the primary agent that transfers knowledge from parent and grandparent to child, even in societies where strong educational institutions already exist. It instills a sense of continuation, identity, and resiliency that our individualized world has diminished.

Not only does the family contribute to society by being a vessel of virtue, faith, and knowledge, but it is the only thing that secures a future society and can teach the economic responsibility that supports the Distributive state. Because of this, Distributists strongly feel that raising children is a form of highly productive labor. With children being the future leaders, workers, citizens, and parents of a society, their upbringing is highly productive. Modern economics discounts this heavily since parenting typically has no market transaction and thus little market value, which is unstable for the continuation of a society where justice and dignity are meant to be upheld. Because work has dignity and parenting is work, parenting is the highest form of work one can undertake.

The emphasis here on the continuation of family in society also applies to the productive property owned by said families. Productive property in the hands of the family roots a people to a specific place, where, through their stewardship, labor, and patience, a home is constructed. A home is something that the markets also fail to accurately value. The market considers the value of the structures, its resources, and potential future wealth when assessing a property, but it has less of an ability to consider its history, continuity, and to honor those who have passed or those who are yet to come.

Modern economies undermine family life, not only placing families at risk, but also by making itself unstable. The need for dual incomes to provide for children often reduces the ability and access to being a parent. Needing to chase higher incomes anywhere they appear has incentivized geographic mobility that has reduced familial ties and the ability to smoothly engage in property succession. Children are subjected to education by market offerings and public institutions rather than by the family, and are raised distantly from their family members, undermining their sense of identity and letting external forces shape them. As generations become less and less connected to their families and are challenged to find time to impart virtue, the direction of our future becomes less steered from the bottom up and more directed from the top down. The family unit is something that economies must avoid harming and decide to empower through the recognition of the family unit as a productive unit.

Subsidiarity

The concept of subsidiarity influences the Distributist approach to how power and decision-making should be organized in society. This concept was originally formalized by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 papal encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno. Subsidiarity argues that it is an injustice for a community of a higher order (like a nation, or city) to interfere in the life of a community of a lower order (a family or individual). This can also be interpreted as larger organizations not performing functions that smaller organizational units are able to perform. It is a decentralized approach to governance that protects freedom through the prevention of swelling bureaucracy and inspires personal initiative.

While subsidiarity is arrived at from Catholic Social Teaching, as is solidarity, which will be discussed in the next part of the series, both of these concepts can be intuitively reached from the secular natural-law perspective as well. Subsidiarity is built on and directly relies on the previously outlined principles because these principles imbue people with the economic and moral independence needed for self-governance. Subsidiarity occurs when the previously mentioned principles are implemented and upheld.

The hierarchy of subsidiarity flows from the individual to the family unit. Higher authorities should not usurp the responsibilities trusted to the individual and families. Issues and responsibilities pertaining to a localized area can be handled by neighborhoods, civic associations, and charities. It is viewed that the localized area’s inhabitants will be able to best solve the issue affecting their respective area. When a problem requires resource coordination that exceeds that of a neighborhood or community association, it can be handled by the city, county, and sometimes state governments. Common examples of issues that would fall under this category are infrastructure needs, regional policing, and city planning. At its highest level, the state and national governments should only handle issues that the bodies below are unable to, such as national defense, international treaties, and systemic policy.

The U.S. government codified subsidiarity in the 10th amendment by delegating all powers not explicitly given to the federal government to fall to the people at the state or lower levels. This has largely been eroded by the welfare capitalism that rose in response to the Great Depression and post WWII world. Today, the highest levels of power tend to have the ability to coerce lower levels through financial incentives and weaponized policy to override lower-level determinations.

Centralization of power and decision-making is avoided by Distributists because it creates conditions where reliance is built, undermining the key principles already established. Just as concentration of productive property creates dependence, concentration of political authority does the same thing. Distributism does not seek to dissolve higher order governing bodies, only aiming to limit them. A Distributist recognizes that a family cannot be responsible for a highway, an individual cannot regulate international trade, and that a community civic association cannot protect the nation from invasion.

Higher institutions remain necessary, but unless the lower institution is incapable of performing the matter, it should not subsume responsibility. For lower institutions to be capable, widespread property ownership, dignity of labor, and strengthened families are essential. For these principles to be maintained, subsidiarity must be present so that the person and family are protected from absorption by higher institutions.

These principles related to economics and politics establish Distributism’s vision for how the world ought to be organized. One where productive property is widely owned, labor is dignified, families are secured and strengthened, and power is vested as close to the individual as possible. For a moment, let us imagine this has already been achieved. What else remains for our just society?

Institutions maximizing these principles cannot ensure or sustain a just society without moral aims. Direction toward the responsibilities that extend beyond the individual and family are needed. It is through the moral principles, derived from Christendom and/or natural law that we must turn. In part 3 of this series, we will examine Distributism’s moral principles, touching on solidarity, the common good, and preference for localism.

Pictured is the symbol of the distributist movement, the hound. It represents the endless pursuit of social justice and is a nod to Saint Dominic’s “Dogs of the Lord”.

For this section, please be aware that this was written in 1912, and some terminology and sentiment has aged less than favorably for modern times.

Section 2 - Our Civilisation Was Originally Servile

In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find, from two thousand years ago upwards, one fundamental institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is Slavery.

There is here no distinction between the highly civilised City-State of the Mediterranean, with its letters, its plastic art, and its code of laws, with all that makes a civilisation—and this stretching back far beyond any surviving record,—there is here no distinction between that civilised body and the Northern and Western societies of the Celtic tribes, or of the little known hordes that wandered in the Germanies. All indifferently reposed upon slavery. It was a fundamental conception of society. It was everywhere present, nowhere disputed.

There is a distinction (or would appear to be) between Europeans and Asians in this matter. The religion and morals of the one so differed in their very origin from those of the other that every social institution was touched by the contrast—and Slavery among the rest.

But with that we need not concern ourselves. My point is that our European ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.

It is a matter of capital importance to seize this.

An arrangement of such a sort would not have endured without intermission (and indeed without question) for many centuries, nor have been found emerging fully grown from that vast space of unrecorded time during which barbarism and civilisation flourished side by side in Europe, had there not been something in it, good or evil, native to our blood.

There was no question in those ancient societies from which we spring of making subject races into slaves by the might of conquering races. All that is the guess-work of the universities. Not only is there no proof of it, rather all the existing proof is the other way. The Greek had a Greek slave, the Latin a Latin slave, the German a German slave, the Celt a Celtic slave. The theory that “superior races” invaded a land, either drove out the original inhabitants or reduced them to slavery, is one which has no argument either from our present knowledge of man’s mind or from recorded evidence. Indeed, the most striking feature of that Servile Basis upon which Paganism reposed was the human equality recognised between master and slave. The master might kill the slave, but both were of one race and each was human to the other.

This spiritual value was not, as a further pernicious piece of guess-work would dream, a “growth” or a “progress.” The doctrine of human equality was inherent in the very stuff of antiquity, as it is inherent in those societies which have not lost tradition.

We may presume that the barbarian of the North would grasp the great truth with less facility than the civilised man of the Mediterranean, because barbarism everywhere shows a retrogression in intellectual power; but the proof that the Servile Institution was a social arrangement rather than a distinction of type is patent from the coincidence everywhere of Emancipation with Slavery. Pagan Europe not only thought the existence of Slaves a natural necessity to society, but equally thought that upon giving a Slave his freedom the enfranchised man would naturally step, though perhaps after the interval of some lineage, into the ranks of free society. Great poets and great artists, statesmen and soldiers were little troubled by the memory of a servile ancestry.

On the other hand, there was a perpetual recruitment of the Servile Institution, just as there was a perpetual emancipation from it, proceeding year after year; and the natural or normal method of recruitment is most clearly apparent to us in the simple and barbaric societies which the observation of contemporary civilised Pagans enables us to judge.

It was poverty that made the slave.

Prisoners of war taken in set combat afforded one mode of recruitment, and there was also the raiding of men by pirates in the outer lands and the selling of them in the slave markets of the South. But at once the cause of the recruitment and the permanent support of the institution of slavery was the indigence of the man who sold himself into slavery, or was born into it; for it was a rule of Pagan Slavery that the slave bred the slave, and that even if one of the parents were free the offspring was a slave.

The society of antiquity, therefore, was normally divided (as must at last be the society of any servile state) into clearly marked sections: there was upon the one hand the citizen who had a voice in the conduct of the State, who would often labour—but labour of his own free will—and who was normally possessed of property; upon the other hand, there was a mass dispossessed of the means of production and compelled by positive law to labour at command.

It is true that in the further developments of society the accumulation of private savings by a slave was tolerated and that slaves so favoured did sometimes purchase their freedom.

It is further true that in the confusion of the last generations of Paganism there arose in some of the great cities a considerable class of men who, though free, were dispossessed of the means of production. But these last never existed in a sufficient proportion to stamp the whole State of society with a character drawn from their proletarian circumstance. To the end the Pagan world remained a world of free proprietors possessed, in various degrees, of the land and of the capital whereby wealth may be produced, and applying to that land and capital for the purpose of producing wealth, compulsory labour.

Certain features in that original Servile State from which we all spring should be carefully noted by way of conclusion.

First, though all nowadays contrast slavery with freedom to the advantage of the latter, yet men then accepted slavery freely as an alternative to indigence.

Secondly (and this is most important for our judgment of the Servile Institution as a whole, and of the chances of its return), in all those centuries we find no organised effort, nor (what is still more significant) do we find any complaint of conscience against the institution which condemned the bulk of human beings to forced labour.

Slaves may be found in the literary exercises of the time bewailing their lot and joking about it; some philosophers will complain that an ideal society should contain no slaves; others will excuse the establishment of slavery upon this plea or that, while granting that it offends the dignity of man. The greater part will argue of the State that it is necessarily Servile. But no one, slave or free, dreams of abolishing or even of changing the thing. You have no martyrs for the case of “freedom” as against “slavery.” The so-called Servile wars are the resistance on the part of escaped slaves to any attempt at recapture, but they are not accompanied by an accepted affirmation that servitude is an intolerable thing; nor is that note struck at all from the unknown beginnings to the Catholic endings of the Pagan world. Slavery is irksome, undignified, woeful; but it is, to them, of the nature of things.

You may say, to be brief, that this arrangement of society was the very air which Pagan Antiquity breathed.

Its great works, its leisure and its domestic life, its humour, its reserves of power, all depend upon the fact that its society was that of the Servile State.

Men were happy in that arrangement, or, at least, as happy as men ever are.

The attempt to escape by a personal effort, whether of thrift, of adventure, or of flattery to a master, from the Servile condition had never even so much of driving power behind it as the attempt many show to-day to escape from the rank of wage-earners to those of employers. Servitude did not seem a hell into which a man would rather die than sink, or out of which at any sacrifice whatsoever a man would raise himself. It was a condition accepted by those who suffered it as much as by those who enjoyed it, and a perfectly necessary part of all that men did and thought.

You find no barbarian from some free place astonished at the institution of Slavery; you find no Slave pointing to a society in which Slavery was unknown as towards a happier land. To our ancestors not only for those few centuries during which we have record of their actions, but apparently during an illimitable past, the division of society into those who must work under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labour was the very plan of the State apart from which they could hardly think of society as existing at all.

Let all this be clearly grasped. It is fundamental to an understanding of the problem before us. Slavery is no novel experience in the history of Europe; nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of Slavery as acceptable to European men. Slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for thousands upon thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that considerable moral experiment called The Faith, which many believe to be now accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem that the old and primary institution of Slavery must return.

For there came upon us Europeans after all those centuries, and centuries of a settled social order which was erected upon Slavery as upon a sure foundation, the experiment called the Christian Church.

Among the by-products of this experiment, very slowly emerging from the old Pagan world, and not long completed before Christendom itself suffered a shipwreck, was the exceedingly gradual transformation of the Servile State into something other: a society of owners. And how that something other did proceed from the Pagan Servile State I will next explain.

Section 3 - How the Servile Institution Was for a Time Dissolved

The process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men, though very lengthy in its development (it covered close upon a thousand years), and though exceedingly complicated in its detail, may be easily and briefly grasped in its main lines.

Let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which the European mind passed between the first and the fourth centuries (that revolution which is often termed the Conversion of the World to Christianity, but which should for purposes of historical accuracy be called the Growth of the Church) included no attack upon the Servile Institution.

No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right.

The emancipation of Slaves was indeed regarded as a good work by the Faithful: but so was it regarded by the Pagan. It was, on the face of it, a service rendered to one’s fellowmen. The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilisation to force men away from Civilisation to Barbarism. In general you will discover no pronouncement against slavery as an institution, nor any moral definition attacking it, throughout all those early Christian centuries during which it none the less effectively disappears.

The form of its disappearance is well worth noting. It begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production in Western Europe of those great landed estates, commonly lying in the hands of a single proprietor, and generally known as Villӕ.

There were, of course, many other forms of human agglomeration: small peasant farms owned in absolute proprietorship by their petty masters; groups of free men associated in what was called a Vicus; manufactories in which groups of slaves were industrially organised to the profit of their master; and, governing the regions around them, the scheme of Roman towns.

But of all these the Villa the dominating type; and as society passed from the high civilisation of the first four centuries into the simplicity of the Dark Ages, the Villa, the unit of agricultural production, became more and more the model of all society.

Now the Villa began as a considerable extent of land, containing, like a modern English estate, pasture, arable, water, wood and heath, or waste land. It was owned by a dominus or lord in absolute proprietorship, to sell, or leave by will, to do with it whatsoever he chose. It was cultivated for him by Slaves to whom he owed nothing in return, and whom it was simply his interest to keep alive and to continue breeding in order that they might perpetuate his wealth.

I concentrate particularly upon these Slaves, the great majority of the human beings inhabiting the land, because, although there arose in the Dark Ages, when the Roman Empire was passing into the society of the Middle Ages, other social elements within the Villæ—the Freed men who owed the lord a modified service, and even occasionally independent citizens present through a contract terminable and freely entered into yet it is the Slave who is the mark of all that society.

At its origin, then, the Roman Villa was a piece of absolute property, the production of wealth upon which was due to the application of slave labour to the natural resources of the place; and that slave labour was as much the property of the lord as was the land itself.

The first modification which this arrangement showed in the new society which accompanied the growth and establishment of the Church in the Roman world, was a sort of customary rule which modified the old arbitrary position of the Slave.

The Slave was still a Slave, but it was both more convenient in the decay of communications and public power, and more consonant with the social spirit of the time to make sure of that Slave’s produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues. The Slave and his descendants became more or less rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, but in decreasing numbers. As the generations passed a larger and a larger proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived, and the produce which they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount, which the lord was content to receive and ask no more. The arrangement was made workable by leaving to the Slave all the remaining produce of his own labour. There was a sort of implied bargain here, in the absence of public powers and in the decline of the old highly centralised and vigorous system which could always guarantee to the master the full product of the Slave’s effort. The bargain implied was, that if the Slave Community of the Villa would produce for the benefit of its Lord not less than a certain customary amount of goods from the soil of the Villa, the Lord could count on their always exercising that effort by leaving to them all the surplus, which they could increase, if they willed, indefinitely.

By the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for a matter of some three hundred years, one fixed form of productive unit began to be apparent throughout Western Christendom.

The old absolutely owned estate had come to be divided into three portions. One of these was pasture and arable land, reserved privately to the lord, and called domain: that is, lord’s land. Another was in the occupation, and already almost in the possession (practically, though not legally), of those who had once been Slaves. A third was common land over which both the Lord and the Slave exercised each their various rights, which rights were minutely remembered and held sacred by custom. For instance, in a certain village, if there was beech pasture for three hundred swine, the lord might put in but fifty: two hundred and fifty were the rights of the “village.”

Upon the first of these portions, Domain, wealth was produced by the obedience of the Slave for certain fixed hours of labour. He must come so many days a week, or upon such and such occasions (all fixed and customary), to till the land of the Domain for his Lord, and all the produce of this must be handed over to the Lord though, of course, a daily wage in kind was allowed, for the labourer must live.

Upon the second portion, “Land in Villenage,” which was nearly always the most of the arable and pasture land of the Villæ, the Slaves worked by rules and customs which they gradually came to elaborate for themselves. They worked under an officer of their own, sometimes nominated, sometimes elected: nearly always, in practice, a man suitable to them and more or less of their choice; though this co-operative work upon the old Slave-ground was controlled by the general customs of the village, common to lord and slave alike, and the principal officer over both kinds of land was the Lord’s Steward.

Of the wealth so produced by the Slaves, a certain fixed portion (estimated originally in kind) was payable to the Lord’s Bailiff, and became the property of the Lord.

Finally, on the third division of the land, the “Waste,” the “Wood,” the “Heath,” and certain common pastures, wealth was produced as elsewhere by the labour of those who had once been the Slaves, but divided in customary proportions between them and their master. Thus, such and such a water meadow would have grazing for so many oxen; the number was rigidly defined, and of that number so many would be the Lord’s and so many the Villagers’.

During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries this system crystallised and became so natural in men’s eyes that the original servile character of the working folk upon the Villa was forgotten.

The documents of the time are rare. These three centuries are the crucible of Europe, and record is drowned and burnt in them. Our study of their social conditions, especially in the latter part, are matter rather of inference than of direct evidence. But the sale and purchase of men, already exceptional at the beginning of this period, is almost unknown before the end of it. Apart from domestic slaves within the household, slavery in the old sense which Pagan antiquity gave that institution had been transformed out of all knowledge, and when, with the eleventh century, the true Middle Ages begin to spring from the soil of the Dark Ages, and a new civilisation to arise, though the old word servus (the Latin for a slave) is still used for the man who works the soil, his status in the now increasing number of documents which we can consult is wholly changed; we can certainly no longer translate the word by the English word slave; we are compelled to translate it by a new word with very different connotations: the word serf.

The Serf of the early Middle Ages, of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, is already nearly a peasant. He is indeed bound in legal theory to the soil upon which he was born. In social practice, all that is required of him is that his family should till its quota of servile land, and that the dues to the lord shall not fail from absence of labour. That duty fulfilled, it is easy and common for members of the serf-class to enter the professions and the Church, or to go wild; to become men practically free in the growing industries of the towns. With every passing generation the ancient servile conception of the labourer’s status grows more and more dim, and the Courts and the practice of society treat him more and more as a man strictly bound to certain dues and to certain periodical labour within his industrial unit, but in all other respects free.

As the civilisation of the Middle Ages develops, as wealth increases and the arts progressively flourish, this character of freedom becomes more marked. In spite of attempts in time of scarcity (as after a plague) to insist upon the old rights to compulsory labour, the habit of commuting these rights for money-payments and dues has grown too strong to be resisted.

If at the end of the fourteenth century, let us say, or at the beginning of the fifteenth, you had visited some Squire upon his estate in France or in England, he would have told you of the whole of it, “These are my lands.” But the peasant (as he now was) would have said also of his holding, “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 it was always inheritable from father to son; and, in general, at the close of this long process of a thousand years the Slave had become a free man for all the ordinary purposes of society. He bought and sold. He saved as he willed, he invested, he built, he drained at his discretion, and if he improved the land it was to his own profit.

Meanwhile, side by side with this emancipation of mankind in the direct line of descent from the old chattel slaves of the Roman villa went, in the Middle Ages, a crowd of institutions which all similarly made for a distribution of property, and for the destruction of even the fossil remnants of a then forgotten Servile State. Thus industry of every kind in the towns, in transport, in crafts, and in commerce, was organised in the form of Guilds. And a Guild was a society partly co-operative, but in the main composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self-governing, and 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 monopolising capitalist upon the other.

There was a period of apprenticeship at a man’s entry into a Guild, during which he worked for a master; but in time he became a master in his turn. The existence of such corporations as the normal units of industrial production, of commercial effort, and of the means of transport, is proof enough of what the social spirit was which had also enfranchised the labourer upon the land. And while such institutions flourished side by side with the no longer servile village communities, freehold or absolute possession of the soil, as distinguished from the tenure of the serf under the lord, also increased.

These three forms under which labour was exercised the serf, secure in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for craft production, for transport and for commerce—all three between them were making for a society which should be based upon the principle of property. All, or most,—the normal family—should own. And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.

The State, as the minds of men envisaged it at the close of this process, was an agglomeration of families of varying wealth, but by far the greater number owners of the means of production. It was an agglomeration in which the stability of this distributive system (as I have called it) was guaranteed by the existence of co-operative bodies, binding men of the same craft or of the same village together; guaranteeing the small proprietor against loss of his economic independence, while at the same time it guaranteed society against the growth of a proletariat. If liberty of purchase and of sale, of mortgage and of inheritance was restricted, it was restricted with the social object of preventing the growth of an economic oligarchy which could exploit the rest of the community. The restraints upon liberty were restraints designed for the preservation of liberty; and every action of Mediæval Society, from the flower of the Middle Ages to the approach of their catastrophe, was directed towards the establishment of a State in which men should be economically free through the possession of capital and of land.

Save here and there in legal formulæ, or in rare patches isolated and eccentric, the Servile Institution had totally disappeared; nor must it be imagined that anything in the nature of Collectivism had replaced it. There was common land, but it was common land jealously guarded by men who were also personal proprietors of other land. Common property in the village was but one of the forms of property, and was used rather as the fly-wheel to preserve the regularity of the co-operative machine than as a type of holding in any way peculiarly sacred. The Guilds had property in common, but that property was the property necessary to their co-operative life, their Halls, their Funds for Relief, their Religious Endowments. As for the instruments of their trades, those instruments were owned by the individual members, not by the guild, save where they were of so expensive a kind as to necessitate a corporate control.

Such was the transformation which had come over European society in the course of ten Christian centuries. Slavery had gone, and in its place had come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and brought into existence the Distributive State.

That excellent consummation of human society passed, as we know, and was in certain Provinces of Europe, but more particularly in Britain, destroyed.

For a society in which the determinant mass of families were owners of capital and of land; for one in which production was regulated by self-governing corporations of small owners; and for one in which the misery and insecurity of a proletariat was unknown, there came to be substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now turned, and which goes by the name of Capitalism.

How did such a catastrophe come about? Why was it permitted, and upon what historical process did the evil batten? What turned an England economically free into the England which we know to-day, of which at least one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies?

The answer most usually given to this fundamental question in our history, and the one most readily accepted, is that this misfortune came about through a material process known as the Industrial Revolution. The use of expensive machinery, the concentration of industry and of its implements are imagined to have enslaved, in some blind way, apart from the human will, the action of English mankind.

The explanation is wholly false. No such material cause determined the degradation from which we suffer.

It was the deliberate action of men, evil will in a few and apathy of will among the many, which produced a catastrophe as human in its causes and inception as in its vile effect.

Capitalism was not the growth of the industrial movement, nor of chance material discoveries. A little acquaintance with history and a little straightforwardness in the teaching of it would be enough to prove that.

The Industrial System was a growth proceeding from Capitalism, not its cause. Capitalism was here in England before the Industrial System came into being;—before the use of coal and of the new expensive machinery, and of the concentration of the implements of production in the great towns. Had Capitalism not been present before the Industrial Revolution, that revolution might have proved as beneficent to Englishmen as it has proved maleficent. But Capitalism—that is, the ownership by a few of the springs of life—was present long before the great discoveries came. It warped the effect of these discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them from a good into an evil thing. It was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it was the loss of a free mind.

Alexander Keirincx (1600-1652)

Richmond Castle, 1639

In this series, we will move from the origins of Distributism to its principles, and then conclude with its historical application and how it can be applied today.

For those unfamiliar with Distributism, it is an economic philosophy that argues for the widespread ownership of productive property by individuals and/or families rather than it being concentrated in the hands of the few or the state.

In the search that any person conducts on their quest to conveniently solve all of the world’s problems under a single framework, one swims in an ocean of political, economic, and social -isms. There are the mainstream -isms that people prescribe for any and all problems. Some scary -isms can raise eyebrows more often than not, or “scare the maidens” as some may say. Among all the -isms, there are even relatively unknown -isms that have yet to take root in our world and wait patiently on the fringe of the isms-verse.

Distributism is one of those niche -isms that has yet to proliferate, being relatively unknown compared to the juggernauts of -isms like Capitalism, Socialism, or Communism. Birthed in Europe as the woes from Capitalism wielding industrialization as a weapon spread across the globe, Distributism was a response to industrial capital’s destructive effect on society and concerning proposals from the growing Socialist/Communist movements.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum, lighting Distributism’s flame. This papal encyclical laid the foundation for modern Catholic social teaching by arguing that human dignity should guide economic life. In order to create these conditions where human dignity is set to flourish, it is suggested that there is an inherent right to private property ownership and that it should be widespread rather than concentrated. This stance on the right to property ownership rejects the idea of private property’s abolition associated with Socialism and works against the concentration of land ownership that had occurred via Capitalism. Rerum Novarum did not stop at property ownership, focusing heavily on workers’ rights, just wages/conditions, and protection of the family unit.

Rerum Novarum’s influence continues in Catholic and non-Catholic spheres (and non-Distributist ones for that matter). The current Pope, Leo XIV, cited Rerum Novarum heavily in his latest encyclical on artificial intelligence. Most modern European Christian Democratic political parties, which in many cases are made up of Protestants or are highly secularized, are rooted in the social teachings laid out in this text. It also morally legitimized labor unions, credit unions, and cooperatives, which have delivered great benefits to many regardless of their particular faith.

While Rerum Novarum did not coin the word Distributism, it provided the philosophical backbone for the figures who would. From 1907 to 1912, the two writers Hilaire Belloc, a French-Englishman, and G.K. Chesterton, an Englishman, began developing Distributism into an economic theory and philosophy of its own. In 1912, Hilaire Belloc published The Servile State, hailed today as a foundational text for the Distributist movement, and coined the “Distributive State.” In the 20’s, Chesterton published a series of books and essays in favor of Distributism that would greatly spread the flowering -ism’s seed. Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity would become the movement’s defining and popularizing work. In 1926, the Distributist League was established and sought to reverse the rapid concentration of land ownership that had occurred in Great Britain. It worked to promote the formation of worker cooperatives and guilds, advocate anti-monopoly policy, and support protectionism for small businesses.

Peaking in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Distributism eventually fizzled out from the public consciousness due to a collection of factors. The onset of the Great Depression did validate Distributist concerns, but countries globally pursued solutions antithetical to Distributism. Strong government intervention, welfare programs, stricter regulation/reinforcement of existing concentrated power, and more policies would see Distributism largely sidelined. Pope Pius XI reaffirmed many distributist concepts in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, like the dignity of work, subsidiarity, and limiting economic concentration, but this did little to further Distributism’s footing. Shortly after, in 1936, G.K. Chesterton, the more popular of the two writers responsible for Distributism’s popularity, died, dealing a significant blow to the movement’s leadership.

Distributists quarreled in the years following Chesterton’s death and some gravitated toward authoritarianism and the fascist movement that gripped Europe. The Distributist League would disband at the outbreak of WWII, and the post-war world was left with two dominant systems, welfare capitalism and state socialism, both of which have failed to uphold human dignity. Despite its decline as a formal movement, its thinkers and influence persisted through worker cooperatives, agricultural cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, unions, and more. Since the dawn of the internet, Distributism has been making a quiet comeback as people struggle with the consequences of globalization, continued corporate concentration, lack of community, growing concerns surrounding the dignity of labor, and broken food systems.

Distributism has had its share of successes and failures since its inception, but it is uniquely positioned to help us think about how to address the problems we face today. It is also uniquely disadvantaged, since it has never had the backing of large industrial interests, is lacking sufficient advocates and leaders, and its implementation would require long-term and gradual reform due to its deeply romantic aims. Regardless, Distributism imagines a world in which economic freedom is shared widely, family and friends are prioritized, and faith is central to life. That vision is one that no other -isms have been able to deliver yet and few explicitly aim for, and because of that, it should be seriously considered.

In the next part of this series, we'll examine the principles that form the foundation of the Distributist vision. I chose to begin with its history because understanding the problems that gave rise to Distributism makes its principles easier to appreciate in their proper context.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Pope Leo XIII and Distributism’s foundational text, Rerum Novarum

Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to his needs.

That special, conscious, and intelligent transformation of his environment which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man we call the Production of Wealth.

Wealth is matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more serviceable to a human need.

Without Wealth man cannot exist. The production of it is a necessity to him, and though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary, and even to those forms of production which we call luxuries, yet in any given human society there is a certain kind and a certain amount of wealth without which human life cannot be lived: as, for instance, in England to-day, certain forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth, and habitation.

Therefore, to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist.

Wealth can only be produced by the application of human energy, mental and physical, to the forces of nature around us, and to the material which those forces inform.

This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we will call Labour. As for that material and those natural forces, we will call them, for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conventionally accepted, term Land.

It would seem, therefore, that all problems connected with the production of wealth, and all discussion thereupon, involve but two principal original factors, to wit, Labour and Land, But it so happens that the conscious, artificial, and intelligent action of man upon nature, corresponding to his peculiar character compared with other created beings, introduces a third factor of the utmost importance.

Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious methods of varying and often increasing complexity, and aids himself by the construction of implements. These soon become in each new department of the production as truly necessary to that production as labour and land. Further, any process of production takes a certain time; during that time the producer must be fed, and clothed, and housed, and the rest of it. There must therefore be an accumulation of wealth created in the past, and reserved with the object of maintaining labour during its effort to produce for the future.

Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool, or the setting aside of a store of provisions, labour applied to land for either purpose is not producing wealth for immediate consumption. It is setting aside and reserving somewhat, and that somewhat is always necessary in varying proportions according to the simplicity or complexity of the economic society to the production of wealth.

To such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future production, and not for immediate consumption, whether it be in the form of instruments and tools, or in the form of stores for the maintenance of labour during the process of production, we give the name of Capital.

There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth, which we may conventionally term Land, Capital, and Labour.

When we talk of the Means of Production we signify land and capital combined. Thus, when we say that a man is “dispossessed of the means of production,” or cannot produce wealth save by the leave of another who “possesses the means of production,” we mean that he is the master only of his labour and has no control, in any useful amount, over either capital, or land, or both combined.

A man politically free, that is, one who enjoys the right before the law to exercise his energies when he pleases (or not at all if he does not so please), but not possessed by legal right of control over any useful amount of the means of production, we call proletarian, and any considerable class composed of such men we call a proletariat.

Property is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the control of land and of wealth made from land, including therefore all the means of production, is vested in some person or corporation. Thus we may say of a building, including the land upon which it stands, that it is the “property” of such and such a citizen, or family, or college, or of the State, meaning that those who “own” such property are guaranteed by the laws in the right to use it or withhold it from use. Private property signifies such wealth (including the means of production) as may, by the arrangements of society, be in the control of persons or corporations other than the political bodies of which these persons or corporations are in another aspect members. What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the State, or is only a part of the State (for were that so we should talk of municipal property as private property), but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the hierarchy of political institutions. Thus Mr Jones is a citizen of Manchester, but he does not own his private property as a citizen of Manchester, he owns it as Mr Jones, whereas, if the house next to his own be owned by the Manchester municipality, they own it only because they are a political body standing for the whole community of the town. Mr Jones might move to Glasgow and still own his property in Manchester, but the municipality of Manchester can only own its property in connection with the corporate political life of the town.

An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of the political officers of the community we call Collectivist, or more generally Socialist.¹

A society in which private property in land and capital, that is, the ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the State, while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian, we call Capitalist; and the method by which wealth is produced in such a society can only be the application of labour, the determining mass of which must necessarily be proletarian, to land and capital, in such fashion that, of the total wealth produced, the Proletariat which labours shall only receive a portion.

The two marks, then, defining the Capitalist State are: (1) That the citizens thereof are politically free: i.e. can use or withhold at will their possessions or their labour, but are also (2) divided into capitalist and proletarian in such proportions that the State as a whole is not characterised by the institution of ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole, or even to a small minority. Such a Capitalist State is essentially divided into two classes of free citizens, the one capitalist or owning, the other propertyless or proletarian.

My last definition concerns the Servile State itself, and since the idea is both somewhat novel and also the subject of this book, I will not only establish but expand its definition.

The definition of the Servile State is as follows:—

“That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour we call The Servile State.”

Note first certain negative limitations in the above which must be clearly seized if we are not to lose clear thinking in a fog of metaphor and rhetoric.

That society is not servile in which men are intelligently constrained to labour by enthusiasm, by a religious tenet, or indirectly from fear of destitution, or directly from love of gain, or from the common sense which teaches them that by their labour they may increase their well-being.

A clear boundary exists between the servile and the non-servile condition of labour, and the conditions upon either side of that boundary utterly differ one from another, Where there is compulsion applicable by positive law to men of a certain status, and such compulsion enforced in the last resort by the powers at the disposal of the State, there is the institution of Slavery; and if that institution be sufficiently expanded the whole State may be said to repose upon a servile basis, and is a Servile State.

Where such formal, legal status is absent the conditions are not servile; and the difference between servitude and freedom, appreciable in a thousand details of actual life, is most glaring in this: that the free man can refuse his labour and use that refusal as an instrument wherewith to bargain; while the slave has no such instrument or power to bargain at all, but is dependent for his well-being upon the custom of society, backed by the regulation of such of its laws as may protect and guarantee the slave.

Next, let it be observed that the State is not servile because the mere institution of slavery is to be discovered somewhere within its confines. The State is only servile when so considerable a body of forced labour is affected by the compulsion of positive law as to give a character to the whole community.

Similarly, that State is not servile in which all citizens are liable to submit their energies to the compulsion of positive law, and must labour at the discretion of State officials. By loose metaphor and for rhetorical purposes men who dislike Collectivism (for instance) or the discipline of a regiment will talk of the “servile” conditions of such organisations. But for the purposes of strict definition and clear thinking it is essential to remember that a servile condition only exists by contrast with a free condition. The servile condition is present in society only when there is also present the free citizen for whose benefit the slave works under the compulsion of positive law.

Again, it should be noted that this word “servile” in no way connotes the worst, nor even necessarily a bad, arrangement of society, This point is so clear that it should hardly delay us; but a confusion between the rhetorical and the precise use of the word servile I have discovered to embarrass public discussion of the matter so much that I must once more emphasise what should be self-evident.

The discussion as to whether the institution of slavery be a good or a bad one, or be relatively better or worse than other alternative institutions, has nothing whatever to do with the exact definition of that institution. Thus Monarchy consists in throwing the responsibility for the direction of society upon an individual. One can imagine some Roman of the first century praising the new Imperial power, but through a muddle-headed tradition against “kings” swearing that he would never tolerate a “monarchy.” Such a fellow would have been a very futile critic of public affairs under Trajan, but no more futile than a man who swears that nothing shall make him a “slave,” though well prepared to accept laws that compel him to labour without his consent, under the force of public law, and upon terms dictated by others.

Many would argue that a man so compelled to labour, guaranteed against insecurity and against insufficiency of food, housing and clothing, promised subsistence for his old age, and a similar set of advantages for his posterity, would be a great deal better off than a free man lacking all these things. But the argument does not affect the definition attaching to the word servile. A devout Christian of blameless life drifting upon an ice-flow in the Arctic night, without food or any prospect of succour, is not so comfortably circumstanced as the Khedive of Egypt; but it would be folly in establishing the definition of the words “Christian” and “Mahommedan” to bring this contrast into account.

We must then, throughout this inquiry, keep strictly to the economic aspect of the case. Only when that is established and when the modern tendency to the re-establishment of slavery is clear, are we free to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the revolution through which we are passing.

It must further be grasped that the essential mark of the Servile Institution does not depend upon the ownership of the slave by a particular master. That the institution of slavery tends to that form under the various forces composing human nature and human society is probable enough. That if or when slavery were re-established in England a particular man would in time be found the slave not of Capitalism in general but of, say, the Shell Oil Trust in particular, is a very likely development; and we know that in societies where the institution was of immemorial antiquity such direct possession of the slave by the free man or corporation of free men had come to be the rule. But my point is that such a mark is not essential to the character of slavery. As an initial phase in the institution of slavery, or even as a permanent phase marking society for an indefinite time, it is perfectly easy to conceive of a whole class rendered servile by positive law, and compelled by such law to labour for the advantage of another non-servile free class, without any direct act of possession permitted to one man over the person of another.

The final contrast thus established between slave and free might be maintained by the State guaranteeing to the un-free, security in their subsistence, to the free, security in their property and profits, rent and interest. What would mark the slave in such a society would be his belonging to that set or status which was compelled by no matter what definition to labour, and was thus cut off from the other set or status not compelled to labour, but free to labour or not as it willed.

Again, the Servile State would certainly exist even though a man, being only compelled to labour during a portion of his time, were free to bargain and even to accumulate in his “free” time. The old lawyers used to distinguish between a serf “in gross” and a serf “regardant.” A serf “in gross” was one who was a serf at all times and places, and not in respect to a particular lord. A serf “regardant” was a serf only in his bondage to serve a particular lord. He was free as against other men. And one might perfectly well have slaves who were only slaves “regardant” to a particular type of employment during particular hours. But they would be slaves none the less, and if their hours were many and their class numerous, the State which they supported would be a Servile State.

Lastly, let it be remembered that the servile condition remains as truly an institution of the State when it attaches permanently and irrevocably at any one time to a particular set of human beings as when it attaches to a particular class throughout their lives. Thus the laws of Paganism permitted the slave to be enfranchised by his master: it further permitted children or prisoners to be sold into slavery. The Servile Institution, though perpetually changing in the elements of its composition, was still an unchanging factor in the State. Similarly, though the State should only subject to slavery those who had less than a certain income, while leaving men free by inheritance or otherwise to pass out of, and by loss to pass into, the slave class, that slave class, though fluctuating as to its composition, would still permanently exist.

Thus, if the modern industrial State shall make a law by which servile conditions shall not attach to those capable of earning more than a certain sum by their own labour, but shall attach to those who earn less than this sum; or if the modern industrial State defines manual labour in a particular fashion, renders it compulsory during a fixed time for those who undertake it, but leaves them free to turn later to other occupations if they choose, undoubtedly such distinctions, though they attach to conditions and not to individuals, establish the Servile Institution.

Some considerable number must be manual workers by definition, and while they were so defined would be slaves. Here again the composition of the Servile class would fluctuate, but the class would be permanent and large enough to stamp all society. I need not insist upon the practical effect: that such a class, once established, tends to be fixed in the great majority of those which make it up, and that the individuals entering or leaving it tend to become few compared to the whole mass.

There is one last point to be considered in this definition.

It is this:—

Since, in the nature of things, a free society must enforce a contract (a free society consisting in nothing else but the enforcement of free contracts), how far can that be called a Servile condition which is the result of contract nominally or really free? In other words, is not a contract to labour, however freely entered into, servile of its nature when enforced by the State?

For instance, I have no food or clothing, nor do I possess the means of production whereby I can produce any wealth in exchange for such. I am so circumstanced that an owner of the Means of Production will not allow me access to those Means unless I sign a contract to serve him for a week at a wage of bare subsistence. Does the State in enforcing that contract make me for that week a slave?

Obviously not. For the institution of Slavery presupposes a certain attitude of mind in the free man and in the slave, a habit of living in either, and the stamp of both those habits upon society. No such effects are produced by a contract enforceable by the length of one week. The duration of human life is such, and the prospect of posterity, that the fulfilling of such a contract in no way wounds the senses of liberty and of choice.

What of a month, a year, ten years, a lifetime? Suppose an extreme case, and a destitute man to sign a contract binding him and all his children who were minors to work for a bare subsistence until his own death, or the attainment of majority of the children, whichever event might happen latest; would the State in forcing that contract be making the man a slave?

As undoubtedly as it would not be making him a slave in the first case, it would be making him a slave in the second.

One can only say to ancient sophistical difficulties of this kind, that the sense of men establishes for itself the true limits of any object, as of freedom. What freedom is, or is not, in so far as mere measure of time is concerned (though of course much else than time enters in), human habit determines; but the enforcing of a contract of service certainly or probably leaving a choice after its expiration is consonant with freedom. The enforcement of a contract probably binding one’s whole life is not consonant with freedom. One binding to service a man’s natural heirs is intolerable to freedom.

Consider another converse point. A man binds himself to work for life and his children after him so far as the law may permit him to bind them in a particular society, but that not for a bare subsistence, but for so large a wage that he will be wealthy in a few years, and his posterity, when the contract is completed, wealthier still. Does the State in forcing such a contract make the fortunate employee a slave? No. For it is in the essence of slavery that subsistence or little more than subsistence should be guaranteed to the slave. Slavery exists in order that the Free should benefit by its existence, and connotes a condition in which the men subjected to it may demand secure existence, but little more.

If anyone were to draw an exact line, and to say that a life-contract enforceable by law was slavery at so many shillings a week, but ceased to be slavery after that margin, his effort would be folly. None the less, there is a standard of subsistence in any one society, the guarantee of which (or little more) under an obligation to labour by compulsion is slavery, while the guarantee of very much more is not slavery.

This verbal jugglery might be continued. It is a type of verbal difficulty apparent in every inquiry open to the professional disputant, but of no effect upon the mind of the honest inquirer whose business is not dialectic but truth.

It is always possible by establishing a cross-section in a set of definitions to pose the unanswerable difficulty of degree, but that will never affect the realities of discussion. We know, for instance, what is meant by torture when it exists in a code of laws, and when it is forbidden. No imaginary difficulties of degree between pulling a man’s hair and scalping him, between warming him and burning him alive, will disturb a reformer whose business it is to expunge torture from some penal code.

In the same way we know what is and what is not compulsory labour, what is and what is not the Servile Condition. Its test is, I repeat, the withdrawal from a man of his free choice to labour or not to labour, here or there, for such and such an object; and the compelling of him by positive law to labour for the advantage of others who do not fall under the same compulsion.

Where you have that, you have slavery: with all the manifold, spiritual, and political results of that ancient institution.

Where you have slavery affecting a class of such considerable size as to mark and determine the character of the State, there you have the Servile State.

To sum up, then:—The Servile State is that in which we find so considerable a body of families and individuals distinguished from free citizens by the mark of compulsory labour as to stamp a general character upon society, and all the chief characters, good or evil, attaching to the institution of slavery will be found permeating such a State, whether the slaves be directly and personally attached to their masters, only indirectly attached through the medium of the State, or attached in a third manner through their subservience to corporations or to particular industries. The slave so compelled to labour will be one dispossessed of the means of production, and compelled by law to labour for the advantage of all or any who are possessed thereof. And the distinguishing mark of the slave proceeds from the special action upon him of a positive law which first separates one body of men, the less-free, from another, the more free, in the function of contract within the general body of the community.

Now, from a purely Servile conception of production and of the arrangement of society we Europeans sprang. The Immemorial past of Europe is a Servile past. During some centuries which the Church raised, permeated, and constructed, Europe was gradually released or divorced from this immemorial and fundamental conception of slavery; to that conception, to that institution, our Industrial or Capitalist society is now upon its return. We are re-establishing the slave

Hilaire Belloc (middle) and G.K. Chesterton (right), the popularizing writers of distributism, stand with George Bernard Shaw (left).