Distributism Needs a New Name

People who get too far from fundamental things, from ploughing and reaping and rearing children, lose something that is never restored by any progress or civilization. —G. K. Chesterton

In 1910, G. K. Chesterton wrote a book called What’s Wrong with the World. In it is found one of his most famous lines: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

But what did he say was wrong with the world? Four things: big government, big business, feminism, and public education. The first two, which he nicknamed Hudge and Gudge, were in cahoots with each other, and largely drove the other two. The feminists, while imagining themselves to be achieving freedom and independence, had merely abandoned their positions of power and influence in the most fundamental unit of society – the family – and become wage slaves in factories and offices. As Chesterton quipped, “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting ‘We will not be dictated to!’ and went off and became stenographers.” Gudge was only too happy to grant them their “liberation” from the home and use them for cheap labor.

Meanwhile, with the mother leaving the home and the father, also a wage slave, having already left, the only institution powerful enough to fill the parenting void was the state, in the form of public education. Chesterton makes the bold claim that never before in all of human history did the government have so much power over the private citizen as when it took over education. He says the state had less power over a man when it could send him to be burned at the stake than it does now when it sends him to public school. In the century since Chesterton wrote that book, the state has served to drive a larger wedge between parent and child, giving parents little say in what public schools will teach their children.

The four things that are wrong with the world have one thing in common: they undermine the family.

Hudge and Gudge are huge and powerful, feminism pervasive, and public education a slithery beast. The four things that are wrong with the world have one thing in common: they undermine the family. And if the family falls apart, so does the whole society.

While flirting with socialism as a young man (as so many young men do, being aghast at the inequity of wealth and the crassness of a commercially driven culture), Chesterton soon realized that capitalism and socialism were remarkably similar. Both involve the majority of people working as wage-earners and not owning their own land or source of living. There is little difference between a clerk sitting at a desk in a tall corporate building and a bureaucrat sitting at a desk in a tall government building. There is little difference in a factory owned by Hudge and a factory owned by Gudge. Chesterton says, “It is cheap to own a slave. It is cheaper to be a slave.”

Inspired by the writings of Pope Leo XIII, who in his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum attacked both capitalism and socialism, Chesterton and his colorful colleague Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) founded a movement that they eventually – and unfortunately – named Distributism. It was based on Pope Leo XIII’s idea that more workers should become owners. It favored small, family-owned business and trades, and a more agriculturally based and less industrially based society. As Chesterton says, “An agricultural country which consumes its own food is a finer thing than an industrial country, which at its best can only consume its own smoke.”

Photograph by Alex Gruber

Most importantly, Distributists are opposed to an economy based on the wage. “The opposite of employment,” argues Chesterton, “is not unemployment. It is independence.” The idea of people doing things for themselves – that is the opposite of dependence. Even in the case of larger and more complicated businesses that require many workers, the Distributists argued for employee ownership, where workers are stakeholders and not merely disposable wage slaves.

While the Distributist movement gained a much larger following than most historians have acknowledged, and is even experiencing something of a revival these days, it has suffered from being dismissed. Conservatives (and capitalists) accuse Distributism of being too socialist, an enemy of free trade. Liberals (and socialists) accuse it of being too capitalist, an enemy of regulation and the public interest. But more often it is dismissed without a fair hearing – not only by established economists and academics but by most everyone else as well – simply because of its unfortunate name: Distributism. No one knows what it means, and usually people think it means something else. It is understandably conflated with redistribution, which means taking money from a wealthier segment of the citizenry and redistributing it to a less wealthy segment. Sort of like Robin Hood. Or taxation. Yet while the early Distributists recognized that some redistribution of land, wealth, and power would obviously be necessary to achieve their ends, redistribution was never their end goal nor what made their vision compelling to so many.

It is for this reason that the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton recently renamed Distributism. Now, I wish to make it clear that we don’t have any special control over the word “Distributism.” People can keep using the old word if they want. But we introduced a new word because the old word was … well, it was no good!

The new word we came up with is “Localism.”

The advantage of the term “Localism” is that it already has a recognizable meaning: the support of local production and consumption of goods; local control of government; promotion of local history, local culture, and local identity; and the protection of local freedom. It is about directness and decentralization, whether in government or in commerce. It is opposed to globalism.

There are many people who want to take responsibility for their own lives, but they are increasingly frustrated by the feeling that everything is out of their control, and they cannot even say who is in control. They are weary of the complexities and complications brought on by bureaucracy and regulation, with no one being answerable for anything.

Localism means having control over the things that most directly affect you. Another term for this is “subsidiarity.” (But that’s another word that always has to be explained.) It means keeping accountable those who have any power that affects your home, your children’s education, your trade. As Chesterton says, you should be able to keep your politicians close enough to kick them. It means keeping your dollars in your community, buying from your neighbor and not from a remote corporation (or a river in South America). It means owning your own piece of the community. It means reconnecting with the land and with what you eat. It does not mean everyone has to be a farmer, but it means everyone should be in touch with a farmer. It means more people doing more things for themselves, which makes them less passive, less dependent, less helpless, less hopeless.

And there is nothing more local than the family. There is nothing more local than the home. By Localism, we mean an economy and a political system based on the family.

In spite of the fact that this idea resonates with people when they learn about it, Localism faces two major hurdles at present. First, people are not always allowed to do things for themselves. And second, people are not accustomed to doing things for themselves.

But this can change. Our society can be transformed from the bottom up, through a grassroots revival. It starts with people learning there is another option and that there are little things they can begin to do to change the world around them, the world within their reach: where they spend their money, what they support, and how they choose to make a living. As Chesterton says:

The whole object of real art, of real romance – and, above all, of real religion – is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread; to prevent them from regarding daily life as dull or domestic life as narrow; to teach them to feel in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plough. What is now needed most is intensive imagination inward, on the things we already have, and to make those things live.