Distributism

Distributism was a pollical theory and programme developed in the 1920s and 30s by the English writers Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton partly under the influence of then recently developed Catholic Social Teaching. It was a response to the dominance of two opposing ideologies dominant in the between the two world wars: liberal capitalism and state socialism. The first elevated freedom but without regard to the values of community and social justice; the second sought control of society as a means of promoting these but did so at the cost of personal liberty. Distributism saw itself as identifying and charting a third way between these extremes. Like socialism, it believed in the distribution of material and manufacturing resources away from the ownership and control of the few who sought and used them for their own benefit. Like liberalism, however, it believed that people should be free to choose for themselves and for their families how to live and to cooperate with others voluntarily rather than as a matter of direction from a centralized and controlling state. The threat posed to the world by national socialism (Nazism) and the war to defeat it rather overtook this debate as governments necessarily took control of national resources. After the Second World War the main task was the rebuilding of the fabric, economies and services of the damaged societies but with awareness of the dangers of totalitarianism this led to a social liberal democratic consensus which was itself a kind of third way politics. From the 1960s onwards, however, there has been something of a revival of interest in Distributist ideas among economists, philosophers and social activists such as E.F. Schumacher, Alasdair MacIntyre and Wendell Berry.