An Excerpt From Foundations of a Catholic Political Order

by Thomas Storck

[Editor's note: We thank Thomas Storck for granting permission to reprint an excerpt from his out-of-print book, Foundations of a Catholic Political Order. Mr. Storck will represent The Society for Distributism at next year's debate, Catholicism and Economics.]

...if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall in temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs. I Tim. 6:8-10

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. James 5:1-3a

From these as well as other passages in both the Old and New Testaments we ought to be able to see clearly that there is some sort of a problem in regard to riches and moneymaking. Quite obviously the problem is complex and cannot be reduced to saying that all the rich are evil and will end up in Hell nor that the desire for material goods is evil. Neither of these statements is true. Neither, however, can Christians accept the modern world’s attitude toward riches and material things, an attitude which fails to see that there is anything to be troubled about. Catholicism, when it has been free to be true to itself, has always set up safeguards around the activities connected with money and the accumulation of wealth, safeguards for the common good and health of the community, as well as for the spiritual safety of the individual possessor of wealth himself, precisely because the Church knows the weakness of man and his propensity to sin.

Because of the original disaster that affects all of Adam’s descendants, man tends to disorder, his appetites tend to revolt against his reason. We see this clearly in reference to our sexual appetites, but perhaps twentieth-century Catholics do not see this quite as clearly in regard to our appetite for pecuniary gain as did our medieval fathers in the Faith. Moreover, I think that we have not always well understood what it is about our sexual appetites that is disorderly. Some, I fear, have tended to see sexual desire as in a class by itself, either somehow inherently evil, or at least tainted. But this is not the correct way of looking at the matter, for the problem is not in our sexual desire itself, but in the entire integration of our human nature.

Man’s sexual appetite and all that naturally goes with it were quite obviously created by God, and thus share in the original Divine approbation, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good,” Genesis 1:31. They were created for a purpose, namely to bring new human beings into the world, and ultimately into Heaven, in cooperation with Almighty God. What is wrong with our sexual appetite today, and indeed since the Fall, is that the appetite tends toward objects with whom it is impossible to obtain the end for which that appetite was given to us, that is, to beget children and bring up those children in the circle of a loving family. Our sexual desire, one of our concupiscible appetites, is indiscriminate and blind in its wants. Instead of being readily subordinate to its controlling purpose, the begetting and subsequent rearing of children, it simply wants what it wants. In the state of original justice the intellect easily ruled over all subordinate aspects of man, and thus would effortlessly have directed a man’s sexual desire exclusively toward his spouse, but since Adam’s sin this has not been the case. In our present condition we must all struggle to subject the concupiscible appetites to the rule of reason. But in this hard work of ruling our blind appetites we do not do anything against what is natural for us. We were created with reason as the ruling element in us and it is impossible to make sense of human beings in any other way; thus to restrain our blind desires within the bounds of reason, though at times a bitter effort, is simply to live as is natural to man, in fact, to live according to nature.

A similar thing is true of our desire for material things, which is the basis for man’s economic activity and all that goes with it. Since we have bodies we need material things, and this would have been true had the Fall never occurred. But instead of asking why we need material things, we make them ends in themselves, not means toward allowing us to cultivate what is important in life, namely, our spiritual lives, our intellectual lives, our family and social lives. As with our sexual appetite, our desire for money and material goods is now more or less indiscriminate and inordinate in its wants. But also as with our sexual appetite, our appetite for material goods was created for an end. Material goods exist for the sake of the more important aspects of our lives. Such goods are good only to the extent that they facilitate our easier attainment of spiritual, intellectual, family and social goods, just as sexual activity is good to the extent it furthers one of the three ends of marriage. And just as the sexual appetite run out of bounds hurts not only the individuals involved but the entire community, the same is true of our appetite for economic gain. Adam Smith notwithstanding, it is not the case that if each man seeks his own gain to the utmost the community will necessarily benefit thereby. History as well as common sense teach otherwise.

One of the main reasons why this is so hard for many otherwise orthodox Catholics to grasp today is, I think, that we have been so accustomed to attacks on free-market capitalism coming from socialists and communists, that we assume only they can have anything bad to say about our economic system. But just as the logic of looking at our sexual appetite and the role it ought to play in human affairs according to its own nature, leads us to conclude that man must put many restraints on his sexual conduct, which at the time feel as if they were going against his nature, but in reality are fulfilling that nature, in a similar fashion, if we ask ourselves fundamental questions about man’s capacity for and need of material goods, and look honestly at the disruptive effect unrestrained economic activity has on human society, we are led to propose strong curbs, curbs which indeed are different from those proposed by socialists, but which are equally contrary to our present system and to the desires of unrestrained greed.

If any Catholic is disposed to dispute this line of argument, then I would point out two different things which confirm what I have said. The first is the practice of medieval Christendom. The attitude toward economic activity that obtained in Europe during the Middle Ages was vastly different from our own. The following from Richard Tawney conveys some idea of the medieval outlook:

Material riches are necessary; they have a secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another; the wise ruler, as St. Thomas said, will consider in founding his State the natural resources of the country. But economic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud them. Like other strong passions, what they need, it is thought, is not a clear field, but repression. There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct

Tawney continues with his description of medieval economic ethics,

At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings, against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by Providence. But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labor.

How unbelievably different is our modern attitude. With us not only is trade in goods no longer held to be a dangerous activity, but we see no problem even in trade in such nebulous things as commodity futures contracts! It is difficult to fully fathom the huge differences in our mentality from that of the medievals. Most Englishspeaking Catholics are infected to a greater or lesser extent with the modern and unchristian conception of economic life. Christopher Dawson sums up this modern attitude thus:

In the lands where these [new, non-Catholic] ideals had free play — Holland, Great Britain, above all New England, a new type of character was produced, canny, methodical and laborious; men who lived not for enjoyment but for work, who spent little and gained much, and who looked on themselves as unfaithful stewards before God, if they neglected any opportunity of honest gain.

The second thing to which I would appeal in confirmation of the line of argument I am making, is the corpus of modern papal teaching on the economy. As is well known, this body of doctrine began with the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII in 1891 and, as of this writing, has continued down to Centesimus Annus of John Paul II in 1991. Though diverse, in that they were for the most part addressing the immediate needs of widely varying situations — the economy of 1891 is not that of 1931 nor yet that of today — nevertheless several basic themes can be discerned.

From the beginning, with Rerum Novarum, the Popes have made it clear that the economic system must serve mankind, and from this it follows that any particular economic arrangements must be judged on how well they in fact are serving the human race. Secondly, they have also pointed out again and again that it will always be necessary to bring other factors into the ordering of our economic affairs besides mere free competition. Some kind of legal framework is necessary to make sure that human goods are given their proper respect. One cannot depend either on the blind forces of the market or enlightened self-interest or even individual rectitude.

Now the purpose of the restraints on economic activity which this attitude demands is twofold. On the one hand, if the activities of moneymaking and the accumulation of external goods are firmly put in their place, men will be able to concentrate on what is really of importance in life. Men of good will, who in a capitalistic economy and society might devote too much of their energies to material things and even get entirely caught up in them, will be deterred from this not only by the explicit teaching of the Church, but also by that of the state and of all organs of society, such as educational institutions and publications, as well as by regulations firmly administered, which aim to prevent the beginnings of wrongdoing in these matters. These same regulations, on the other hand, backed by appropriate sanctions, will also help to forestall the actions of truly bad men, who would otherwise harm their fellows and the society as a whole.

Though no one can expect this apparatus to work perfectly, its aim is to uphold the common good by helping to enforce a notion of society that puts the general welfare first. Elsewhere Christopher Dawson notes that the traditional monarchies in Europe “had striven to keep the several orders of the polity within their appointed limits, to maintain the corporative system in industry, to regulate wages and prices, and to protect the peasants from eviction and enclosures.” This conception of society does not especially value some notions that are dear to Americans, such as continuous improvement in one’s standard of living or the chance to get rich. But it does aim to allow everyone to have at least enough, and to further ensure the maintenance of that social peace which is necessary if we are to apply ourselves to those things which are truly important. For if material goods exist only for the sake of other and non-material things, and if money in turn exists only for the sake of material goods, then money is twice removed from what is valuable in human life. But how a Catholic state actually tries to realize such an approach to living is the subject of the following sections of this chapter.

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Oikos and Logos: Chesterton's Vision of Distributism

by Richard Gill

Although he was appalled by the social consequences of industrial capitalism, the English Catholic novelist, poet, and journalist G. K. Chesterton (1875–1936) rejected the idea that socialism was the solution to such an economic malaise. In fact, he believed that socialism represented a continuation and not a curtailment of the process of property expropriation inaugurated by the advent of a capitalist economy, which could only be challenged by promoting the widespread ownership of limited private property. In Chesterton’s Christian-Aristotelian vision of distributism, limits are placed on the life processes of nature—the acquisition of goods and human sexuality—as both aspects of economy are transfigured in accordance with the will of the Creator and the needs for sustaining a human community. The institutions Chesterton offers to this end of transcending the market relations of self-interest in these spheres are Christian marriage and a modern form of medieval guild regulation of industry to preserve independent household economies.

Leaving London in 1919 on a journey to the Holy Land, Chesterton remarked on the political confusion that he believed was the hallmark of the industrial West:

The employers talk about “private enterprise,” as if there was anything private about modern enterprise. Its combines are as big as many commonwealths; and things advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to “nationalise” the mines or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy to nationalise the government, or even to nationalise the nation.1

Chesterton’s own sympathies lay on the side of Labour, but he believed that the proposed statist solution—together with its rejection by the plutocracy—was an absurdity: “The mob howls before the palace gates, ‘Hateful tyrant, we demand that you assume more despotic powers’; and the tyrant thunders from the balcony, ‘Vile rebels, do you dare to suggest that my powers should be extended?’ There seems to be a little misunderstanding somewhere.”2

To fathom out this misunderstanding, says Chesterton, we need to get to the root of the problem faced by modern Western civilization: “We must begin at the beginning; we must return to our first origins in history, as we must return to our first principles in philosophy. We must consider how we came to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say.”3 What is the ideal that modern Western societies are supposed to be achieving? According to Chesterton, it is democracy: “It is this which prophets promise to achieve, and politicians pretend to achieve, and poets sometimes desire to achieve, and sometimes only desire to desire. In a word, an equal citizenship is quite the reverse of the modern world; but it is still the ideal of the modern world.”4

Chesterton maintains that the source of this classical republican ideal was Rome. Yet the Republic of ancient Rome was built upon slavery, and here is the crux of the dilemma of labor and liberty in the modern world:

The Labour problem is the attempt to have the democracy of Paris without the slavery of Rome. Between the Roman Republic and the French Republic something had happened. Whatever else it was, it was the abandonment of the ancient and fundamental habit of slavery; the numbering of men for necessary labour as the normal foundation of society, even a society in which citizens were free and equal. When the idea of equal citizenship returned to the world, it found the world changed by a more mysterious version of equality. . . . We have now to assume not only that all citizens are equal, but that all men are citizens.5

The “something” that had happened—which had transformed the desire for an equality of citizens into the equality of men—was Christendom. Recalling that his destination was Jerusalem, Chesterton declared, “I know the name of the magic which had made all those peasants out of pagan slaves, and has presented to the modern world a new problem of labour and liberty.”6 Thus for Chesterton the roots of the dilemma can be traced to the Incarnation and the riddle of the Gospels. Chesterton’s concept of a free society is not respublica—the reality of the “Public Thing”—but the universal freedom and reality of “The Thing”: the restoration of Christendom.

Chesterton rejected the view that he was attempting to reinstate some medieval Golden Age: “After Eden I know of no golden age in the past.”7 He looked to the undeveloped potentials of the Christian medieval past and saw that “the glory of this great culture is not so much in what it did as in what it might have done.”8 Chesterton’s medieval point of reference for social criticism was thus neither irrational nor romantic; he wanted not to return to the past but to pick up the thread lost with the triumph of industrial capitalism and reassert the project to institutionalize the universal freedom that had been partially achieved in the past by the guild system of the towns and not the feudal framework of agriculture.

As Richard Tawney says of medieval Christendom in his classic study Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, “Stripped of its eccentricities of period and place, its philosophy had at its centre a determination to assert the superiority of moral principles over economic appetites, which have their place, and an important place, in the human scheme, but which, like other natural appetites, when flattened and pampered and overfed, bring ruin to the soul and confusion to society.”9 Chesterton had no wish to revive the “eccentricities of period and place,” which would include feudalism, but hoped that the ideal of subordinating economic and other natural drives to an ethical framework of limits might take root once again in modern England. Defending a Christian concept of the household was central to this aim.

Chesterton recognized that the Romans of antiquity had brought about a qualitative transformation in the life of the private realm of household. He had a great sympathy for the Roman belief in the penates and lares or household gods—this was, he noted, a homely religion. As opposed to the ancient Greek gods who seemed to multiply outwards to the skies, the gods of Rome multiplied inwards, taking root in the everyday life of domesticity. For Chesterton, the Roman household gods symbolize a potential transfiguration of the natural household that would reach its climax in the Christian religion and provide the firm foundation for the building of a human home on earth. Chesterton considered the Roman domestic religion as being more oriented to the establishment of such a home than the Greek religion: “[If the Greek] mythology personified the forces of nature, this [Roman] mythology personified nature as transformed by the forces of man. It was the god of the corn and not of the grass, of the cattle and not of the wild things of the forest; in short the cult was literally a culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.”10

Chesterton favorably contrasts the pagan cult of household gods with the bourgeois fiction of domestic bliss and equates the rise of industrial capitalism with “the end of the household gods”—the despiritualization and narrowing of the home. He vigorously rejects the idea that the Victorian Age represented any kind of high point in family unity or domestic respectability; it was in fact a period in which household life had reached an ignoble state: “the Victorians were people who had lost the sense of the sacredness of the home,”they did not “understand the meaning and possibilities of domesticity.”11 There was no sense of the old pagan sacredness of the household in the Manchester utilitarians or any other Victorian school of thought:

Nineteenth-century England had destroyed the last legends of the fireside, long before twentieth-century England had a chance of feeling the full poetry of the legend. The philistines were the image-breakers; they shattered the household gods and the patron saints. Puritanism combined with Industrialism threw away the Lares and Penates like the disused dolls of a dead infancy and went on to what was counted the Manhood of the Manchester School; with what results we see today.12

And that result was a radically subjective consumerism that devoured the life of the household and could only conceive of property as the endless accumulation of money, and of love as the endless pursuit of the subjective pleasures of sex.13

Chesterton thus rejected both the traditional defense of the bourgeois family and the radical assault upon it: “The generation in revolt fled from a cold hearth and a godless shrine. That is the historical fact that is really hidden by both sides of this controversy.”14 For Chesterton, however, the revolt against the Victorian household merely took to an extreme the very individualism that had destroyed the household gods in the first place. In the face of the progressive attack on the conventional family, Chesterton had no wish to return to any domestic situation of the past but to strive for the unfulfilled potentials that he believed were latent in the Christian ideal—free, independent, and productive households centered around the mutual love and care of family life yet open through an enriched hospitality to a life of neighborly feeling.

The culmination of the spiritual enrichment of the household for Chesterton comes with Christianity and the Incarnation of the “Household God.”15 Henceforth for Chesterton the human household— upheld by the guild system and through marriage—takes on a new significance. The centrality of the Incarnation to Chesterton’s thought meant that the labor of the body could no longer be viewed as beneath human dignity as it had been for the ancients, and that such labor would become part of a fully human life. The institution of slavery and not the need to labor for one’s living was what, in this perspective, would be considered shameful. Pursuit of the fully human life, for Chesterton, is not consigned to a specifically public realm as it was for pagan philosophers; it is intimately connected with the life of the household, for the realm of “mere life,” of nature and the body, becomes part of the everlasting in the light of the Incarnation— of the Word made flesh—as the eternal intersects with the temporal:

There really was a new reason for regarding the senses, and the sensations of the body, and the experiences of the common man, with a reverence at which great Aristotle would have stared, and no man could have begun to understand. The Body was no longer what it was when Plato and Porphyry and the old mystics had left it for dead. It had hung upon a gibbet. It had risen from a tomb. It was no longer possible for the soul to despise the senses, which had been the organs for something more than man. Plato might despise the flesh; but God had not despised it. . . . After the Incarnation had become the idea that is central to our civilisation, it was inevitable that there should be a return to materialism; in the sense of the serious value of matter and the making of the body. When once Christ has risen, it was inevitable that Aristotle should rise again.16

The classical republican ideal of a free citizenry, which in the light of Christianity was transfigured so that not just all citizens but all men were free, and with their liberty anchored in marriage and property—that was Chesterton’s vision of “distributism.” Chesterton’s answer to what he believed was the malaise of modernity was, in a sense, a form of ecology. Oikos and Logos—the very term is almost a literal translation of Chesterton’s characterization in The Everlasting Man of the Incarnation as the arrival of the Household God. It is a vision informed by a deep sense of the need to ascribe limits to economic processes: “For our very word for God means economy: is not improvidence the opposite of Providence?”17

According to Chesterton and other distributists, industrial society—whether capitalist or socialist—had deprived the mass of the population of the ownership of property, which was now concentrated in the hands of a minority who sought maximum financial gain for themselves. Such a development had thwarted the creation of an independent peasantry and instead brought into being a dependent proletariat—a society of laborers who owned nothing but their own bodies (and even these were coming to be eyed with eugenic interest by the elites). The aim of distributism was to regain liberty for the mass of the population by introducing widely distributed family-owned private property, establishing a significant class of independent small-scale producers in agriculture and industry. Chesterton therefore rejected socialism because it did not get to the root of the problem—the loss of privately owned property— but instead only offered to make the situation worse. Thus Chesterton remarked in The Outline of Sanity:

A socialist Government is one in which its nature does not tolerate any true and real opposition. For there the government provides everything; and it is absurd to ask a Government to provide an opposition. . . . Opposition and rebellion depend on property and liberty. . . . The critic of the State can only exist where a religious sense of right protects his claims to his own bow and spear; or at least, to his own pen or his own printing-press. It is absurd to suppose that he could borrow the royal pen to advocate regicide or use the Government printing-presses to expose the corruption of the Government. Yet it is the whole point of Socialism, the whole case for Socialism, that unless all printing-presses are Government printing-presses, printers may be oppressed.18

It ought to be recognized that Chesterton was not voicing a right-wing attack on socialism. Chesterton had been a socialist in his own youth, and he continued to sympathize with their critiques of capitalism though he could no longer endorse their proposed solutions: “My own sympathies are with the Socialists; in so far as there is something to be said for Socialism, and nothing to be said for Capitalism.”19 Chesterton rejected socialism because he believed it was an offshoot of capitalism and because socialists uncritically accepted the ideology of industrial “progress,” rejected not because it threatened privileged interests for the sake of the masses but quite the contrary—it undermined the freedoms of ordinary people. “I do not object to socialism because it will revolutionise our commerce,” writes Chesterton, “but because it will leave it so horribly the same.”20 By taking the laissez-faire economy to its property destroying conclusion, Chesterton claimed that “Communism is the only complete and logical working model of Capitalism.”21

The philosophical roots of Chesterton’s social vision, I believe, lie in Aristotle’s distinction in The Politics between housekeeping and moneymaking, and the critique of Plato’s call in The Republic for the abandonment of private property and the particular ties of family in the name of a communal ownership of property, wives, and children.22 Chestertonian distributism offered an alternative to either capitalism or socialism based on the defense by Aristotle, later taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas, of private property for common use. That is, the view that private property does not carry unrestricted rights to its use; property is to be privately managed in such a way that it benefits the common good of the community. In this regard Aristotle makes some important distinctions between the proper management of the household for use and the improper management in order to gain unrestricted accumulation of money through the exchange market.

The concern of household management, according to Aristotle, is the acquisition of property for neither life itself nor the good life is possible without a minimum of necessities. Following Aristotle, there is a natural and desirable form of property acquisition that belongs to household management (oikonomia). This is the acquisition of goods solely for use; “wealth in the true sense consists of property such as this.” According to Aristotle, “the amount of property of this kind which would give self-sufficiency for a good life is not limitless.”23 In contrast to this household or “economic” form is the “chrematistic” form of unnatural acquisition. Chrematistike occurs through exchange and is concerned with the acquisition of money (not satisfaction of need), which then becomes its own end and hence pursued without limits.

For Chesterton, the replacement of the concept of use by that of exchange is at the root of the contemporary confusion. The whole thrust of modernity had involved the eclipse of an economy centered on use by an economy of exchange:

The truth . . . might be stated in many ways; perhaps the shortest statement of it is in the fable of the man who sold razors, and afterwards explained to an indignant customer, with simple dignity, that he had never said the razors would shave. When asked if razors were not made to shave, he replied that they were made to sell. That is A Short History of Trade and Industry During the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.24

This was also the root of the fundamental mistake of “treating a farm not as a farm to feed people, but as a shop from which to sell food.”25 Thus Chesterton realized that what modern-day economists were concerned with was not so much oikonomia as chrematistike: “Ruskin . . . would have told him [Dickens] that the worst thing about the economists was that they were not economists: that they missed many essential things even in economics.”26 Thus it could be said that the modern capitalist “economy” from a distributist perspective was not a form of house making but of house breaking together with the marketization of its contents.

The mistaken belief that household acquisition knows no limits stems from a confusion of mere life with eudaimonia, the humanly distinct good that, says Aristotle, consists in virtuous activity of the soul. This confusion of ends and means leads to the accumulation of the “goods” presiding over the pursuit of the “good.”27 Indeed, the modern business world, according to Chesterton, has confused ends with means. Today’s economy, Chesterton says, no longer refers to anything outside of itself that could serve as a limit; it literally knows no end. Thus the unnatural—chrematistic—means of ministering to the natural life-process becomes elevated as the end of social life:

Trade is all very well in its way, but Trade has been put in the place of Truth. Trade, which is in its nature a secondary or dependent thing, has been treated as a primary and independent thing; as an absolute. The moderns, mad upon mere multiplication, have even made a plural out of what is eternally singular, in the sense of single. They have taken what all ancient philosophers called the Good, and translated it as the Goods.28

In Chesterton’s Christian perspective, what the ancients called the good becomes acting in accordance to the will of God, of accepting the contingent condition of creaturehood and hence the responsibilities and limits of being made in the image of God. The elevation of trade to the center of everyday life in a capitalist society has however obscured the possibility of appreciating the intrinsic and inexchangeable good in God’s creation. Both the land and human labor are reduced to mere commodities that can only be conceptualized in instrumental terms of furthering the process of capital accumulation:

When God looked on created things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have looked at them and seen that they were The Goods. In other words, there would be a label tied to the tree or the hill, as to the hat of the Mad Hatter, with “This Style, 10/6.” All the flowers and birds would be ticketed with their reduced prices; all the creatures would be for sale or all the creatures seeking employment; with all the morning stars making skysigns together and all the Sons of God shouting for jobs. In other words, these people are incapable of imagining any good except that which comes from bartering something for something else. The idea of a man enjoying a thing in itself, for himself, is inconceivable to them.29

Chesterton admits that trade has its place in a human society but it should occupy a subordinate position as it had throughout history prior to the triumph of industrial capitalism. As such, production and consumption are part of the same process and subject to limits. The elevation of the principle of exchange has, however, severed the connection between production and consumption and initiated a limitless commercial process: “There is a limit to the number of apples a man can eat. But there is no limit to the number of apples he may possibly sell; and he soon becomes a pushing, dextrous and successful Salesman and turns the whole world upside-down.” 30 The commercial society to which this leads is the antithesis of one built on private property: “the actual direct and isolated enjoyment of private property, as distinct from the excitement of exchanging it, is rather rarer than in many simple communities that seem almost communal in their simplicity.”31

Chesterton understood that property needs to be hedged in by a framework of limits; property should not be used in such a way that it infringes upon the property of others with whom we live in common. We need to recognize that our own creativity is always limited; we ought to aspire to act in the image of God, not to try to be God:

God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God must be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. . . .32

Chesterton also saw the need to preserve the physical boundaries between people in order to maintain their distinctive personalities: “A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith’s garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown’s. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbour’s.”33 Large-scale landowners and capitalists were commonly assumed to epitomize the principle of private property, but this is not so according to Chesterton: “It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.”34 Indeed, as we shall see later, Chesterton felt that both marriage and privately owned property were being undermined by a process of capitalist commodification that would reduce enduring love and stable property into an inhuman and limitless pursuit of sterile sex and wealth.

Central to the distributist vision of a society marked by widespread ownership of small-scale and well-defined private property was a concern to reassert the economic principles of the medieval guild system in order to impose limits on the use of property such that its use was directed to the common good and not to amassing a personal fortune. In the ideal of the medieval guild, Chesterton found the principle that could provide “a human alternative to the individualistic muddle of Manchester and the insane centralisation of Moscow.”35 The historical reality of the guild showed that economic life could be organized around principles very different from those that had come to dominate in the world of industrial capitalism. The guilds were attractive to Chesterton because—having emerged spontaneously from the people themselves rather than being imposed from above—they represented the democratic ideal of Christendom: “They rose in the streets like a silent rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: The Trades Unions.”36

The guilds regulated commercial competition in order to ensure the survival of their members as equal and independent producers, set just prices for the consumer, and maintain high standards of craftsmanship. Productive property was thereby hedged in by a framework of limits to ensure it served the common good. Remarking on the figures of the Dyer and the Doctor in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chesterton noted that the latter still exists for us as a recognizable character whereas the Dyer does not. The reason for this, says Chesterton, is that doctors but not dyers are still organized on the idea of the guild:

In the modern doctor we can see and study the medieval idea. We shall not, even if we are medievalists, think it an infallible or impeccable idea. The Guild is capable of pedantry; it is sometimes capable of tyranny. The British Medical Council, which is the council of a Guild, sometimes condemns men harshly for very pardonable breaches of professional law; it sometimes excludes outsiders from membership who might well have been members. But it does what a Guild was supposed to do. It keeps the doctors going; it keeps the doctors alive; and it does prevent one popular quack from eating all of his brethren out of house and home. It sets limits to competition; it prevents the growth of monopoly.37

The dyer, by contrast, has not had his independence—and thus his distinct personality—preserved by the guild idea but has become a mere functionary in an abstract system of commercial enterprise: “The Dyer has totally disappeared; his hand is not subdued to what it works in, but his whole body and soul dissolved in his own dye-vat. He has become a liquid; a flowing stream of tendency; an impersonal element in the economics of the dye-works. He is not a Master-Dyer; he is at most a Master of Dyes. But in plain truth, he is not really a master, but only a paymaster.”38

Chesterton believed that a society built around the accumulation of wealth through exchange rather than the management of stable property would be inherently unstable and lacking in durability: “Since Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing, they have swept us into a society which is no longer solid but fluid, as unfathomable as a sea and as treacherous as a quicksand.”39 For Chesterton, transforming the principle of exchange from the exception to the rule has had the disastrous consequence of unleashing a drive for unlimited accumulation of wealth and that created a fatalistic condition in which humanity became “chained eternally to enlargement without liberty and progress without hope.”40

Chesterton believed that the transformation of love into the limitless pursuit of sexual fulfillment was as much of a perversion of the household economy as the transformation of property into the making of money. That is, outside of any teleological framework, both dimensions of the economic process would be liberated from the limits of the household, and that while natural existence would indeed become the exaggerated focus of modernity, it would be natural existence in an unnatural or perverse form. Chesterton intimated that the breakup of the household inaugurated by the capitalist transformation of stable property into fluid wealth would be consummated by a sexual revolution. Thus he declared on the pages of G. K.’s Weekly in 1926, “the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. . . . I say the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times.”41

Inherent to Chesterton’s defense of limited property was therefore a defense of the family and the institution of marriage. Chesterton believed he knew exactly why modern-day theorists failed to come to the defense of the family:

Everywhere, all over the world, the farm goes with the family and the family with the farm. Unless the whole domestic group hold together with a sort of loyalty or local patriotism, unless the inheritance of property is logical and legitimate, unless the family quarrels are kept out of the courts of officialism, the tradition of family ownership cannot be handed on unimpaired. On the other hand, the Servile State, which is the opposite of the distributive state, has always been rather embarrassed by the institution of marriage.42

And if any one should think this link between servility and the erosion of marriage is mere speculation, Chesterton asks his readers to recall that one of the chief criticisms of American slavery was that it destroyed slave families. Modern-day opponents of freedom, according to Chesterton, know exactly what they are doing; the granting of sexual license is the strongest form of bribery to ease into being the total loss of independence and a new form of slavery in the industrial “servile state.”43

The family, for Chesterton, is a nonpolitical institution that should possess a fundamental independence from public interference—but that does not mean that it has no political effect. The nonpolitical family is the champion of the ideal of liberty for it is an institution “that is at once necessary and voluntary.”44 Chesterton views Christian marriage as the transfiguration of sexual life and the achievement of freedom through self-limitation. For Chesterton, marriage is the means by which men and women come to terms with one another and is emphatically not a contract. A contract is based on self-interest and is thus easily terminated for the sake of the same self-interest: “Force can abolish what force can establish; self-interest can terminate a contract when self-interest has dictated the contract. But the love of man and women is not an institution that can be abolished, or a contract that can be terminated. It is something older than all institutions or contracts, and certain to outlast them all.”45 Chesterton believed that marriage was not to be entered into for reasons of self-interest and neither could it be easily dissolved like a contract, for marriage is a sacrament that overcame the subjectivity and self-interest of short-term gain.

The Christian understanding of marriage, Chesterton maintains, has been under ideological attack, and there has been a deliberate attempt to break up families into their component individuals in order to better serve the economic interests of a commercial system. Christendom was broken up by the spread of cynicism and self-interest that followed “the era of contract.” “Marriage not only became less of a sacrament but less of a sanctity. It threatened to become not only a contract, but a contract that could not be kept.”46 As the era of contract had destroyed the guild it was now threatening the future of marriage. The vow is the antithesis of servility, little wonder then, says Chesterton, that the “captains of industry” are attempting to undermine it in the context of marriage:

Marriage makes a small state within the state, which resists all such regimentation. That bond breaks all other bonds; that law is found stronger than all later and lesser laws. They desire the democracy to be sexually fluid, because the making of small nuclei is like the making of small nations. Like small nations, they are a nuisance to the mind of imperial scope. In short, what they fear, in the most literal sense, is home rule.47

And Chesterton makes it absolutely clear what he believes has undermined the private family realm:

What has broken up households, and encouraged divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and power of Capitalism. It is Capitalism that has forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favour of the influence of the employer; that has driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers.48

Chesterton realized that the supposedly “radical” sexual libertarians were in fact proposing little more than the mirror image of the business contract in the realm of the family. If the capitalists were busy breaking up families, the socialists appeared all too eager to provide ideological legitimation for this process. Chesterton illustrated his belief that both the Left and Right are two sides of a mistaken attitude toward the family through his characters of Hudge and Gudge:

Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge calls the woman’s work “freedom to live her own life.” . . . Above all, Gudge rules by a course and cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow.49

The collectivization of property that is the culmination of unlimited exchange also has a parallel in sexual life. Chesterton even speculates that just as free-market individualism led to a propertyless proletariat and the concentration of property into fewer and fewer hands so too may sexual individualism lead to a nation of bachelors and the concentration of wives into the harems of a minority of handsome and rich men! 50 Admittedly, this is a reductio ad absurdum used to illustrate the madness of unimpeded exchange. The harem is symbolic of what Chesterton sees as the “Eastern” engulfment of individual personality into the collective soul. We may not actually embrace polygamy in the form of the harem, but we are well on the way to the polygamy of what is now called “serial monogamy,” what Chesterton would have recognized as Companionate Marriage, “so called,” he says, “because the people involved are not married and will very rapidly cease to be companions.”51 What was most important in Chesterton’s mind was that this flight from the forming of enduring bonds of love represented a retreat into indifference. It represented a flight from the living out of a distinctly human life, which could be understood in terms of a story—reflecting the human capacity for free will—into the formless patterns of behavior endemic to collective life.

The wedding ceremony is a public action that takes us out of mere repetition for it represents a definite choice of spouse and the assertion that one way is better than another. Thus for Chesterton all action is a self-limitation, the choice of one marriage partner is the giving up of all others. The replacement of marriage by easily revocable contracts of self-interest, in Chesterton’s account, thus corresponds more to predictable patterns of behavior, endlessly repeatable, with neither promise of endurance nor consequence. Their orientation is now the society of market/contract centered on exchange and indifference—not the world transfigured in the light of the eternal and thus embodying the promise of permanence. The endless process of exchange represents the failure to make a choice and to stand by that decision.

To find ourselves within limits is for Chesterton the essence of a dramatic view of life that acknowledges human free will and “of all these great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important.” 52 Christian marriage, according to Chesterton, is essential for this story because of its vow of endurance. Chesterton saw that marriage could not be based on subjective whim or caprice:

You cannot make any enduring literature out of love conscious that it will not endure. Even if this mutability were workable as morality, it would still be unworkable as art. . . . If ever monogamy is abandoned in practice, it will linger in legend and in literature. When society is haunted by the butterfly flitting from flower to flower, poetry will still be describing the desire of the moth for the star. Literature must always revolve around loyalties; for a rudimentary psychological reason, which is simply the nature of narrative. You cannot tell a story without the idea of pursuing a purpose and sticking to a point. You cannot tell a story without the idea of the Quest, the idea of the Vow; even if it be only the idea of the wager.53

Progressive advocates of “free love,” by contrast, are seen by Chesterton as expressing “the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life.” No longer is sexual life integrated into a coherent story stretching across time, it becomes instead a disconnected “string of episodes.”54 Polygamy—as serial monogamy—is inherently dull for it offers no ground for a story:

When a man looks forward to a number of wives as he does to a number of cigarettes, you can no more make a book out of them than out of the bills from his tobacconist. Anything having the character of a Turkish harem has also something of the character of a Turkey carpet. It is not a portrait, or even a picture, but a pattern. We may at the moment be looking at one highly coloured and flamboyant figure in the carpet; but we know that on every side, in front as well as behind, the image is repeated without purpose and without finality.55

The ultimate value of marriage, according to Chesterton, is the survival of the human race; it is the appropriate site for procreation. The enduring tie of marriage makes this task distinctively human: “The more human, that is the less bestial, is the child, the more lawful and lasting are the ties. So far from any progress in culture or the sciences tending to loosen the bond, any such progress must logically tend to tighten it”56 Sexuality liberated from procreation was also a sign of the eclipse of the sense of newness brought into the world by the birth of a child and the antithesis of true freedom:

A child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. . . . People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.57

Chesterton believed that sexuality—like the general economy—was coming to be celebrated as an end in itself and no longer took its point of orientation from something external and thereby subject to moral limits. Marriage, which had previously been concerned primarily with the begetting of children and thus concerned with the passing on of human culture, was becoming remodeled on the basis of satisfying purely subjective pleasures. Chesterton saw clearly that the fate of money, now viewed not as a mere means of exchange but as an unnatural end in itself, had its parallel perversion in sexual life:

The unnatural separation, between sex and fruitfulness, which even the Pagans would have thought a perversion, has been accompanied with a similar separation and perversion about the nature of the love of the land. In both departments there is precisely the same fallacy; which it is quite possible to state precisely. The reason why our contemporary countrymen do not understand what we mean by Property is that they only think of it in the sense of Money; in the sense of salary; in the sense of something which is immediately consumed, enjoyed and expended; something which gives momentary pleasure and disappears. They do not understand that we mean by Property something that includes that pleasure incidentally; but begins and ends with something far more grand and worthy and creative.58

Thus Chesterton saw that the root of the modern problem was an extreme solipsism that could only perceive happiness in terms of the subjective pleasures of consumerism and not as a concomitant to the enactment of the gratitude for the gift of life. Consumerist subjectivism was the antithesis of true freedom: “The notion of narrowing property merely to enjoying money is exactly like the notion of narrowing love to merely enjoying sex. In both cases an incidental, isolated, servile and even secretive pleasure is substituted for participation in a great creative process; even in the everlasting Creation of the world.”59 In Aristotelian terms, this has mistaken a secondary good—pleasure—as the primary and distinctly human good.

This centering of sex upon the self through the isolated pursuit of pleasure was for Chesterton a hallmark of capitalism’s tendency toward the reinstitution of slavery. Under the sign of the free market, sexuality and property lost their power for forming and maintaining productive households and became mere modes of servility. The citizen was now being reduced to the level of a solitary consumer with no relation to God or neighbor. Marriage as a sacrament embodying the “hope of permanence” as it was “mixed with immortality” was giving way to the flight from constancy and the direct pursuit of fleeting sexual encounters that held no promise of permanence.60

The commercial world centered on exchange had turned away from the vision of the Incarnation. In relation to both sex and property the citizen has become a mere consumer: “he is to have no notion of the sort of Burning Bush that burns and is not consumed. For that bush only grows on the real soil, on the real land where human beings can behold it; and the spot on which they stand is holy ground.”61 Chesterton believed that the liberation of the economic and sexual processes from the limits of the household was a sentence of death: “The world has forgotten simultaneously that the making of a Farm is something much larger than the making of a profit . . . and that the founding of a Family is something much larger than sex in the limited sense of current literature; which was anticipated in one bleak and blinding flash in a single line of George Meredith; ‘And eat our pot of honey on the grave.’”62

For Chesterton, the household had previously provided the context that—however imperfectly it may have been in practice—gave the two elements of the economic process their distinctly human character, by which I mean that they are informed by a sense of permanence inspired by an awareness of the divine. As housekeeping and marriage, mere biological existence becomes transfigured to serve the durability of a Christian-humanist culture.

With the collapse of the household, however, property and sexuality have lost these Christian-humanist dimensions and spiraled off as unlimited desire for personal wealth and sexual fulfillment. The removal of the economic life from guild regulation has been complemented in our own age by the removal of the sexual instinct from the sacramental context of marriage. As Chesterton so prophetically saw, free-market economy has now been combined with free-market sexuality.

Chesterton was deeply alarmed by the reduction of marriage to a contractual relationship of self-interest—which could easily be dissolved when self-interest decreed—and which entailed the move away from the spiritual transfiguration of human sexuality toward the fleeting and purely subjective demand for “fulfillment.” By contrast, what Chesterton wanted was not to free men and women from the home but to free the home from the pressures and distortions of industrial capitalism as a prerequisite to fostering a culture of economic independence and increased hospitality rooted in a sustainable form of agriculture. He knew that this, and not the proposals of the sexual libertarians, was a fundamentally revolutionary demand within the modern world. Freeing people from the bonds of marriage and family life would, for Chesterton, be merely freeing people from the conditions of being human and wreck the possibilities for a decentralized and sustainable agriculture centered around the long-term commitment embodied in small-scale, family-owned farms.

Today such themes are eloquently explored by the Kentuckian farmer, poet, essayist, and novelist Wendell Berry. Berry sees “an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth.”63 The estrangement of the sexes from one another resembles the estrangement of humanity from the land through “social mobility.” These two forms of estrangement are historically parallel, both “caused by the disintegration of the household, which was the formal bond between marriage and the earth, between human sexuality and its sources in the sexuality of Creation.”64 Without the household and its practical content, marriage becomes an abstraction: “Work is the health of love. To last, love must enflesh itself in the materiality of the world—produce food, shelter, warmth or shade, surround itself with careful acts, well made things.”65 For Berry, marriage and the care of the earth are deeply connected though increasingly under threat in modern society: “As the household has become increasingly generalized as a function of the economy and, as a consequence, has become increasingly ‘mobile’ and temporary, these vital connections have been weakened and finally broken. And whatever has been thus disconnected has become a ground for some breed of salesman, specialist, or expert.”66

Chesterton’s emphasis on the loyalty of the vow also connects well with Erazim Kohák’s stress on the importance for the moral understanding of the nature of the bond of mutual belonging to other persons and to place that stems from lived experience—as opposed to the notion of possession and domination that arises out of abstract, contractual, or legalistic thinking:

The bond of belonging that grows up over the years, love and labor is the most basic truth of being human in a world. Here the claims about the “sacredness of private property,” trite and blasphemous when used to justify abstract possession become meaningful. They reflect not possession but the utterly basic relationship of belonging between a human and his world. It may well be within the prerogatives of the society which established those conventions to modify or disestablish them as it sees fit for the common good. To sever the bond of belonging that love, life, and labor shared have forged between two humans or between a human and the segment of the natural world in which he is incarnate is always a crime and a sacrilege, no less heinous than depriving a person of his body. That is a bond no human imposed and no human can cut asunder. As the land and I came to belong together, I ceased to possess it: I could no longer “alienate” it as if it were a possession, sell it or carve it into subdivisions.67

In Kohák, Chesterton, and Berry, it is possible to detect something of the ancient hope of Isaiah (62: 4–5) of a people wedded to the land: “Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord Delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.”68

Chesterton’s own hope was that through the widespread practice of small-scale agriculture, the small workshop, or family-owned business, people would regain the “productive” and reject the “consumptive” household (to borrow Berry’s terms) thus allowing them to regain the experience of joy in life and the power to resist tyranny. At the root of the endurance needed for such an adventure would be the liberating power of the marriage vow—for just as in the Incarnation “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” so too can humans act in the image of God through the giving of their own word. Against the short-term contracts of self-interest promoted by the Right in terms of property, and by the Left in terms of sexuality, Chesterton hoped that in the light of the Incarnation the intersection of the eternal and the temporal would find reflection in the forming of enduring bonds of mutual care and recognition through Christian marriage and neighborliness.

Notes
1. G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 5–6.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Ibid., 8.
5. Ibid.,11.
6. Ibid., 13.
7. G. K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows (London: Sheed and Ward, 1937), 265.
8. Chesterton, New Jerusalem, 205.
9. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 279.
10. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947), 166.
11. G. K. Chesterton, Sidelights on New London and Newer York (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932), 69.
12. Ibid., 72.
13. See Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows, 232–36.
14. Chesterton, Sidelights on New London, 72.
15. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 203.
16. G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933), 138–39.
17. G. K. Chesterton, The Apostle and The Wild Ducks and Other Essays, ed. Dorothy E. Collins (London: Paul Elek, 1975), 4.
18. G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity (London: Methuen, 1926), 15–16.
19. Chesterton, New Jerusalem, 6.
20. G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (London: Cassell, 1912), 293.
21. Chesterton, Well and the Shallows, 234–35.
22. Plato, The Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), (416d), 121; (457d),
170–71.
23. Aristotle, The Politics (London: Penguin, 1992), book I, chap. viii (1256b26), 79.
24. Chesterton, Well and the Shallows, 223.
25. Chesterton, Sidelights on New London, 113.
26. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Thornton Butterworth,
1913), 84.
27. See Aristotle, Politics, book I, chap. ix (1257b40), 85.
28. Chesterton, Well and the Shallows, 225.
29. Ibid., 225–26.
30. Ibid. 229.
31. Ibid.
32. Chesterton, What’s Wrong, 46.
33. Ibid., 48.
34. Ibid.
35. G. K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930),
36. G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964),
37. G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 73.
38. Ibid., 72.
39. Chesterton, Well and the Shallows, 230.
40. Chesterton, Outline of Sanity, 19.
41. G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Orthodox: A Selection from the Uncollected Writings of G. K. Chesterton, arranged and introduced by A. L. Maycock (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963), 123.
42. G. K. Chesterton, Fancies Versus Fads (London: Methuen, 1930), 127–28,
43. Ibid., 128–29.
44. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce, (London: Chatto and Windus 1920), 67.
45. Ibid., 58–59.
46. Ibid., 97.
47. Ibid., 100.
48. Ibid., 148–49.
49. Chesterton, What’s Wrong, 276–77.
50. Chesterton, Outline of Sanity, 26.
51. G. K. Chesterton, “On Evil Euphemisms,” Chesterton’s Stories Essays and Poems, ed. Maisie Ward (London: J. M. Dent, 1957), 208.
52. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (London: The Bodley Head, 1928), 194.
53. Chesterton, Fancies Versus Fads, 99.
54. Chesterton, What’s Wrong, 55.
55. Chesterton, Fancies Versus Fads, 103–4.
56. Chesterton, Superstition of Divorce, 60.
57. Chesterton, Well and the Shallows, 145–46.
58. Ibid., 233–34.
59. Ibid., 234.
60. Chesterton, Short History of England, 114.
61. Chesterton, Well and the Shallows, 235–36.
62. Ibid., 236.
63. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 124.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 132.
66. Ibid.
67. Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 107.
68. See Stephen R. L. Clark, How to Think About the Earth: Philosophical and Theological Models for Ecology (London: Mowbray, 1993), 110–12.

Originally published in LOGOS: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer 2007): 64-90. COPYRIGHT 2007 Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas.

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Work and Property: An Afterword to Quadragesimo Anno

by John Sharpe

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists. —G. K. Chesterton
The Uses of Diversity, 1921

Those fortunate enough to be acquainted with the work of Southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy might be surprised to learn that it was not for his novels that Percy thought he would be most remembered. It was rather for his “semiotics”: his philosophical and scientific work on man’s language and use of symbols, not only in mundane communication, but also in the most profound intellectual acts of comprehension that have as their object the deepest realities of the universe. At its most radical, Percy’s work on language and symbolism deals with the essential nature of the created human intellect’s ability to penetrate – in however limited a way – to the depths of metaphysical reality. It is due to the profound significance of this question for all of reality as man confronts it that Catholics recognize the second person of the Trinity as the Word of God, by Whom all things were made.

As for the pressing question of what the Church thinks, and what we Catholics are to think, of capitalism, reference to Percy’s semiotics is surprisingly useful, if not plainly necessary. His vision of language posited the quite defensible hypothesis that any linguistic act (or “language event”) necessarily involves three parts: the speaker (or the “sign-user”), the sign used (usually a “word”), and the thing signified (or, the “object”). Without each of the three parts of this triad, not only can there be no communication (which is obvious enough), but there can arguably be no real grasp by the human intellect – which ultimately needs language – of reality itself. Thus the act of naming is an essential aspect of man’s ability to understand the reality of which he is a part;1 indeed, it would not be a stretch to see, as part of the dominion God commanded Adam to exercise over all earthly created things (Genesis i:28), his assigning of names to those earthly realities, and his consequent comprehension of them.2

The significance of properly naming things has been emphasized by a host of thinkers, ancient, medieval, and modern. St. Thomas raises the issue in the Summa when discussing the virtue of truth: “A person who says what is true, utters certain signs which are in conformity with things.”3 Note that the sign used must conform to the thing referenced, which assumes that the thing has some actual and independent reality – independent properties and characteristics, and an essence of its own that dictates what the word used must express if it is to be properly chosen. It was the achievement of nominalists going back to Occam to attempt a destruction of this linkage between words and the objective realities they signify – an achievement that Weaver decries in the introduction to his monumental Ideas Have Consequences.4

How much of the discussion of the Church’s attitude to “capitalism” depends upon what this “ism” means among those discussing it may be gathered from the radically different assessments made of it by many who, at bottom, actually seem to agree, notwithstanding their varying mode of expressing themselves. His Excellency signaled the problem, if tangentially, by saying, “In all discussions of ‘capitalism,’ it is crucial to define what one means by the word.” Contrary to these, however, who beneath apparent disagreement do in fact agree, are others who disagree not only about the words used to signify the reality, but also about the reality itself. It is therefore that third element of Percy’s triad – the reality that the sign used must signify – that we must discover vis-à-vis “capitalism,” in order to have in our possession both a yardstick with which to measure orthodoxy, and a scalpel with which to excise heterodoxy, so as to rectify our ideas about modern economic life. A rectification of thought that is an essential prerequisite, then, to doing what we ought.

In his characteristic way, Chesterton hit on both the problem of definition in general, and the definition of capitalism itself. The great English wit is worth quoting in full, for the light he sheds on the meaning of the vexing term and for the lightheartedness he brings to Percy’s not unimportant observations in the field of language study.

When I say “Capitalism,” I commonly mean something that may be stated thus: “That economic condition in which there is a class of capitalists, roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage”. This particular state of things can and does exist, and we must have some word for it, and some way of discussing it. But this is undoubtedly a very bad word, because it is used by other people to mean quite other things. Some people seem to mean merely private property. Others suppose that Capitalism must mean anything involving the use of capital. But if that use is too literal, it is also too loose and even too large. If the use of capital is Capitalism, then everything is Capitalism. Bolshevism is Capitalism and anarchist communism is Capitalism; and every revolutionary scheme, however wild, is still Capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky believe as much as Lloyd George and Thomas that the economic operations of today must leave something over for the economic operations of tomorrow. And that is all that capital means in its economic sense. In that case, the word is useless. My use of it may be arbitrary, but it is not useless. If Capitalism means private property, I am capitalist. If Capitalism means capital, everybody is capitalist. But if Capitalism means this particular condition of capital, only paid out to the mass in the form of wages, then it does mean something, even if it ought to mean something else.

The truth is that what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism. The point of it is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital.5

GKC’s definition is precisely Pius’s (“that economic regime in which were provided by different people the capital and labor jointly needed for production” (Quadragesimo Anno (QA) §1016)), as it is, incidentally, Belloc’s (“a state of society in which a minority control the means of production, leaving the mass of the citizens dispossessed”7) as well. All of which is fine, so far as it goes. That the simple division, abstractly considered, of an economic operation into the provision of capital by one party, and the provision of labor by another, is neutral and not inherently immoral is admitted and plain to all reasonable observers, not least Pius XI (§102: the system “is not vicious of its very nature.”). For this reason even a popularly conceived “anti-capitalist” like Belloc could admit that “[n]o one can say that [industrial capitalism] stands condemned specifically by Catholic definition.”8

Nevertheless, how many commentators, looking at both QA and Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (RN), envision the Church to have in fact condemned “capitalism” by her pronouncements in both these encyclicals? Which means that these reliable thinkers certainly, and with good reason, believe that some thing signified by the term “capitalism” was indeed condemned, notwithstanding the “neutrality” of the system that Pius XI characterized as “not vicious of its very nature.” Msgr. Luigi Civardi, author of so many books on the Church’s social teaching and its salutary effect on the world, states plainly that RN “condemns the capitalistic system.”9 Bishop Emile Guerry for his part explained why “the Popes condemned liberal capitalism so severely” by saying that “the ‘social system’ itself [is condemned] where it is based on a concept of private ownership opposed to the community end assigned by God to the goods of the earth.”10 Amintore Fanfani, whose study of the “capitalist spirit” more than rivals the treatises of Weber and Tawney, declared that “there is an unbridgeable gulf between the Catholic and the capitalistic conception of life.”11 If, then, the neutral, almost “mechanical” system built on a division between labor and capital is not condemned by the Popes, what is it that they did condemn – and, more to the point, how does what they condemn relate to the thing, the third element of Percy’s triad, that most people mean when they say “capitalism”?

The careful reader will be ready to reply that all of the answers to the first part of our question are spelled out in precision and detail by Pius XI in QA, who, in exercising his ordinary magisterium, simply reiterated and more or less codified the common opinion both of his predecessors and of Catholic philosophical tradition. Condemned by the Pope is the social and moral philosophy that prevailed since the advent of industrialism, and which reigns still today (it is “an economic science alien to the true moral law” (QA §135; see also §§42, 43, 131)). Also condemned are the broader ideologies supporting rationalist economics (and highlighted by His Excellency at the beginning of his introduction): liberalism (§§14, 24, 26), individualism (§§46, 70, 89, 110), and materialism (§§120–1, 134). Condemned as well, at least implicitly, is the triumph of machine- and technology-worship, to the exclusion of the focus man should have on the “one thing necessary” and the other values that support such a focus (“dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, where men are corrupted and degraded”(§138)). Condemned, in the strongest terms, is limitless, free competition (§§89, 108–110), as is the resultant gross disequilibrium in the distribution of ownership (§§57, 60–63) and the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few (§106). Condemned is the anarchist conception of the state which refuses to sanction any enforcement of the moral law (§135). Resulting from these condemned principles and practices, furthermore, is a condemned economic life that is “hard, cruel, and relentless,” producing crying evils, and leading to economic imperialism and a “noxious and detestable internationalism...in financial affairs” (§§3–4, 102–110, 134–135, 137).

Anyone who maintains that “capitalism” of itself escaped condemnation in QA would have to prove that the “thing” signified by the term as it is used today does not imply free competition, Enlightenment or classically liberal economic doctrine, the near worship of technology, the modern doctrine of individualism, the practical tyranny of international finance, and the concentration of productive property in relatively few hands. The “capitalism,” then, that was not condemned in QA was a theoretical “capitalism” of which eye has not seen nor ear heard (1 Cor. ii:9). One small point illustrates: in an article on Belloc’s economics from not too long ago, the writer, in offering his definition of “capitalism,” asserted that among its corollary “rights” to that of private property ownership are “the right to free competition in the marketplace” and the right of pursue profit with “no legal limit as to the amount of money that one can earn.”12 Notwithstanding the fact that by no means is it necessary that a right of private ownership imply these corollary rights as they are formulated (indeed, all modestly keen observers will note that these latter soon destroy the former right for all but the most powerful, i.e., the most wealthy), these so-called rights are categorically denied by the Pope at §§64, 89, 108, and 111. So much, then, for this kind of capitalism, with its alleged corollary rights, surviving condemnation by the Church! The point, of course, is that what the modern world understands “capitalism” to be – notwithstanding the theoretical, on-paper existence of an abstract, almost laboratory-esque notion that merely designates the collaboration in wealth creation of the provider of labor and the purveyor of productive property – necessarily implies ideological and practical realities that were indeed condemned in no uncertain terms by Pius XI, just as they were condemned under the label of “capitalism” by Fanfani, Civardi, and a host of Social Catholics and moral philosophers whose names in a list would literally fill the page. A “capitalism” that was not encompassed or included by the Pope’s condemnatory words in QA is a theoretical capitalism that has never existed and will never exist.13 What did then exist, and does now, more than ever, in terms of modern capitalism, was indeed “bad practice,” but the practice was condemned (“it violates right order”) in principle!14

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It will help us better appreciate what Pope Pius XI was driving at by concentrating upon what he advocated, in addition to and in light of what he condemned in his encyclical. For while he refrains from setting forth in detail a point-by-point program for social and economic restoration (indeed this is the task of the laity who collaborate to develop and implement a “truly Christian social science” and conduct specific activities “in accordance with Christian social doctrine”15), he clearly articulates the attributes of a sane and healthy social economy that serve as stars by which to navigate in our quest to understand – and then to implement – the principles of a socio-economic order worthy of Catholic men and families.

QA is frequently understood to be a restatement of the most well known and hardly controversial Catholic moral principles in the field of economic thought (such as the right of workingmen to a just or family wage; the right of both labor and capital to a proper share – but not to all – of profits; the need to steer social philosophy away from the twin errors of individualism and collectivism; plus the utter opposition of Catholicism to Socialist doctrine). It is that, of course, as His Excellency highlights in the introduction. But across the encyclical’s paragraphs, a careful reader will observe a vindication, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, of two key, indispensable principles of political economy that have been and remain dear to the hearts of Social Catholics of all generations, even if they are not declared in concise statements (e.g., “No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist”) that can be made almost platitudinous through repetition and without broader context. These two principles are: (1) the need, in a healthy and rightly ordered society, for a wide distribution of productive property, and (2) the importance of organizing economic activity in free “vocational groups” uniting the employers and employees of the various industries and professions.

The latter is perhaps less susceptible of rejection, insofar as it is so clearly stated. “The aim of social legislation must therefore be the re-establishment of vocational groups” (§84). It could not be more clear. Encompassed in an individual Guild or Corporation (yes, that’s what the Pontiff meant – for, following Leo XIII16 and St. Pius X,17 whose social teaching he declared in Ubi Arcano (UA) §60 to be in “full force” at the outset of his pontificate, he specifically laments the Guilds’ destruction at the hands of liberal individualism (§80)) will be both “employers and employees of one and the same group joining forces to produce goods or give service” (§85, emphasis mine), uniting not according to their status as supplier or procurer of labor (along familiar trades-union lines), but according to the functions they exercise in society (§84). Putting, as it were, the “crown” atop the corporative social order that he outlines in the paragraphs dealing with vocational groups, the Pope calls for the development of a true juridical order, with “social charity” as its “soul” and a State ready “to protect and defend it effectively” (§89). The sincerity of the Pope on this point was made only more obvious by his frank advocacy of Corporatism in Divini Redemptoris (§54), six years later.

As for the first of our two principles, it is capitulated in the declaration of Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (the “Magna Charta,” according to Pius XI, “on which all Christian activities in social matters are ultimately based” (§38)): “The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners” (RN, §46). That Pius XI throughout QA reiterated his predecessor’s call for development of what Fr. McNabb termed the “ownership system,” in opposition to the then- and still-prevailing “wage system,” is clear on a number of counts. Let us look at these to ensure that there is no mistaking the point.

By way of entering argument, we must establish that in §§44–66 the Pope is dealing with productive property, and not just with “wealth” or “goods” in general. And it is essential to do so, in case there be any doubts, and we leave our review of QA with the impression that the Pope wants gadgets, and not gardens, more widely distributed, to leave the gardens to remain concentrated in just a few hands. It might be tempting for some to claim that it is only the inadequate distribution of wealth for consumption that that the Pope laments and wants to see rectified. Except that such an interpretation would be wrong (as we shall see). And it would fail to strike the disease, by dealing only with a symptom – a symptom which is, in fact, debatable, as the spectacle of people in poverty toting cell phones, sporting $250 sneakers, and riding in fancified, tricked-out automobiles illustrates. Capitalist wealth-creators might be efficaciously forced to share a few of their profits, but none of this will address the essence of the problem as it has existed for centuries: the problem that, as G.K.C. put it, “most people only have wages because they do not have capital.”

That Pius XI is referring, throughout QA, to productive property is clearly proven in three ways.

First, if one looks at the logical progression of the portion of QA dealing with property (§§44–66), the discussion of the right of ownership (§§44–53) appears as a preamble for the treatment of the distribution of both ownership and the products and income that are the fruit of the property owned. Now the type of property that, combined with labor, creates products and income is by definition, productive property. Furthermore, the discussion that takes place at §§56–66 regards the distribution of wealth and income derived from the very property whose ownership by private individuals was just defended in those preceding paragraphs. So in even just general terms, there is no doubt, based upon the structure and the “narrative” progression of this particular section of the encyclical, that the property that is the subject of discussion here is of the productive kind.

The commentary on the encyclical by Nell-Breuning,18 its drafter, confirms the point, by noting clearly that the discussion in these paragraphs deals with, among other things, whether ownership as such is a title to income from the property owned (which it is); the kind of property at issue, therefore, is productive.

Finally, §§53, 54, and 56 make explicit reference to property upon which labor is expended, whether that property is one’s own or that of one’s neighbor.19 One man might hire another to work his land or his machine to produce new wealth, but not to work his food, drink, and his furniture, which all serve merely to satisfy a need or a want. Furthermore, at §53 there is the possibility of “some new form or new value” being produced by the labor of a man who works “as his own master,” directly implying that his labor is applied to some land or capital, because it is only in this way that new wealth can be created by labor. The kind of property thus referred to is necessarily productive property. Indeed, no other interpretation of these passages is remotely possible, since the whole discussion ultimately addresses how to reconcile the competing claims of capital and labor to not just wealth in general but also to the products resulting from the combination of labor with that wealth. So the property in dispute is precisely that kind that can create new wealth when labor is applied to it: namely, productive property.

Reference to the dispute between labor and capital leads to the second point. For, beginning at §44, Pius XI specifically defends a doctrine of private ownership against the claims of the Socialists. We take as our reference Socialism20 by the Jesuit Victor Cathrein, who states, authoritatively, that Socialism advocated “the transformation of all capital, or means of production, into the common property of society, or of the state, and the administration of the produce and the distribution of the proceeds by the state” (p. 17). The socialists saw in private ownership of productive property the necessary exploitation (by the private owners of capital) of laborers, whom they claimed were exclusively entitled to the proceeds resulting from the labor expended on the machines they worked. That Pius takes this as the “official” stance of Socialism, against which he is arguing throughout this section of QA, is overtly stated at §§44, 58, and 60, and at least implied at §§46, 48, and 49. In vindicating private ownership against the Socialists, the Pope is vindicating the private ownership of productive property, which was the only ownership contested in the first place (the Socialists saw exploitation in the private ownership of factories, not of forks). Pius’s explicit reference (§44) to the teaching of his predecessor makes the point even more clear, for Leo’s suggested solution of the social question takes private ownership as a “given” (“this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable” (RN §46)), against the Socialists’ proposals. Thus, both Popes, along with the tradition of the Church, in combating the trend of Socialism, resist a trend that would further the admitted evils of capitalism; namely, it would make all men merely wage-earners and “sharers” in income, earning a wage (and perhaps some dividends) for laboring on “community” property that they do not own (and that in fact no one in particular owns). Indeed, it is for the workingman, the artisan, the family head, the yeoman, and the peasant that the right of ownership is defended (“...the abolition of private ownership would prove to be not beneficial, but grievously harmful to the working classes” (§44)), and not so much for the “big capitalists” who, anyway, end up being taken to task for “long [being] able to appropriate to [themselves] excessive advantages” (§57). Hence we find numerous Social Catholic commentators who see Socialism as a fulfillment of capitalism and its errors, rather than, at bottom, an adversary to it,21 as well as a number of them who see the “other” way (for those who prefer not to say “third”), in opposition to both kindred “isms,” as the only philosophical and practical alternative to what are simply variations on the same wage-system theme, ordained to a single, materialist end.22

Third and last: the distinction clearly implied Pius in later paragraphs between comfort and propertylessness proves the point: for he is arguing both that the lot of workers has been somehow improved and that they do not own property. He refers to workers as “propertyless” at §§60 and 63 while admitting that their condition “has indeed been improved and rendered more equitable”; that they “can no longer be said to be universally in misery and want” (§62). He also admits the “formal difference between pauperism and proletarianism” (§63). One can possess an income from an employer that suffices to meet day-to-day expenses, for the purchase, in relative sufficiency and even abundance, of food, clothes, home furnishings, etc, without possessing a secure means of income that is immune from the “hand-to-mouth uncertainty which is the lot of the proletarian” (§64), an uncertainty that – the Pope will later argue – can only be remedied by ownership. If the Pontiff admits, however, that a propertyless worker can nevertheless live in equitable conditions, above pauperism, but still be a “non-owner,” what these workers do not own is productive property (land, tools or machines, raw materials, or liquid capital to be invested in such things), which provides a living, and not property for consumption, which only satisfies immediate wants or needs.23

Having established that the ownership in question in QA §§44–66 is the ownership of productive property, we now look at the Pontiff’s treatment of the distribution of ownership (which follows its mere vindication as a right in itself), to show that he was indeed aiming for a better, more widespread distribution. We take the argument in five parts.

First, the Pope decries the present distribution of property between the two classes, those possessing capital, and those possessing mere labor. Insofar as we have established above that, in general, the property that Pius is referring to throughout this part of the encyclical must be of the productive kind, his condemnation of the present state of property distribution must deal essentially with that kind of property.

Following his warning that “not every kind of distribution of wealth and property amongst men is such that it can at all, and still less can adequately, attain the end intended by God” (§60), he goes on to denounce as a “grave evil” (§61) “the vast differences between the few who hold excessive wealth and the many who live in destitution” (§61). More stridently, he then declares that “the immense number of propertyless wage-earners on the one hand, and the superabundant riches of the fortunate few on the other, is an unanswerable argument that the earthly goods so abundantly produced in this age of industrialism are far from rightly distributed” (§63). By denouncing the present distribution of “earthly goods,” the Pope prepares the way for the solution he will propose in the paragraphs that follow, as we see below.

With our second point we highlight the almost chronological approach the Pope takes in proposing a solution to the social question. His approach refutes any contention that might be made (in response, especially, to the first point above) that his remarks about the equitable distribution of wealth are restricted to the fruit of, or income produced by, productive property – i.e., that he is maintaining, in §§56, 60, and 61, that merely “profits” and “income” must be equitably shared. (Of course insofar as QA is partially a refutation of Socialism, it was necessary to reassert the right, long admitted by the Church, of the owners of capital to at least a portion of the income and profit generated by its employment; hence the discussion of the right disposition of capital’s proceeds.) The Pope indeed defends the right of capital to a share of income and proceeds, but in proposing that the non-owning workers become owners, his reference to the income and proceeds resulting from the combined effort of capital and labor is from that standpoint incidental, because he conceives of the proper distribution of income as a means to an end. The means of granting labor a larger share of income from productive activity are, in the mind of the Pope, ordained to achieving the end of making the non-owning workers into owners. This is clear from §§64 and 66 where the Pope demands an “ample sufficiency” of profits and fruits of production be provided to the wage-earner so that he may “acquire a certain moderate ownership.”

A close examination of the actual texts we have just cited, where the Pope demands the rectification of inequity in the distribution of income (irrespective of whether this rectification is a means or an end in itself – for arguably it is both), reveals that he also requires an adjustment to the inequity in the distribution of property in general.

For in §61, the Pontiff demands, yes, that each class “receive its due share” of profits, but he also maintains that in general – without reference only or specifically to income or the products of industry – “the distribution of created goods must be brought into conformity with the demands of the common good and social justice” (emphasis mine). The reference to social justice and the common good especially situates the Pope’s remarks within the framework of a discussion of that kind of property that provides people with a living, for it is the distribution of this productive property and how that distribution is handled in terms of a broad social institution – rather than just the availability of food and clothing to individuals or individual families – that is most bound up with the overall structure of society and the social order, and therefore properly discussed in terms of social justice and the common good.24 Two paragraphs later, the Pope contrasts, as we have seen, “the immense number of propertyless wage-earners on the one hand, and the superabundant riches of the fortunate few on the other” (§63), again without limiting his remarks only to income or products generated by the use of capital. Finally, in §64 the Pope expresses concern that without “efficacious remedies,” the “dispossessed laboring masses” in the newly capitalistic countries, along with the “immense army of hired rural laborers,” will remain “perpetually sunk in the proletarian condition” (emphasis mine).

Note the explicit reference to the propertylessness and “proletarian” status of wage-earners, propertylessnes that must refer to their non-ownership of productive property, and not their lack of the basic means of sustenance (i.e., property for consumption), which the Pope concedes elsewhere had been in certain areas mitigated and partially remedied since Leo XIII’s day. For it is the “condition” of not owning productive property that causes, as we have seen at §64, the “uncertainty” that is necessarily – the Pope almost offers a definition here – “the lot of the proletarian.” One has the sense here and elsewhere that the Pope means “proletarian” as an almost binary indicator of “status” (i.e., one is an owner or one is not), rather than simply as a descriptor of degree (i.e., that one doesn’t have enough material possessions, even if one has some).25 In fact this is the only way to read the Pope’s language, for no one could maintain that even the poorest of the “non-owning” masses did not possess some rags of clothing and some modest number of personal items. The point is, though, that this kind of ownership does not yield a living, while owning capital or land does so, when labor is applied to it. Confirming this interpretation is that fact that the Pope specifically calls, six years later, for efficacious methods to be applied to rectify the mal-distribution of property; he demands precisely that the methods adopted in furtherance of such an aim “will really affect those who actually possess more than their share of capital resources, and who continue to accumulate them to the grievous detriment of others” (DR §75, emphasis mine).

Third, running through QA, and appearing subtly in at least five different places, is the frequently neglected and unappreciated image of what without exaggeration we might call a frame of reference for the Pope’s broader discussion of ownership and property distribution. This is the man whose economic life of work and property are not disintegrated and divided, but rather united. Nell-Breuning posits, as an example, “the peasant who cultivates his own soil with his and his family’s labor” (p. 129). This ideal becomes, for the Pope, a foil for the masses who occupy the position of wage-earner: those who, in order to receive an income “derived from property” (as all income is, ultimately), “must approach an owner, offer his labor, and receive a remuneration for it.”26

The Pope briefly puts before us an image of the small proprietor in several places. One place is a reference to the title he may claim to the fruits of his labor (§53, emphasis mine): “The only form of labor, however, which gives the working man a title to its fruits, is that which a man exercises as his own master, and by which some new form or new value is produced.” The other is a reference point against which the non-owning laborers are compared (§56, emphasis mine): “…unless a man apply his labor to his own property, an alliance must be formed between his toil and his neighbor’s property….”

Now the need for a man who owns only labor to approach someone else who owns productive property, in order to seek employment and obtain income, arises precisely because the man does not own his own productive property. But, as we have already seen, the Pope specifically calls for ownership of property to be distributed among the class of laborers who presently do not own, even while he insists that “man is born to labor as the bird to fly” (§64).27 So he is aiming, at least in broad terms and to the extent feasible, at a re-union of work and property, of labor and ownership. Unless we are to believe – and this is both ludicrous, and distinctly refuted by §64 – that the Pope intends for the masses to come into ownership of proprietary and financial assets, such that they need not labor but can rather obtain income exclusively from property, the ideal envisioned, even though in the distance and a long ways off, must be the man who can apply labor “to his own property” (§56), as his own “master” (§53), so as to depend more upon himself and less upon the “uncertainty” (§64) of a wage built upon only the “alliance” (§56) between his toil and another’s property.

The small proprietor appears again at §72, where the Pope discusses the limits the capitalistic economy must observe in employing women and children. He rightly finds it “intolerable, and to be opposed with all Our strength,” that mothers of families be “forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the domestic walls to the neglect of their own proper cares and duties.” Now “gainful occupation” evokes employment for a wage, a necessity, as we have seen, principally for non-owning men and families. But Pius is far from condemning altogether the contribution of women and children to the home economy, just as he is far from condemning labor (even while he decries the proletarian status of the laborers). It is rather the homestead and the shop that are subtly offered as the ideal where “the rest of the family [can] contribute according to their power towards the common maintenance, as in the rural home or in the families of many artisans and small shopkeepers.” Here labor is joined to the family’s property, not to someone else’s. And again at §103 we find a reference, not to an individual, but to a whole social system that differs from that “in which were provided by different people the capital and labor jointly needed for production” (§101). As an example of this “[other] economic system” the Pope offers the peasant-owners, namely “the agricultural classes, who form the larger portion of the human family, and who find in their occupation the means of obtaining honestly and justly what is needful for their maintenance” (§103). And finally, when wrapping up a concluding section of the encyclical calling for a renewal of Christian principles and Christian charity, the Pontiff places before us a Model Who, though He spent His life “in labors” (§128), was not employed by the “Schwartz Lumber Conglomerate,” but Who had full share of ownership in “Joseph & Son, Proprietors”: namely, “Him Who, being in the form of God, chose to become a Carpenter among men, and to be known as the Son of a Carpenter” (§140).

As for the fourth of our arguments in defense of Pius XI’s call for a wider distribution of ownership of productive property, let us simply call attention to his clear language demanding that workers become owners. The “necessary object of Our efforts” is “the uplifting of the proletariat” (§62), an “uplifting” that, we have seen above, necessarily involves changing their status from non-owning workers to owners. “Efficacious remedies [must] be applied” (§62) to ensure that rural laborers do not remain “perpetually” in the “proletarian condition.” To accomplish this, the Pope calls for an “ample sufficiency” of the fruits of production to be supplied to the workingmen, so that, as we noted earlier, “they may increase their possessions” and become “freed from that hand-to-mouth uncertainty which is the lot of the proletarian” (§64). Finally, and convincingly, at §66 Pius demands that “the propertyless wage-earner be placed in such circumstances that by skill and thrift he can acquire a certain moderate ownership.”

Nell-Breuning’s gloss here is instructive, confirming this interpretation. He states the hard truth that to realize the Pope’s plan it may be necessary to make large estates available to “small and independent families.” His comment is striking and forthright, especially so because it makes clear that the Pope’s vision in calling for “ownership” is one that involves making men and families into independent proprietors, working their own productive property:

But is it the Pope’s intention to have his energetic measures cover the expropriation of large estates in order thus to create the means for the support of small and independent families? The answer is that this passage is silent in this respect. Therefore we should not attempt to interpolate a meaning it does not contain. We can merely ask ourselves whether we can speak of “efficacious” measures at all, if we renounce expropriation in principle, even as a last resort. We will also have to remember that, in discussing property, the Pope assigned extraordinary authority to the state whenever a genuine need of common welfare is involved. We also have to consider the fact that the Pope declares justified the so-called socialization of “certain forms of property” in certain circumstances (114). Considering all this, we can see no objections to the demand for expropriation of estates in order to make the rehabilitation of the agricultural wage-earners possible, provided of course, that such action is taken only after strict and very careful considerations.28

Nell-Breuning’s other important observation here regards the footnote, at §72, to Pius XI’s Casti Connubii. Our commentator (and he was in a position to know) maintains that this reference was meant to call attention to the Pope’s doctrine on marriage, specifically regarding the wages needed by the head of a family for its support. “The Pope is anxious not to be understood,” Nell-Breuning writes,

in the sense that, as a result of a law of nature, the family of the worker must live on the wages of the head of the house. It is by no means a natural condition, or one demanded by nature, that the family shall have no other means of support than the wage income of its father and head. Neither is it the will of nature or its Creator that the other members of the family permit themselves to be supported by the working head of the family without contributing their share for the common support. Here, too, our ideas are easily influenced by the picture of the wage-earners of metropolitan industry where indeed – except for the steadily decreasing activities of the housewife – the family members have no reasonable opportunity to contribute to the family support. Here we have actually the condition where the wife works in an office or factory, while the children from early youth are engaged in some trade; or the wife is limited to a little coking and sewing in a wretched tenement, while the children loaf in the house or on the street unless taken care of at a playground. Under such conditions which are, however, not natural, but most unnatural, the family has no other source of income than its father’s wages.29

If this all-too-familiar scene is not what Pius wishes to advocate in calling for wages high enough to support the family and its head, then we must return to the “rural home or…the families of many artisans and small shopkeepers,” specifically offered by the Pope as the example of a situation where the family does have a means of support beyond “the wage income of its father and head.” But the key here is the need for ownership of the property the family needs to generate an alternative “means” of support, and to enable its members to participate in the creation of wealth necessary for a life of modest material sufficiency and dignity.

Fifth, and finally: QA’s explicit references, in the area of distribution of property ownership, to the demands made by the predecessor of Pius XI and author of Rerum Novarum confirm beyond all doubt that family ownership of productive property is precisely is being advocated. Five times, over as many paragraphs, Pius XI refers specifically to what Leo XIII proposed as a way of both endorsing his own recommendations and vindicating and renewing Leo’s proposals. It is Leo XIII, says Pius, who urged “the uplifting of the proletariat” as the “necessary object of Our efforts” (§62). Leo’s injunctions “have lost none of their force or wisdom for our own age.” Pius XI’s calls, which we have just examined, that workingmen obtain an “ample sufficiency” so that they may rise out of their non-owning status; that they be “freed from….hand-to-mouth uncertainty which is the lot of the proletarian”; that they may be enabled to “support life’s changing fortunes” and pass on “some little provision for those whom they leave behind them” (§64); all of these are ideas that were “not merely suggested, but stated in frank and open terms” by Leo XIII. Finally, the Pope writes that the need for the “propertyless wage-earner…[to] acquire a certain moderate ownership” was “already declared by Us, following the footsteps of Our Predecessor” (§66).

And what were those footsteps that Pius intended to follow in?

One: The father of every family is enjoined in RN to “provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten” and to enable them “who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, [to have] all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life.” Fair enough. But how? “[I]n no other way,” says Leo XIII, “can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance” (RN §13, emphasis mine).30 Note the explicit parallel between this and Pius’s concern for what a workingman needs to pass on to his family.

Two: In Leo XIII’s own words:

If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners (RN §46, emphasis mine).

Many excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided. For, the result of civil change and revolution has been to divide cities into two classes separated by a wide chasm. On the one side there is the party which holds power because it holds wealth; which has in its grasp the whole of labor and trade; which manipulates for its own benefit and its own purposes all the sources of supply, and which is not without influence even in the administration of the commonwealth. On the other side there is the needy and powerless multitude, sick and sore in spirit and ever ready for disturbance. If working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the consequence will be that the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over, and the respective classes will be brought nearer to one another (RN §47, emphasis mine).

The fact that Pius XI makes an explicit allusion at §62 to RN §47 (see his use of the phrase “a share in the land”) makes irrefutable the contention that the Pope intended to adopt, vindicate, and re-promulgate these “injunctions” of his predecessor, both “salutary and imperative.”

Just as the explicit evocation of Leo removes all trace of doubt as to what Pius XI was calling for, should any have remained, the evocation of both Leo and Pius by Pope Pius XII in his memorial commemoration of Rerum Novarum offers a hindsight confirmation of our interpretation of Pius’s message in QA, far more authoritative than any gloss based merely on a close reading of the encyclical’s text and a few commentaries, no matter how reliable. In Pius XII’s June 1, 1941, Pentecost radio discourse, he provides “directive moral principles on three fundamental values of social and economic life...animated by the spirit of Leo XIII and unfolding his views.”31 Two related points made throughout his elaboration of these “directive moral principles” are to our purpose here in confirming the social message of his predecessor. The first is relevant to our consideration of the advantage of small proprietorship that is subtly implied by Pius’s call for the liberation of the non-owning worker from the “uncertainty” of dependence upon a wage, along with his endorsement of the contribution made to family upkeep, “as in the rural home or in the families of many artisans and small shopkeepers” (§72), by family members working on their property rather than someone else’s. On this head Pius XII repeatedly emphasizes that the purpose for the family’s private possession of productive property is to “secure for the father of a family the healthy liberty he needs in order to fulfill the duties assigned him by the Creator regarding the physical, spiritual, and religious welfare of the family.”32 Note the convergence between Pius XII’s call for the “healthy liberty” of the family and the demand of his immediate predecessor for liberation of non-owners from wage-earning “uncertainty.” And there is a similar dovetailing between the mutual approach of Pius XII and Leo XIII, who both view the need for the private possession of productive property as rooted primarily in the duty of a father to properly provide for all aspects of his family’s welfare. Pius XII notes this duty elsewhere in his discourse, confirming beyond doubt his clear conception of this reality, and his insistence upon it.33

The second point, relating to what Pius XII calls “the insistent call of the two Pontiffs of the social Encyclicals,”34 deals with the family’s plot of land – the smallholding – as that which nearest approximates to the ideal form of productive property possessed by the family, necessary for safeguarding its liberty to pursue and fulfill its economic, social, moral, and spiritual duties: “Of all the goods that can be the object of private property, none is more conformable to nature, according to the teaching of Rerum Novarum, than the land, the holding on which the family lives, and from the products of which it draws all of part of its subsistence.”35 The successor of Pius XI goes to far as to state, “in the spirit of Rerum Novarum,” that “as a rule, only that stability which is rooted in one’s own holding makes of the family the vital and most perfect and fecund cell of society....”36 Leo XIII’s demand that individuals be enabled to look forward to obtaining “a share in the land,” and Pius XI’s allusion to it, give substance to the continuity of aim that animates Catholic teaching on this point and inspired Pius XII’s confirmation of it, enabling us, in hindsight, to establish with precision the content of Quadragesimo Anno in this regard.

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There is much more to Pius XI’s monumental social encyclical than its take on capitalism, work, and property, as His Excellency rightly highlights. But perhaps for the needs of our time these aspects are properly emphasized. With QA as our guide, we can think with the Church about that “thing” that moderns mean when they say “capitalism,” while we worry less about the label. We will support the idea of a Guild System, so clearly promoted in this and other social encyclicals. And we will work to foster as best we can in our own little circles, in our own families, at least, if not elsewhere, a wider distribution of ownership of productive property, striving both to see and to realize the ideal re-integration of work and property, where a man’s labor – which is obligatory on most all of us – is combined with his property rather than someone else’s. Let us become, with the doctrine of the Popes to inspire us, the peasant proprietors; the independent tradesman; the employee-owners; the self-employed entrepreneurs of a resurgent Christendom.

Given the outlook of Pope Pius XI on this question, it would not be gratuitous to see in his encyclical a word of encouragement for the Distributists (whose land movement he lauded as a “most praiseworthy enterprise” in a letter from then Cardinal Pacelli), the Corporatists, the Solidarists, and so many others of Social Catholic conviction who sought to understand the role of private ownership of productive property in society, to clarify it, and to mark its duties and limitations in view of the common good of society. “Most helpful therefore and worthy of all praise,” the Pope writes, “are the efforts of those who, in a spirit of harmony and with due regard for the traditions of the Church, seek to determine the precise nature of these duties, and to define the boundaries imposed by the requirements of social life upon the right of ownership itself or upon its use” (§48).

Of course no one would have the parochial temerity to call Pius XI a “Distributist.” Nevertheless, he laments the mal-distribution of productive property; defends its private ownership so far as to wish that more people had it; sees the solution to the plight of the employed masses in wage-earner “ownership”; insists that the right of property must conform to the needs of the common good, and must therefore be subject to regulation by the public authority in its interest (§§49–50); and expects, finally, that after following his program “the production and acquisition of goods [and] the use of wealth…will within a short time be brought back again to the standards of equity and just distribution” (§139, emphasis mine). So what, then, would we call him, especially in light of his principled, if unintentional, sanction of the outline for reform offered some years later by an English historian in a little essay called Restoration of Property?

Meanwhile, let Pius rouse our spirits for the battle ahead with the closing thoughts of QA. We must avoid, he says, as “valiant soldiers of Christ” who are ready to “strain every thew and sinew” (§148), modernism of the moral, social, and juridical kind (§46),37 lest we fall victim to a schizophrenia that cuts off social thought and public life from day-to-day Catholic duty, prayer, and worship – a “cleavage” in the conscience later condemned by the Pope as “a scandal to the weak, and to the malicious a pretext to discredit the Church” (DR, §55). Instead, we will reach outside our ramparts and invite the cooperation of all men of good will to apply Catholic principles (§98), adapting to modern needs the unchanging and unchangeable doctrine of the Church (§19). We will develop and thrust into public view a truly Christian social science (§20), and convince well-intentioned but erroneous social reformers that their just demands are more cogently defended by the Church and promoted by Christian charity (§118). We will avoid contributing to the calumny that the Church is on the side of the rich (§§44, 127) by ignoring her social teaching or, worse, by hiding immoral economic practice under her name.38 And, finally, because “nowadays the conditions of social and economic life are such that vast multitudes of men can only with great difficulty pay attention to…their eternal salvation” (§132), we endeavor “unremittingly” to reform society according to the mind of the Church (§128), imitating and attaining to the marvelous unity of the divine plan, which “the Church preaches” and “right reason demands” (§139).

As for the “final say” on work and property, perhaps we may be permitted to see in the words of the Carpenter of Nazareth regarding Holy Matrimony a lesson that is instructive here as well: “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (St. Matt. xix:6).

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