What's Wrong with the World

In 1910 G. K. Chesterton turned a decade of weekly battles in the press into a book. What's Wrong with the World is his combative, paradoxical survey of the Edwardian appetite for reform — the schemes for fixing poverty, schooling, the family, and the place of women that filled the age — and his charge against all of them is the same: that they rush to remedies without ever settling what they are aiming at. “We agree about the evil,” he writes; “it is about the good that we should tear each other's eyes out.” The first thing wrong with the world, he insists, is that we have stopped asking what is right.

Against the reformers Chesterton sets the ordinary man and his ordinary desires — a home of his own, a family inside it, a small patch of the world to rule and to bungle as he pleases. He dramatises the forces arrayed against that man in the tale of Hudge and Gudge: Gudge the hard-faced capitalist who herds the poor into slums, Hudge the soft-faced official who would herd them into model tenements for their own good. They believe themselves enemies; Chesterton's joke, and his charge, is that they cooperate perfectly to strip the common man of his property, his independence, and his dignity.

At the book's heart is a defence of the household as the last fortress of liberty — “to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty; nay, it is the only place of anarchy” — and from it flow the book's most famous and most contested arguments: on the dignity of domestic life, on the universality rather than the narrowness of women's work, on education as something done to children rather than for them. The chapters on women read against a century of change, and Chesterton, who dedicated the book to a friend who disagreed with him, wrote to provoke a reply, not to compel assent.

Beneath the jokes lies the seed of Distributism — the conviction that liberty needs property to stand on, and that the cure for modern dispossession is to spread ownership widely rather than concentrate it in the few or the state. Witty, humane, and gloriously quotable, What's Wrong with the World is where Chesterton first set out the social vision that would occupy the rest of his life.