Oikos and Logos: Chesterton's Vision of Distributism (G. K. Chesterton‪)‬

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: