Several months ago I lamented that a normally astute conservative commentator had dismissed Hilaire Belloc’s classic work, The Servile State, as being “strikingly similar” to The Communist Manifesto. Although such a claim is patently absurd, it did set me wondering why it was that otherwise sane and sensible people should have such a blind spot [...]
In Joseph Pearce’s second critique of our work on Tolkien’s political thought, he begins by saying he hardly knows where to start. We would like to suggest, respectfully, that Mr. Pearce start by reading our book, where we develop our arguments at some length. In his second post, as with the first, he refers to [...]
I hardly know where to start in responding to Messrs. Richards’ and Witt’s “response” to my earlier article on “Distributism in the Shire”. More to the point, I hardly know where to end. There seems so much to discuss. There is the question of Tolkien’s agreement with Belloc on the practical aspects of distributism, specifically [...]
Joseph Pearce, whose work we appreciate, has issued a critical response in The Imaginative Conservative to our new book from Ignatius Press about J.R.R. Tolkien’s political and economic vision. Or rather, he has issued a critical response to a short answer one of us gave in an interview about the book. Mr. Pearce begins: “In [...]
In a very interesting interview in Catholic World Report, Jay W. Richards, co-author of The Hobbit Party, a new book examining the political thought of J. R. R. Tolkien, sought to distance Tolkien from the political views of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Whilst paying lip service to the romantic aspirations of distributism, the political [...]
“There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council,” he said. “We were all a lot of silly policemen looking at each other. And all these nice people who have been peppering us with shot thought we were the dynamiters. I knew I couldn’t be wrong about the mob,” he said, beaming over the enormous multitude which [...]
A man of principle who put his principles before his party loyalty, Hilaire Belloc found himself increasingly disillusioned by parliamentary politics. Hilaire Belloc’s political career commenced in May 1904 when he presented himself for adoption as the Liberal Parliamentary candidate for South Salford, an industrial suburb of Manchester in northern England with a large working-class [...]
Hilaire Belloc was one of a rare breed, which today might be considered an endangered species. He was what was called a man of letters and a man who refused to be pigeonholed, who refused to be labeled, who refused to be restricted by any sphere of specialty. Mercifully, he lived in an age in [...]
Distributism is the name given to a socio-economic and political creed originally associated with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton bowed to Belloc’s preeminence as a disseminator of the ideas of distributism, declaring Belloc the master in relation to whom he was merely a disciple. “You were the founder and father of this mission,’”Chesterton [...]
G. K. Chesterton visited the United States twice, in 1921 and 1930, and his impressions of America, gleaned from these visits, formed the basis of two books, What I Saw in America (1922) and Sidelights on New London and Newer York (1932). These books are in fact some of the most muddled, confused, and confusing, [...]
Conservatives, or more specifically Traditionalists, find ourselves in the rather uncomfortable position of revering a group of men who espoused ideas that modern Traditionalists approach with immense reserve—namely, Liberalism and democracy. Conservatives, or more specifically Traditionalists, find ourselves in the rather uncomfortable position of revering a group of men who espoused ideas that modern Traditionalists [...]
Much of G. K. Chesterton’s work is an engagement with relativism and modernism in their multifarious manifestations. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Everlasting Man, arguably his most important book. It was no mere coincidence that Chesterton’s book should appear in 1925, the same year that H.G. Wells’s Outline of History was first [...]
Distributism, as originally conceived by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, has long ceased being a practical possibility for the majority of those living in the liberal democracies of the West. Yet this does not mean that the core principle of distributism—widely distributed private ownership of the means of livelihood—is wholly beyond our reach. Chesterton, [...]
An author too robust and significant to be wholly un-personned can still be marginalized. Consider this elegant pasquinade, which years ago won a parody-contest award in Britain’s New Statesman and which employs the same rhyme scheme and meter as Hilaire Belloc’s own “The chief defect of Henry King”: The chief defect of dear Hilaire Was [...]