Theodore Roosevelt was the obvious victor in both of the “battles to transform American capitalism.” He refused to do the bidding of the coal operators and instead helped engineer a compromise. American capitalism was not so much transformed as tamed in the process. The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan and the Battle to [...]
What if the fundamental problem in the American academy is a loss of institutional identity that has nothing to do with conservative or liberal ideology? What if the modern university simply is no longer dedicated to being a house of learning and a community of scholars? Jake Meador’s article in The Atlantic* about the decline [...]
Counting upon God’s grace, we must recognize and respect the organic nature of man, full of vivacity, spontaneity, and unpredictability. This is the essence of a truly organic—that is, living—society. An element of organic society involves the manner in which remedies are found. In searching for solutions, we must carefully observe the fact that organic [...]
Economists can analyze trends in production and consumption, but they cannot plumb the depths of the human soul; they can only observe the consequences of certain human commercial acts and take limited conclusions. Unlike the laws of the natural sciences, economic laws involve free and rational human beings and are consequently free of determinism. Given [...]
Because of the strong secular faith instilled in us by education, most of us trust that science and technology, democracy, and capitalism, the three legs of Modernity, can bring about only good ends and fail to see that these three triumphs of humankind can diminish the human person. With the publication of the book The [...]
There is a lot of talk these days about an increasing interest in socialism. It is quite the conundrum if approached within the assumptions of late liberalism: why indeed would the victors in the Cold War seek to become their vanquished enemies? Pope Pius XI helps us through this problem. He helps us see that [...]
Peter Drucker is best known to the world as the author of massive bestsellers in the category of business management. But Drucker thought a lot about such things as totalitarianism, decentralization, limited government, an American type of conservatism, social harmony, the impact of mass production on human beings. A number of readers of this essay [...]
“Capitalists” are often accused of wanting unfettered markets in which the only value is the almighty dollar and nobody cares about anything that is not related to making money. But others claim that capitalism is progressive by nature. Which is it? Is capitalism itself intrinsically “woke”? In “The Distributist” column in the latest issue of [...]
John Randolph of Roanoke, one of the great exponents of the Southern political tradition, knew that what was proper to any state government was the preservation of the received order. The duty of the citizen of the commonwealth was to resist any legislative or constitutional changes to the received order, and to grant a broad [...]
Alexander Salter’s "The Political Economy of Distributism" is a much-needed scholarly work on the ideas of distributism, as presented in the writings of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Written in such a way that it will pass muster in the ivory towers of academe, it is also accessible for any reader interested in politics and [...]
Literary scholars have long interpreted “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a fable of populism, but it is more than that: It is a celebration of consumer culture as the the very meaning of America, this bright and shining land where men and women are happy to deceive themselves into believing a fairy tale, which, [...]
In a recent essay, Veronique de Rugy focuses her ire on Alexander Salter, author of a forthcoming book entitled "The Political Economy of Distributism." She apparently seeks to discredit the book by discrediting its author as an admirer of the "antisemitic" Hilaire Belloc. This is really all too silly to be taken seriously. We live [...]
The logic of individualism may now almost be played out in the West. In the society which we see all around us, people are brought up to think of themselves as free floating social particles, individuals whose only fulfillment lies in choice. The only alternative now to accepting the dissolution of the self is to [...]
Creation is an act of the Trinity, and existence is a participation in the Trinity—a participation in the Trinitarian act of giving, receiving, and being given. Each creature called into existence by God receives its own life as a gift. My topic is a theological appreciation of the notion of “gift”, and how this throws [...]