The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good
Alexander William Salter. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. ISBN: 9780813236810. $24.95 (paperback).
Distributism is a school of Christian economic thought developed most fully by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the late 1800’s and the early part of the 20th century. The school of thought falls squarely within Catholic Social Doctrine, and proposes a version of a market economy where the ownership of productive property is much more evenly distributed across the population. In his recent book, Alexander Salter offers an overview of some important early distributist texts, and pairs his analysis of those texts with the work of Ordoliberal thinker Wilhelm Röpke. More importantly, perhaps, he also subjects these distributist thinkers to the scrutiny and analysis that would be expected of a contemporary scholar of economics, bringing growth theory, public choice analysis, price theory, and modern empirical evidence to bear on the topics raised by these writers. The result is a fine introduction to distributism viewed through a disciplined economic lens.
One of the interesting themes that emerges is the distinction that Salter wants to maintain between positive economic analysis and normative political economy. Salter is clearly an appreciative student of Catholic Social Thought, and he believes that there are important normative elements to economic life. Nevertheless, he takes the positive-normative distinction seriously and wants to maintain a neutral professional space for economic analysis. In a book about distributism this is a challenge, because the authors he is working with jump back and forth between historical analysis, theological reflection, and political proposals. The care that Salter takes to make clear distinctions between different modes of argument, however, makes him a capable guide to this work, and he is able to compartmentalize outdated economic ideas while still giving full weight to the moral vision that Belloc, Chesterton, and Röpke offer.
Overview
The first chapter motivates the project as an attempt to explore a deep foundation for a “common good conservatism” and situates the book within the work of political figures like Marco Rubio, and scholars like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermule. Given the tumult of the conservative intellectual movement today, I am not sure this was a wise place to start. The work of this volume is important, and even a couple of years after publication the references made in this chapter feel dated. Nevertheless, the chapter offers an important introduction to the idea that economic institutions should be motivated by a vision of human freedom that is based in a theological account of humanity. In particular, he sets up distributism as a study of the institutional and material prerequisites for a fuller human freedom than is offered by classical liberalism.
The second chapter gives a quick overview of Catholic Social Thought in order to provide some context for the thinking of Belloc and Chesterton. Readers familiar with this body of work will find little here that is surprising, and Salter covers the ground well. Of particular interest, given the topic of the book, is a focus on the doctrine of the Universal Destination of Goods and the positive but limited views on property and ownership.
The third and fourth chapters offer a detailed reading of the work of Hilaire Belloc. There are a couple of themes that emerge. First Salter emphasizes Belloc’s view that the ownership of productive property is a central foundation for liberty. In contrast, Belloc defined capitalism as a system characterized by concentrated ownership of productive property. This defines the central critical nature of Belloc’s writing: individual households are subject to the abuse of economic and political power because they have been stripped of any ownership stake in productive property. Salter brings his economic expertise to bear in these chapters by comparing Belloc’s account with more recent theory and evidence about market power and economic institutions. He also highlights, however, the elements of Belloc’s argument that depend, instead, on economic culture and psychology.
The fifth and sixth chapters delve deeply into the writing of G.K. Chesterton. For Chesterton, the ideal economy consists of families that are independent of corporate or political power. This, in turn, allows families to engage in education, cultural pursuits, creative production, and religious practice in a manner that is truly free. The culture that results, moreover, offers the best ultimate check on abuse of power elsewhere. For Chesterton, like Belloc, the enemy of this kind of freedom is concentrated state power (particularly in socialist countries) and concentrated economic power, each of which create an oppressive bureaucratic order. Chesterton offers a series of proposals for moving toward this ideal, including targeted taxes, inheritance law changes, joint ownership of capital, and subsidies for small enterprises.
Chapter 7 is one of the most valuable chapters of the book, because this is where Salter draws connections between this distributist literature and some important big questions in economics. For example, Salter notes that this literature could add to our understanding of economic development, noting that we have some evidence that economic development depends on both adequate state capacity to provide public goods and also adequate limits on state action in the economy. The distributists have an intuitive account of how genuine freedom requires both an active state and a realm of life that is independent of the state and corporate power. Salter also notes that these distributist theorists have a distinct account of economic freedom, argue convincingly for a connection between political freedom and economic freedom, and offer a useful way to integrate Christian theology and economics. The chapter ends with an exploration of justice in exchange, in which Salter draws on the work of Michael Munger to think about what it means for a participant to freely enter into trade. The work in this chapter is mostly suggestive; Salter does not offer a sustained argument on any of these topics, but he offers the distributists as conversation partners in each of these areas of inquiry.
In chapters eight and nine, Salter brings another economist into his historical tour: Wilhelm Röpke. Röpke was an early 20th century German ordoliberal, and Salter argues, persuasively, that Röpke’s thought is very similar to that of Belloc and Chesterton. Moreover, as an economist, Röpke offers a compelling synthesis between the ethical goals and social critique of the distributists while also offering a deep understanding of market institutions and price theory. Like the distributists, he was concerned about the cultural and political effects that he thought were downstream of an economy built on scale and concentration. Röpke expressed this concern by describing two tendencies of modern economies: (i) “proletarianization” in which division of labor and concentration make it difficult for individuals to own productive capital and (ii) “enmassment” in which the scale of human interactions quickly outpaces and replaces normal human relationships. These concerns led Röpke to favor an economy that privileged small businesses and small farms, much like the distributists.
In the final chapter, Salter concludes with a discussion how we can maintain a scientific approach to economics while also taking seriously a particular Christian vision of economic life. He also reflects on the possibility of a distributist political option in the United States, examining, in particular, the American Solidarity Party.
Distributism in the twenty-first century?
One of the open questions that is never really resolved by Salter is whether the distributist vision is worth pursuing in 2025. Each of the thinkers that Salter examines are keenly aware of the fact that some amount of economic prosperity would have to be sacrificed to realize their vision. What stands out, in particular, is the loss that would be required to reject production at scale. Even in agriculture, where the ideal of a family farm is imaginable, the increases in the cost of food would be substantial if we lost the efficiency of the supply chains built by the vertically integrated food distributors. There is a reason why agriculture has become a business built on scale, with individual hog and chicken farms raising over a million animals at one time. This scale gives farmers a cost advantage that results in a lower price of food for consumers. For so many other goods, particularly those that require precision engineering and assembly, small local producers are probably not possible. Widely distributed equity ownership might be a way forward, as well as more employee-owned enterprises, but this seems to fall far short of what Belloc and Chesterton envision.
A second anachronism in this literature is the heavy emphasis on land and physical capital. An updated distributism would have to place a heavy emphasis, also, on human capital and intellectual property. It is not clear if the argument that Belloc and Chesterton make can easily accommodate an economy where physical capital is a smaller part of the overall recipe for productivity. For example, these authors make the powerful argument that land offers a kind of freedom from government and economic power. In a world where the family farm is less competitive and human capital is more important, does that argument still hold?
It is easy for a reviewer to demand more of a book, but these open questions deserve more attention. It might be that more recent distributist scholars have been busy updating the ideas and working through these difficulties. Salter does not heavily engage with the distributist literature outside of the primary sources by Belloc and Chesterton, though, which leaves the readers to do this further research for themselves. Nevertheless, this book is excellent in a couple of respects. First, Salter does a fine job explaining both the ethos and details of a distributist vision. The charity that he extends to his primary sources, even when he disagrees, is admirable. Moreover, for an economist trying to make sense of this literature, Salter is a particularly good guide, offering connections to relevant economics literatures throughout the book. For scholars interested in this corner of Catholic Social Thought, or for distributist scholars interested in the economic side of the literature, this book will be essential reading.