Allan Carlson, who has old liberal impulses but an aversion to modern economic structures, reports on a conference on Belloc-Chesterton-style Distributivism (or distributism) that took place in England this month, featuring philosophers and theorists of various sorts.
From his report, the analysis of the crisis is not entirely off base but the report suggests that the conference has an entirely predictable “third way” quality to it: down with socialism, especially down with capitalism, and up up up with something we won’t actually describe in any detail lest we expose our theory to critical examination.
The problems with distributivism (I spoke on this topic at the recent Acton University) are many but the main trouble comes down to its dogmatic opposition to modern technology and modern forms of property ownership. They imagine reform toward an equal distribution of private property (as if there is no trading on day 2), a return to agricultural life, and restoration of community-based work, and even something of a resurgence of medieval gilds, but they don’t come to terms with the possibility that forging such a world would require totalitarian planning structures, the end of anything resembling free enterprise, and might end up starving most of the world’s 6 billion people who cannot be fed, clothed, and housed in the context of a 12th-century-level of the division of labor.
I know they mean well, and they have a decent critique of the modern state and state capitalism but I can’t get passed the impression that these nice people are really engaged in a kind of romantic sharing of poetic reflections rather than engaging in real-world analysis. In this way, they seem to have much in common with pre-Marxian socialists.
Nor is this tendency irrelevant. It makes conservatives more sympathetic with bogus policy plans such as those promoted by environmentalism. And it leads to subtle “lifestyle” books designed to spread loathing of capitalism such as those pushed by the Crunchy Con movement.
As with the socialists, the way to deal with these people is to ask the question: what is to be done? The answer–always some version of “dismantle industrial civilization”–is less than viable.
