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Chesterbelloc’s Distributists wanted a new world much more like the old one
March 05, 2025
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Distributism - the philosophy whose advocates want to create a new economic system in which the country’s assets and industries are in the hands of as many private owners as possible - is not discussed much outside of small circles.
The fact that there developed a school of thought directly inspired by a papal encyclical is itself remarkable, and a testament to the boldness of a very remarkable leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIII.
At the time of his election in 1878 following the death of the longest ever serving Pope, Pius IX, many appear to have considered the former Cardinal Pecci as a placeholder of sorts, chosen on the grounds that as a cardinal of advancing years, he would not reign for very long.
If so, they were greatly mistaken. In a pontificate lasting for a quarter of a century, one of Pope Leo XIII’s greatest accomplishments was the drafting of Rerum Novarum in 1891.
Issued a century after the upheavals of the French Revolution, the Pope was addressing a world turned upside down by economic industrialisation, political radicalisation, urbanisation and secularism.
In describing “the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world,” Leo identified as a key problem the growing divisions between “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses.”
Rather than accepting the contention that state socialism was necessary to right capitalism’s defects, Leo suggested that what was needed was more private property, held in a greater number of human hands.
Citing the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, Leo wrote that governments needed to practice a system of justice which was “distributive - toward each and every class alike.” Everyone should be able to feel that they were part of society, and that part of the society’s overall wealth belonged to them.
Summing up his views in a sentence, the Pope wrote that: “The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.”
In the following decades, the encyclical inspired many Catholics to consider this issue in more detail, and this included two of the finest writers of the early 20th century - Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton - who repeatedly made the case for a broader base of property ownership in popular works such as Belloc’s ‘The Servile State’ and Chesterton’s ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’
Belloc’s call for the “re-establishment of a Distributive State” drew direct attention to Leo XIII’s words and through Belloc’s writings and that of others, distributism was born.
The Distributist League which the Chesterbelloc combination helped to establish wanted to redistribute property, pass new laws favouring small businesses and promote a return to the land, among other things.
It is hardly a comprehensive manifesto, and one can understand the criticism that distributism was never really practicable.
There is also a strong case to be made that it would be even less realistic today. The focus on land is a clear sign of how dated distributism can appear.
More importantly, as Trent Horn pointed out in his book on Catholicism and socialism, “the vast majority of the productive capital that exists today can’t be distributed,” for it is the intellectual property which exists in the human mind.
A large farm can be subdivided, and so could a chain of shops perhaps, but the form of human capital on which today’s prosperity is built is not divisible.
19th century land reform in Ireland
There was one large-scale example of a practical distribution of property which both Belloc and Chesterton could both point to, and they often did - the Irish land reforms of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Nineteenth century Ireland was one of the most egregious examples of economic inequality which existed anywhere.
The facts are stark, and explained very lucidly in Myles Dungan’s recent book, Land Is All That Matters. In the 1870s, about 50 percent of Ireland was owned by 800 landlords, half of whom lived outside the country. Of Irish farmers, 97 percent were tenants, and 3 percent were farm owners.
After decades of ceaseless land agitation, British governments were forced to introduce various pieces of legislation making it possible for Irish tenants to purchase their farms, and to pay the money back over many decades on favourable terms.
This was spectacularly successful. Almost 500,000 Irish holdings were purchased from landlords over these decades, and the genesis of the family farms in Ireland today can be traced to these laws.
A small number of large property owners had been replaced by a vast number of small property owners.
To Belloc and Chesterton, this was an inspiration.
Chesterton called for a similar approach in Britain to be based on the “policy of buying out landlordism…as it has already been adopted in Ireland,” while Belloc declared with admiration that “Ireland has decided for a free peasantry.”
Irish land reform was however seen more as a national rather than an economic change reform, being inextricably linked with Ireland’s ongoing efforts to recover its lost independence.
The famous Land League was set up long before Rerum Novarum was issued, and Pope Leo XIII had been far from supportive of the efforts of the Irish peasantry. Just three years before Rerum Novarum was issued, Leo had even issued an encyclical specifically condemning the practice of boycotting landlords after the Vatican had been encouraged to take this step by the British government.
Belloc and Chesterton may have seen the Irish land reforms as Catholic distributism in action, but Ireland’s Catholics had a rather different view. They had taken back their soil from the English landlords, and would soon evict England’s soldiers and policemen as well - papal encyclical or no papal encyclical.
A future for Distributism
On an overall level, distributism never caught on or entered political discourse as a mainstream idea.
Regardless of the political success - or lack thereof - of the small distributist movement, Rerum Novarum remains a document which is worth returning to again and again.
Rerum Novarum is sometimes translated as “Of New Things,” and this can lead some to think that its contents are not part of the continuity of Church teaching.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As one writer points out, Pope Leo XIII “would have been appalled” to be described as the founder of anything, given that he “intended nothing other than to apply to current concerns what Jesus taught his apostles and what they handed down to their successors.”
What Pope Leo XIII was doing, and what Belloc, Chesterton and the other distributists were doing was both noble and practical.
Even if we do not need distributism, we do need a distributist approach in which Catholics think about the secular problems of the day - whether that be income inequality, Artificial Intelligence, environmental degradation or anything else - through a prism of religious faith and the guidance which the Church authorities have handed down.
Big problems require deep thinking. As Chesterton quipped: “It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.”
None of this is theoretical. When Catholics retreat from engaging in politics - or when they choose to leave their religious beliefs at the doors of parliaments, as if they were removing their hats - they leave a moral vacuum which is inevitably going to be filled by something else.
We have to ask questions about the state of our societies and make our own voices heard. An excellent way of doing this is by examining how modern Catholic Social Teaching has developed since Pope Leo XIII saw the revolution before him, collected his thoughts and began to write.
Forward this to your friends.
James Bradshaw writes from Ireland on topics including history, culture, film and literature.
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