Distributism is a little-known worldview that ought to be more popular. It is the philosophy of Jeffersonian agrarianism: a nation of small, independent landowners, craftsmen and merchants with the interest in and the economic ability to take part in civic life. It is something done *by* people, and not *to* people. As such, it has an inherent hatred for the state-controlled aspects of socialism, and the plutocrat-controlled aspects of capitalism. "Small Government and Small Business!" is the rallying cry of the Distributist.
Distributist Links:
A Brief Overview.A Distributist Manifesto by the magnificent GKC himself
An Excellent Summary of GKC's political viewsQuotations from Hilare Belloc's The Servile State
Another View on distributism
Articles and Article Sources
A Discussion on Catholic Social Teaching with a big contribution from yours trulyDistributist Organizations or close approximations thereof:Neither Statism nor Individualism from the New Oxford Review magazine.
What is Distributism? by Thomas Storck
A Reply to the above articleStorck's reply to these criticisms
Another Reply
Distributism or the Free Economy?
A Personalist Point on the above exchangeMy Dorothy Day page
Position Paper of The Catholic Worker. Finally, a stand with which I can almost entirely agree.
The Social Order before and after the Protestant Reformation, useful for distributists who look to the medieval age for inspiration
Guild Charters of England, written in Middle English.
The Mondragon Corporation, a Spanish co-operative with many distributist characteristics.Agrarian Links:I wrote a term paper on the Mondragon enterprises, generously reproduced by the UK Third Way organization
Some professor's paper on MondragonCapital Ownership Group at Kent U
National Center for Employee Ownership(U.S. Non-Profit)
World SHARE, the Self-Help and Resource Exchange
The Agrarian Foundation
Further Reading
The Servile State
by Hilaire Belloc, outlining the threat to domestic freedom and suggesting methods to counter such a menaceWho owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, a collection of various distributist and agrarian essays, newly reprinted.
Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton Vol. 5: Outline of Sanity, Utopia of Usurers, and others
by, of course, G.K. Chesterton
Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America
by Bertram Gross
Last updated January 18, 1999
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