HILAIRE BELLOC: THE SERVILE STATE AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DISTRIBUTISM

July 27th is the birthday of Hilaire Belloc, one of the great radical traditionalists.

by Keith Preston

From the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century until the era of the Great Depression immediately preceding the commencement of the Second World War, the most enduring internal conflict within the nations of the West was rooted in what was then called the “social question.” The growth of industrialization and the dispossession of the agrarian peasant classes during the time of the enclosure movement had created within the industrializing nations a massive proletarian class of permanently pauperized laborers and the deplorable social conditions which accompanied the growth of this class.

NEITHER PROGRESSIVE NOR CONSERVATIVE: THE ANTI-MODERNISM OF G.K. CHESTERTON

by Keith Preston

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) bears the distinction of being a writer who resisted virtually all of the dominant trends of his era. He lived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, precisely the time that modernity was fully consolidating itself within Western civilization more than a century after the apex of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Chesterton began his writing career as a young man and as the twentieth century was just beginning. As much as any other writer from his era, he predicted the horrors that century would entail.