Thoughts on Hilaire Belloc’s “Essay on the Restoration of Property” ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Although Hilaire Belloc often refers to the type of economy he advocates as “distributist,” he also refers to it as “proprietary,” because of the idea that a truly free economy requires the widest possible distribution of private property.

Recent essays on distributism and the many commentaries responding to them have raised a number of interesting questions and have also revealed that a number of readers, including myself, were to varying degrees perplexed about the aims and methods of implementing distributism. While John Médaille’s five-part series on distributism clarified much, the discussion prompted me to return to one of distributism’s earliest proponents, Hillare Belloc, in order to understand something of the intellectual legacy of a view of political economy that I had only heard described as “good in theory, but totally impractical.” The following is the first in a series of reflections on Belloc’s theory. Essay on the restoration of propertyone of three works by Belloc in which he advocates a distributist economy.

A simple question of semantics?

Some comments in response to recent articles on distributism suggest that the term “distributism” connotes redistribution.—The idea that wealth should be taken from the rich and given to the poor. While I agree that distributism may carry this unfortunate connotation, Belloc’s work on distributism contains language that elucidates the main tenet of distributism. Additionally, Belloc uses another name for his economics that may help clear up the terminological confusion that “distributism” might somehow be synonymous with what might be called “redistributism.”

In his Essay on the restoration of propertyBelloc describes distributism as a society in which sufficiency and security are associated with freedom because “property is so well distributed and so large a proportion of families in the state own and therefore control the means of production that this determines the general tone of the society.” Belloc contrasts this type of society, where many, if not most, families own property, with a capitalist society, where private ownership of property is concentrated in the hands of a very few, and with a communist society, where most, if not all, property is owned by the state. Thus, according to Belloc, distributism aims primarily at two things: (1) more widespread ownership of private property; and (2) the economic freedom that results from ownership of private property.

While Belloc often describes the type of economy he advocates as “distributist,” he also refers to it as “proprietary,” based on the idea that a truly free economy requires the widest possible distribution of private property. Given that “distributism” primarily refers to a society where private property is widely distributed, it would certainly be clearer and more accurate to use Belloc’s other term to describe this type of economy, namely “proprietary economy.” This term not only emphasizes distributism’s emphasis on the widest possible distribution of private property, but also avoids the admittedly off-putting connotation that the term “distributism” carries.

Of course, this terminological substitution may be mere sematics without substance. Even if the “property economy” avoids the unfortunate connotation of a wholesale redistribution of property, the question raised in several comments linked to the distributism articles remains: how could we achieve such an economy if, in fact, our economy is not sufficiently property-based? Nothing in Belloc’s description of a property economy requires that the government redistribute property to ensure that a large proportion of families own it. But it does seem that one way to achieve this goal might be to do just that.

Now, if government redistribution of property is the only way to make the transition from a non-property state to a property-owning state, then, however good the goal of widespread property, many of us would consider the means of achieving it too treacherous, because they offend our distaste for excessive government intervention in the market. Nevertheless, in this case, it may be worth asking whether such government intervention is not the evil we assume it to be, especially given that the good that Belloc believes can only be achieved through a property-owning economy. My next reflection on Belloc’s work will consider this question of whether the death knell for distributism, as some commentaries have suggested, is that a property-owning economy can only be established through such draconian and intolerable means.

See also the author’s book “A Bad Means to a Good End?” and Belloc’s essay on the restoration of property.

This essay was first published here in September 2010.

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The image shown is a vintage bromide print of Hilaire Belloc (1910) by T. & R. Annan & Sons, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.