Early twentieth-century English writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton-and,...

Early twentieth-century English writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton-and, later, a young Marshall McLuhan-saw in distributism a definitive answer to the failures of both capitalism and state socialism.6, 7, 8 They looked to that same brief moment in the late Middle Ages we've been exploring, when the market was in ascendance and former peasants were making and trading things, as the best example of the ideal economic system. Wealth was relatively widely dispersed, and people had a great deal of control over their livelihoods. They had access to the commons, to a low-cost marketplace, and to their own currencies and credit systems. Craftspeople belonged to trade guilds that both bounded their investment of labor and allowed for the advancement of skills to successive generations. The former peasants of this period became so collectively wealthy that they used their surplus profits to build cathedrals and municipal projects as investments in the future. The centralization of power by the aristocracy and the great Renaissance that followed, according to all three popes, were less a pinnacle of human achievement than an undeserved celebration of dehumanizing technologies, economic injustice, colonial slavery, and an increasingly mechanized approach to life. In distributism, they saw a way to bring back what had been forcibly left behind by the industrial age and the rise of Protestant values that were, not coincidentally, much more directed toward personal achievement, individual wealth, and progress. But

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