Hilaire Belloc Research Articles

Własność i cywilizacja łacińska. Dystrybucjonizm w myśli polityczno-prawnej Feliksa Konecznego

Przedmiot badań: Dorobek intelektualny Feliksa Konecznego cieszy się współcześnie stosunkowo dużą popularnością, inspirując twórczy dyskurs naukowy w wielu dziedzinach. Najważniejszym elementem owej spuścizny jest oryginalne opracowanie zagadnienia cywilizacji, a w szczególności cywilizacji łacińskiej, którą opisał w sposób wyczerpujący i z którą osobiście się identyfikował. Aby lepiej zrozumieć istotę jego myśli, należy spojrzeć na nią z różnych perspektyw. Przedmiotem niniejszej pracy jest próba zestawienia założeń cywilizacji łacińskiej u Konecznego z ustrojem o potencjalnie podobnej naturze, aby ukazać oba zagadnienia w nowym świetle – lepiej wytłumaczyć źródła obu systemów, jak i wytyczyć potencjalne ścieżki rozwoju.
 Cel badawczy: Celem artykułu jest umiejscowienie cywilizacji łacińskiej obok dystrybucjonizmu i zbadanie, w jakim stopniu dystrybucjonizm spełnia wymagania ustrojowe postawione cywilizacji łacińskiej przez Konecznego. Dystrybucjonizm, koncepcja ustroju społeczno-ekonomicznego opracowana przez Hilaire Belloca i Gilberta Keitha Chestertona zakłada w swojej istocie potrzebę jak najszerszej dystrybucji dóbr materialnych. Autor stawia sobie za cel opisanie, na ile ten cel jest kompatybilny z cywilizacją łacińską.
 Metoda badawcza: Autor za pomocą metody historyczno-porównawczej i krytycznej zestawia ze sobą cywilizację łacińską i dystrybucjonizm. Drogą gruntownej analizy materiałów źródłowych dokonuje określenia genez i podstawowych czynników składowych obu koncepcji, a następnie wskazuje na analogie i pokrewieństwa.
 Wyniki: Wnioskiem końcowym jest stwierdzenie wysokiej kompatybilności cywilizacji łacińskiej z doktryną dystrybucjonizmu. Identyfikacji podlegają liczne tożsame elementy: uznanie znaczenia własności i wolności ekonomicznej; postulat jak najszerszej dystrybucji własności, zwłaszcza własności nieruchomości; aposterioryzm w kształtowaniu ustroju; system prawny sprzyjający podziałowi i utrzymaniu własności; afirmacja roli Kościoła Katolickiego i chrześcijańskiej moralności w kształtowaniu społeczeństw. Uzyskane wyniki badań pozwalają postawić tezę o dystrybucjonizmie jako modelowym ustroju ekonomicznym w cywilizacji łacińskiej. Powodzenie przeprowadzonej analizy porównawczej rokuje pozytywnie na dalszą komparatystykę, mającą za przedmiot typy cywilizacji u Konecznego oraz systemy ekonomiczne opisane przez Belloca i Chestertona.

The Theopolitical Vision of G. K. Chesterton and J. R. R. Tolkien and its Contemporary Relevance

What might Chesterton and Tolkien have to offer to contemporary political thought and practice? This essay argues that they share a common project in their fiction and discursive writing, which is to find a way to acknowledge the value of the local and personal, while directing private good to the universal through the concept of the common good. This has implications for our response to environmental crisis as well as the manner in which we relate the one and the many.The sources of Chesterton's thought in Anglo-Catholic and Guild socialism as much as in Hilaire Belloc's Distributism are discussed.

The "Servile State" Down Under: Hilaire Belloc and Australian Political Thought, 1912-53.

This article examines the widespread and varied reception of Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State (1912) in Australia from the time of its publication to the mid-twentieth century. Belloc's claim that market capitalism was giving rise to a series of legislative reforms which entrenched the inferior, servile status of the working classes was of particular interest in Australia where innovations such as compulsory industrial arbitration were pioneered. In the 1930s Belloc's ideas inspired the Catholic Action movement, and they were subsequently developed in the debates around post-war reconstruction by a range of figures including the radical professor of philosophy John Anderson.

‘We who strive for the foundation of a principle’: feminism and suffrage in the biography of Bessie Parkes Belloc

ABSTRACT Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc, 1829–1925) was a central figure in British women’s rights activism during the 1850s and 1860s. She was founding editor of the feminist English Woman’s Journal and one of the organisers of the pioneering 1866 petition for women’s suffrage. She lived long enough to witness some women gaining the vote in 1918, by which time her children, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Hilaire Belloc, were themselves public figures who had taken up opposing positions on women’s suffrage. This article takes as its starting point 1866, a pivotal moment in nineteenth-century agitation for women’s suffrage and in Parkes Belloc’s individual biography, before moving to a longer view of her feminist life before and after this date. It demonstrates the value of a biographical approach to exploring the diversity of perspectives and experiences of women within first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement.

Remembering Hilaire Belloc with Father James Schall Schall on Belloc is a marriage of minds made in heaven.

Remembering Hilaire Belloc with Father James Schall Schall on Belloc is a marriage of minds made in heaven.

Cywilizacja zagrożona rozpadem. Wpływ reformacji na ustrój ekonomiczny Europy według Hilaire Belloca

Hilaire Belloc, pisarz angielski pierwszej połowy XX w. i bliski przyjaciel G.K Chestertona, znany był ze swego niezłomnego katolicyzmu oraz wagi, jaką przywiązywał do roli Kościoła w kształtowaniu cywilizacji europejskiej. W połączeniu z ekonomią dawało to konsekwentną wizję historyczną z punktem przesilenia w postaci tzw. reformacji z początku XVI w. Jego zdaniem cywilizacja europejska początkowo istniała w formie ustrojowej określanej jako państwo niewolnicze, które przekształciło się następnie dzięki chrześcijaństwu w państwo dystrybucyjne – uosobienie warunków stanowiących najwyższe możliwe osiągnięcie w dziedzinie stosunków społeczno-ekonomicznych. Jednakże w wyniku reformacji moralność europejska uległa zmianie, czego wynikiem było powstanie kapitalizmu, a przez to zdegradowanie większości społeczeństwa do ludzi pozbawionych wolności ekonomicznej, wraz z dalszymi możliwymi następstwami w postaci socjalizmu, komunizmu i powrotu niewolnictwa. W niniejszym artykule autor argumentuje, iż wbrew popularnym opiniom wpływ reformacji na ustrój ekonomiczny nie stanowił wartości dodanej do cywilizacji europejskiej, lecz destrukcję sprawdzonego i efektywnego systemu przez nową moralność, która w dłuższej perspektywie prowadziła społeczeństwo do dalszych negatywnych konsekwencji.

U kresu drogi do państwa niewolniczego. Krytyka socjalizmu w twórczości Hilaire Belloca i Gilberta Keitha Chestertona

Socjalizm zapisał się w historii jako obietnica remedium na niepożądane cechy ustroju kapitalistycznego. System ten spotykał się jednak od samego początku z negatywną oceną wielu badaczy, którzy opisywali niebezpieczeństwa wynikające z takiego rozwiązania. Wśród nich byli H. Belloc oraz G.K. Chesterton, dwóch angielskich autorów działających w pierwszej połowie XX w., którzy powołali do życia oryginalną koncepcję społeczno-ekonomiczną, znaną jako dystrybucjonizm. Pisząc z perspektywy rzymskiego katolicyzmu i cywilizacji chrześcijańskiej, byli oni głęboko rozgoryczeni znanym im z doświadczenia industrialnym kapitalizmem. Jednocześnie odrzucali socjalizm jako alternatywę, powołując się na naturalny charakter instytucji własności prywatnej oraz wrodzoną człowiekowi potrzebę wolności. W niniejszym artykule autor argumentuje, iż socjalizm nie stanowi słusznej odpowiedzi na bolączki kapitalizmu, będąc ustrojem w istocie swojej sprzecznym z ludzką naturą, wszelkie zaś próby wprowadzenia w życie jego założeń kończą się nie postulowanym kolektywizmem i uspołecznieniem środków produkcji, lecz dalszym pogwałceniem praw ludzkich, a ostatecznie przywróceniem pogańskiego w swoim charakterze państwa niewolniczego.

Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past

Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past

Love and its Obstacles

Love and its Obstacles Gardner McFall (bio) Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult D. Nurkse Alfred A. Knopf www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549019/love-in-the-last-days-by-d-nurkse/ 104 Pages; Print, $27.00 For nearly thirty years, D. Nurkse has written seriously and prolifically about common human experience (marriage, divorce, the birth of his first child, death of his parents, illness, surgery) as well as world events (the draft, the Iraq War, 9/11), but his recurring, most powerful preoccupation has been love, which is masked and distilled in his eleventh volume, a book-length poetic sequence, Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult. Choosing to reinterpret the twelfth century story of the tragic lovers Tristan and Iseult during the "last days" (presumably human kind's last days) allows the poet to posit the supremacy of love across time as well as the nature of the last days, with its harsh intolerance for passionate, transgressive love. It also shows that love burns fiercest with obstacles in its path. While it helps to have a copy of Joseph Bedier's The Romance of Tristan and Iseult (tr. Hilaire Belloc [2005]) and Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World (tr. Montgomery Belgion [1956]) when reading the book, it's not imperative since, as de Rougemont states: "There is no reason to have read Beroul's Tristan or M. Bedier's, and no need to have heard Wagner's opera, in order to undergo in the course of everyday life the nostalgic domination of such a myth . . . The myth operates wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of being feared like a malignant fever." Still, several points in de Rougemont's book concerning the Tristan myth are borne out in Nurkse's twenty-first century retelling: 1) "Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself;" 2) Passion involves suffering; and 3) "Suffering and understanding are deeply connected; death and self-awareness are in league." In Love in the Last Days as well as Bedier's version of the story, Tristan and Iseult's passion derives from a love potion they mistakenly drink as Tristan sails to take the Irish princess Iseult to marry his uncle and liege, King Mark of Cornwall. Yoking imagery to theme, Nurkse ascribes to the potion a flavor of "honey and bile," foretelling the couple's love and doom, though he suggests the pair is attracted to each other before they ever taste it. Tristan says: "Her high cheek bones made me slightly seasick. / I concentrated on her faults, as Ovid advises. / A mole on her cheek. But that was what fascinated me." De Rougemont calls the philtre "passion's alibi," the excuse for their ship-board affair and adultery at court. Although Tristan and Iseult's love is transgressive by conventional standards, which gives the story its tragic arc, Nurkse's volume pits love against the law; the reader can easily conclude that love is a higher calling, holding within it the possibility of love's existence beyond time, in eternity or Avalon, the enchanted island where the lovers presumably reunite after death. Love inthe Last Days, dedicated tothememory of Marc Bloch, comprises thirty-nine poems, mostly monologues, divided into a prelude (told by a harper), four sections dedicated to the advancing story, and a coda which returns to the harper, who is tortured to death for being "a chronicler of heretic adulterers." Most of the monologues are Tristan's, though Iseult speaks in several, one of which is titled "Everyone in This Story Speaks Except Me." Nurkse gives monologues to the animals, landscape, and inanimate objects so the volume never bogs down in ponderous narration, but advances through a bristling juxtaposition of perspectives. Any person, creature, or thing in a position to have a view about the lovers has a voice, including Iseult's servant Brangien; the Leper to whom the king gives Iseult as punishment for her infidelity; Tristan's horse Beau Jouer that carries the lovers into Morois; Tristan's loyal dog Houdain; the...

The Child's Death as Punishment or Nonsense? Edward Gorey's "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" (1963) and the Cautionary Verse Tradition

Edward Gorey's alphabet book "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" (1963) can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of a tradition of literary representation of children's deaths and especially of cautionary tales and verse. In order to show how Gorey's Gothic nonsense modifies this tradition, this paper considers different functions of the child's death in literature, moving from the moralizing cautionary tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the more parodic cautionary verse that emerged in the nineteenth century. Classic examples of cautionary verse such as Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (1845) and Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children (1907) can be seen as precursors of Gorey's work, while a comparison of selected vignettes from the three texts illustrates Gorey's innovation and the refinement of his nonsense. The children's deaths no longer serve any moral or didactic purpose, producing a tension between the search for such a purpose and an apparent meaninglessness. Instead of resulting in despair, the Gothic elements of Gorey's text and images are placed in the service of nonsense, which resolves in humor.

Henry Morton Stanley and Emin Pasha: New Historical Sources for Heart of Darkness

Henry Morton Stanley and Emin Pasha:New Historical Sources for Heart of Darkness Jeffrey Meyers (bio) In 1885, Emin Pasha, the German-born, Turkish-titled governor of Equatoria—the southernmost province of the Egyptian Sudan, on the upper reaches of the Nile—had acquired an enormous treasure of ivory, worth as much as £60,000, but was cut off from the outside world. The Moslem rebel who called himself the Mahdi, or Messiah, had captured Khartoum, killed the governor of the Sudan, General Charles Gordon, and publicly exhibited his severed head. The British explorer and adventurer Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) had achieved international fame in 1871 by finding a distinguished medical missionary in Central Africa and greeting him with the understated query, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" He wanted to repeat this astonishing achievement by rescuing Emin Pasha. From 1879 to 1884, Stanley had been the principal agent in developing King Leopold II's privately owned and notoriously brutal Congo Free State, which was seventy-six times larger than his Belgian kingdom. Stanley explored the vast region, built roads, launched steamships, and duped the local chiefs into signing, with an X, extortionate treaties in a language they could not understand. Stanley could have taken the more direct route from British East Africa. But King Leopold, whose greed was insatiable, insisted that Stanley, still under contract to the king, take the longer and more dangerous west-to-east route along the Congo River. The king hoped to seize more unknown territory and even absorb Equatoria itself. Stanley and his ten British officers started out in Cairo in January 1886, stopped in Zanzibar to pick up hundreds of Arab porters, and sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. He entered the Congo at the quaintly named Banana, situated on the coast and at the mouth of the river, then trekked through the primeval jungle to Boma, Matadi, and Leopoldville, next to the widening of the river at a place he'd previously named Stanley Pool. For the next thousand miles, from Stanley Pool to Stanleyville, near the seven cataracts at Stanley Falls, he navigated the river by steamboat, which had been carried in sections and reassembled for the journey. Stanley began with more than 700 men and lost more than 500. [End Page 77] The expedition suffered from the burning climate, heavy burdens, exhausting marches, lack of food, near starvation, numerous desertions, virulent disease, hostile tribes, and frequent deaths. Stanley had left a severed head hanging from a tree to warn the Africans not to resist his depredations when he came back. Arthur Jephson, one of Stanley's gentlemanly officers, developed an intense loathing for the river: "One hates it as if it were a living thing—it is so treacherous & crafty, so overpowering & relentless in its force & overwhelming strength" (Liebowitz 171). Jephson wrote that when two of his African followers were wounded in battle and clearly dying, they "looked at me with doglike eyes, like suffering animals. And I felt sickeningly sorry for them & awfully choky" (Liebowitz 116). Stanley masked commercial rapacity as a mission of mercy and made efficient use of the Maxim gun that could shoot 330 rounds a minute. As Hilaire Belloc wrote of British firepower, "Whatever happens we have got / The Maxim gun and they have not" (Belloc, IV). Stanley burned villages, killed unarmed Africans, inflicted severe lashings, beat some porters to death, executed deserters, captured Africans, sold them as slaves, and served them as human sacrifices to starving cannibals. The man-eaters removed the internal organs of their victims, stuffed them with bananas and barbecued them over a fire. Jephson also reported, with grisly detail, "Opposite my hut is a large dead bough stuck in the ground & garnished with skulls & bones, some of them are not picked clean, the natives had not eaten all the meat off them" (Liebowitz 121). The British saw cannibal feasts as the essence of primitive barbarism and justification for conquest, though many myths and plays suggest that this custom had also been practiced in ancient Greece. In The Iliad, Homer wrote that Achilles had a tremendous desire to carve up Hector's flesh and devour it: "I wish only that my...

Between Life and Art: Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome

If an author's impact on English letters can be judged by amount of critical literature devoted to his work, then prospect for Hilaire Belloc is pretty dismal. The MLA International Bibliography lists only ten peer reviewed articles related to Belloc, more than half of which are over twenty years old, and not one of which deals with his most well-known work, The Path to Rome. (1) This tells story not, as title would suggest, of a conversion to Catholicism, but of a journey Belloc made in June, 1901, during which he attempted to walk in a straight line from Toul, commune situated in northeastern France where he served in French military, to Rome. He solemnized journey via vow, or rather, vows, to effect that he would keep same shoes whole trip, sleep rough, hear Mass every morning, not take advantage of any wheeled thing, and arrive in Rome on feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. (2) Over course of book, Belloc breaks all these vows save strict vow of arriving in Rome on June 29 (PR, vi). Few have ever commented explicitly on The Path to Rome. Those who have generally dismiss it as either a book (3) or some kind of self-portrait. (4) Neither of these readings, however, does justice to elements that make avant-garde. For instance, Belloc told American journalist Maria Lansdale that he envisioned The Path to Rome being decousu and written anyhow of its essence. (5) Decousu, literally unstitched or incoherent, is a fairly apt description. With no chapter headings, no dates, over seventy pictures, songs, and scraps of verse, narrative pace of keeps time with Belloc's wandering feet. The peculiar stream of consciousness resulting from this approach foreshadows some of Belloc's later modernist peers. (6) Furthermore, Belloc's use of travel genre is similar to much later, post-modernist conventions. (7) All of this is interesting, but real greatness of The Path to Rome actually lies in its self-conscious medievalism. This is first referenced in a passage so obscure that many contemporary readers might miss it. In preface, Praise of this Book, Belloc writes: Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into desecrated earth under doss-house of Rue St. Paul, or do you not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or drinking that you will not lend us staff of Friar John wherewith he slaughtered and bashed invader of vineyards, who are but a parable for mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of world? (PR, vii) Since Rabelais is not necessarily a household name to contemporary English speakers, this passage is confusing. A sixteenth-century French author, Rabelais was hugely influential in development of French literature; in world literature he holds a place similar to Shakespeare or Cervantes. (8) He is best known for works Belloc alludes to in this passage, Gargantua and Pantagruel, rollicking tales of bawdy giants and their grotesque adventures. (9) What makes Belloc's mention of Rabelais peculiarly interesting is that it suggests that most fruitful way to understand The Path to Rome is to consider it as an example of carnivalesque, a medieval and early modern genre described by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his Rabelais and His World, published in English in 1965. Background For North Americans, word carnival calls up images of seedy travelling fairs common to rural summertime. (10) When Bakhtin chose term, however, he was thinking of European usage meaning the season immediately preceding Lent, devoted in Italy and other Roman Catholic countries to revelry and riotous amusement. (11) The Mardi Gras celebrations of American South offer a dim reflection of morris-dances, sword-dances, wassailings, mock ceremonies of summer kings and queens and lords of misrule, mummings, disguising, masques . …

Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II. By Jay P. Corrin. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. x + 523 pp. $49.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II . By Jay P. Corrin . Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press , 2013. x + 523 pp. $49.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesWhen John XXIII announced his intention in January 1959 to convene an ecumenical council, the reaction within the Roman Catholic Church ranged from apprehension and suspicion on the part of conservatives to expressions of joyful anticipation and hope from Catholics who realized that their church must adapt to the demands of the modern world. death of John XXIII in 1963 did not disrupt the momentum of Vatican Council II, which convened in 1962. His successor, Paul VI, continued the work of the council which addressed many issues such as ecumenism, liturgy, social justice, and the role of the laity, and when the council ended on December 8, 1965, it was apparent that changes would take place within Roman Catholicism. In this important book, Jay P. Corrin, Professor of Social Sciences at Boston University, examines the reactions of the English Catholic Left to the council and how this group worked to implement its decrees, especially in the area of social issues, in the life of the Catholic Church.Corrin divides his book into three distinctive but complimentary sections. first, The English Cultural Setting, examines the conservative and ultramontane nature of English Catholicism. Irish immigration and the existence of old recusant families fostered an atmosphere unfriendly to change. author describes the nature of Catholicism up to the 1960s as insular, apolitical or at least politically conformist, highly authoritative, and out of touch with what was transpiring among Catholic theologians on both the Continent and in the United States (19). But there had been hints of radical thought earlier in the century in the Distributist movement associated with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. author presents the thoughts of these two individuals and the importance of the Distributists on later radicalism in a concise and informative manner. By the end of World War II, however, a conservative spirit still dominated English Catholicism, but Corrin points out that Catholics, in particular the clergy, were slowly emerging out of a ghetto culture and forsaking the traditional siege mentality. By the early 1960s, a new breed of Catholic intellectuals emerged and began to question accepted social and theological standards.Part Two, The Reformers, is an objective and well-balanced account of Vatican Council II and the important role played by John XXIII. To emphasize the revolutionary nature of the council, the author first reminds the reader of the conservative and reactionary ethos of Catholicism which had been enforced by the ultramontane papacy. Liturgical reform, the New Theology, which called for a reappraisal of the relation of the church to society, the insights of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the worker-priest movement posed serious threats to the orthodoxy and traditions of the Catholic Church, but the election of John XXIII and the council initiated changes favored by progressive thinkers. Corrin's discussion of this pope's vision for the church, his encyclicals, and the criticism he faced serve as an appropriate background for a brief but perceptive discussion of the council and its impact on English Catholicism. …

Medievalism: A Critical History by David Matthews (review)

Reviewed by: Medievalism: A Critical History by David Matthews John Martyn Matthews, David, Medievalism: A Critical History (Medievalism, 6), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2015; hardback; pp. 229; 13 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £50.00; ISBN 9781843843924. In his recent book on medievalism, David Matthews traces the history of medievalism from its first appearance in the sixteenth century down to modern times. He provides examples from literature, art, film, music, and from trends in architecture, identifying the grotesque and the romantic, and explaining the rise of medievalism both in England and in Germany. Matthews considers medievalism to be an influential field, but still in a minority form, especially beside medieval studies, with its rich tradition of scholarship. He shows great diversity in his choice of sources, ranging over nearly a hundred years of literature, architecture, and medievalist films. Matthews divides his book, rather repetitively, into seven sections: ‘Taxonomies, how many Middle Ages?’; ‘Time, space, self, society: Welcome to the current Middle Ages – asynchronous medievalism’; ‘This way to the Middle Ages: the spaces of medievalism’; ‘On being medieval: medievalist selves and societies’; ‘History and discipline: Wemmick’s castle; the limits of medievalism’; ‘Realism in the crypt: the reach of medievalism’; and ‘Conclusion; Against a synthesis: medievalism, cultural studies, and antidisciplinarity’. In his Afterword, Matthews describes a stage performance, at London’s Southbank Centre, of Lavinia Greenlaws’s ‘A Double Sorrow’, her version of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ending his text with ‘As Troilus’s laughter echoed, there was some future in all of this, some future for the Middle Ages’. Appendix I is based on sixty-seven responses to a Middle Ages survey, giving the ages, countries, employment, education, and periods chosen, [End Page 392] while Appendix II gives a very useful list of data and dates relating to religion, literature, and art, from 1534 to 1906. A bibliography follows and an index of names. There are a few illustrations, including a barely relevant picture of the interior of Sydney’s Opera House, and six on Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop – depicting Quilp and Nell and the grim sexton in the crypt – which are all very medieval. Matthews notes Studies in Medievalism, started in 1970 by Leslie Workman, which has attracted eminent contributors and he sees the acceptance of medievalism at Kalamazoo in the 1970s and in Leeds in 1994 as a possible breakthrough for the field. But the lack of scholarship in the journal, with only modern authors, provides an obstacle to his contention, and he fails to stress the irony in the ten different Middle Ages described by Umberto Eco. The brilliant Scot, George Buchanan, is not mentioned, although author of the first history of Scotland and tutor to Mary Queen of Scots. Nor does Matthews mention the Inquisition, all too active in its operations, with its brutal variety of tortures to break the spirits, or bodies, of the most brilliant of men and women, which serves as a grim symbol of horror in the Middle Ages. Even so, Matthew’s studies of works by Walter Scott, Dante, Rosetti, John Ruskin, Jane Austen, Chaucer, Tennyson, Hilaire Belloc, Charlotte Bronte, Dan Brown, Norman Cantor, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, and many other authors from England, and Germany, attest to his very wide reading of primarily English literature, for which anyone reading his book should be grateful. As a major new work on medievalism, it deserves to be studied by students or scholars interested in this latest period of a medieval revival. John Martyn The University of Melbourne Copyright © 2015 John Martyn

Economic theory of distributism

this paper, the economic theory of distributism has been analyzed. In the first place, the author explains that the distributism is a social thought which emerged in the Anglo-American world as the development of social teachings in the Roman Catholic Church. Although it has not received the status the main schools in modern economic thought have, distrubutism persists as a specific direction of socio-economic thinking. The paper particularly investigates the ideas of classical distibutism. The author focuses on two basic books by Gilbert Chesterton and two most important economic books by Hilaire Belloc. These authors have insisted on the problem of society moving towards the so-called servile state in which a small number of capitalists rule over mass of proletarians who are gradually coming under slavery status, which is sanctioned by the law. For the purpose of remedying this tendency and collectivism, they proposed a series of measures for a repeated broad distribution of ownership over the means of production. Finally, there is an overview of this idea and its development throughout the twentieth century, finishing with contemporary distributists like John Medaille and Alan Carlson.

Editorial/Letters/Crossword

Editorial/Letters/Crossword

Bax and the ‘Celtic North’

Scholars of Arnold Bax have long acknowledged the influence of the Irish Literary Revival on the composer’s compositional output up to about 1920, of Sibelius from the late 1920s onwards, and of the continuity of styles between these two periods. In this article I argue that this continuity relies on what Bax draws from early Yeats, which is less Celtic mythology or folklore than a particular way of imagining nature; that Bax’s use as a compositional stimulus of what he called the ‘Celtic North’ (essentially the landscapes of western Ireland and north-western Scotland) had parallels in the literature and art of 1920s Ireland; and that the ‘Celtic North’ offers a means of critiquing inter-war English pastoralism, which has traditionally been associated with what Alun Howkins, after Hilaire Belloc, has called the ‘South Country’. Bax thus offers a musical engagement with nature that is essentially dystopian, sublime and (within the discourse of British pastoralism) non-Anglo Saxon.

Catholic Substance in The Golden Bowl

Catholic Substance in The Golden Bowl Roger Duncan (bio) Even if we look only at the fact that his most significant dramatic work is about a man’s vicissitudes on the way to the Catholic priesthood,1 it might be reasonable to conclude that the question of the place of Catholicism in Henry James’s work has been too little discussed. I do not mean James’s personal relationship to the Faith, as though it were a question of some crypto-Catholicism. James was Protestant, not of course in the virulent anti-Whore of Babylon sense, but in that loose and liberal fashion, typical of the upper crust New Yorkers or Bostonians of his time, who looked at Catholicism as something historically passé and impossible to return to, something quaint but undoubtedly a strong part of the fabric of what made continental Europe deep and interesting.2 We can see the point of Hilaire Belloc’s claim that Europe is the Church, at least in the sense in which someone might say Notre Dame is football. You would think anyone could see this, and James certainly did. James’s characters need the mystery of old Europe as the stage of their drama, certainly,3 but it is possible to go further and say that this structural necessity implicates the Catholic Church in definite ways. In the late novels the Church becomes a player in its own right, intrinsic to moral and spiritual resolutions. [End Page 56] Catholicism in the Novels There is, however, a problem in discussing how his novels treat and use Catholicism if all we can do is cite instances of the general attitude expressed in his major characters, reverent toward, even reliant upon, the Church’s deep continuity and tradition and moral firmness as they are. So, for instance, when the protagonist of The Aspern Papers learns that the sisters are Catholic, he and the readers are struck with how much more he is up against than he or we had thought. Aha, we think, that somehow accounts for their no-nonsense firmness. And we are not surprised when in What Masie Knew the care of Masie falls to Mrs. Wix; she is one strange lady, but that she contemplates becoming a Catholic and can relate to the town of Boulogne in terms of its Marian mystery somehow testify to her stability and moral seriousness. It is possible to catalogue these references and draw sober conclusions about the acute awareness of a good artist who is favorable to the Catholic Church at a distance and aware in a balanced way of its lingering moral authority. Edwin Fussell has done this.4 We begin to go beyond Fussell when we note that the famous late trio of novels takes this benign stance a turn of the screw further, so to speak: the Church becomes subtly central. When Strether in The Ambassadors, on one of his frequent visits to the sacred center of Paris, identifies the returning bowed figure in the recesses of Notre Dame as Madame de Vionnet, it is an eye-opener. He grasps how the European cultural-religious matrix is large enough to hold even the relational vagaries of this sophisticated set: how, we might say, Mme. de Vionnet can be in a sense profoundly Catholic though on the sacramental periphery. This is more than a positive evaluation; it is crucial to what induces Strether finally to lay off trying to save anyone from this milieu. The depth of Europe is a Catholic depth. Whether Strether gets all this consciously or not, we get it, or if we do not, we simply do not have any idea what this scene is all about. The Catholic moment in The Ambassadors glows gently in the middle of the novel and subsides into the background, helping to [End Page 57] set an atmosphere, richer, deeper, and more subtle than the narrow moralism and questionable righteousness of Woolett, Massachusetts. In The Wings of the Dove the Old Faith plays a more serious role. Here it is not a matter of the diffused Catholic atmosphere of Paris but of the Church as moral and spiritual Trojan horse in the middle...

How to Craft a Just Economy (not Enforce a Mad Utopia): Response to Michael Black

Most people see ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ as opposed, but for ‘distributists’, like G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, they are both fatally flawed. Instead, distributists ‘believe that ownership in the means of livelihood is normal to man, and necessary to liberty.’ At present, the ownership of productive property is concentrated in too few hands, which causes all sorts of problems, including the latest round of Wall Street failures and bailouts. The question is, how can we achieve a better distribution of property without going down the Utopian road of coercion (and nightmare)? At the heart of distributist theory is the conviction that widespread ownership is what most people actually want. Distributists don’t want to coerce anyone into becoming owners; we want to remove the coercions that currently prevent most people from becoming owners. In theory, all adults in Western societies are already free to become their own economic masters; in reality, a myriad of coercive tactics keep most economic control in a few hands. Although we should work on the political side to end these coercions (for instance, the current government tax breaks, bailouts, and outright subsidies to large corporations), the main distributist focus is always on widespread, personal action. We can do much more than we’re doing with the freedoms we still have, especially our choices in how we shop and how we work.

FROM THE CHRIST-KILLER TO THE LUCIFERIAN: THE MYTHOLOGIZED JEW AND FREEMASON IN LATE NINETEENTH- AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLISH CATHOLIC DISCOURSE

Conventional wisdom in studies of English antisemitism has tended to suggest that by nineteenth century religious prejudice had largely been secularised or replaced by modern socio- political and racial forms of hostility. This may have been case in general English discourse, but in English Catholic discourse at turn of twentieth century, traditional pre-modern myths, with their cast of Jewish and Masonic diabolists, were still a pervasive feature. This article examines a range of sources, including published works of prominent and obscure authors, pastoral letters and sermons of cardinals, bishops and priests, articles and editorials in newspapers and periodicals, letters, and a small number of oral testimonies, in order to bring to light an English Catholic discourse which, with exception of published works of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, has largely gone unexamined. Prominent mythological villains in English Catholic discourse during late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century included the Pharisee, the Christ-Killer, the Ritual Murderer, the Sorcerer, the Antichrist and the Luciferian. This article examines continued presence of narratives in which Jews and Freemasons were assigned one or more of these villainous roles. This article presents some of results of an investigation into representations of the which existed in English Catholic discourse during final years of nineteenth century and early decades of twentieth century (circa 1896 to 1929). Three main types of representation were considered during investigation: roles assigned to Jew in traditional Christian myths, contemporary stereotypes of Jew and composite constructions which combine themes drawn from myths and stereotypes. 1 For purpose of investigation, stereotypes were broadly speaking defined as crude, powerful, resilient but protean representations, which take so-called human vices and virtues, often distorted and magnified, and project them onto all individuals within stereotyped group. In English Catholic discourse, stereotyped Jew was greedy, cowardly, unpatriotic and secretive. 2 He was also depicted as smart, but his intelligence was not considered a virtue. 3 Myths were in essence defined in investigation as important and persistent stories