Beyond Capitalism and Socialism is a book of essays centered around a single subject, a subject that is not mentioned in its title. This subject is distributism. This immediately compounds the problem that one has in reviewing any book of essays; for, as any book of essays can look at one thing from such a wide variety of angles that to review it coherently might seem impossible, so also distributism often seems so variously or so nebulously characterized that a coherent description of it would seem, to many, impossible.  Indeed, the first words of the first essay of the book, “A Distributist Remembers,” by Aidan Mackey, proclaim that there “can be no precise definition of distributism, for it is organic and cannot be reduced to a formula.”

     Other authors, such as Thomas Storck or Dr. Edward McPhail, describe a distributist economy as an economy marked by the widespread distribution of property.  Nevertheless, in all, Beyond Capitalism and Socialism does not attempt to give a scientific definition and explanation of its subject matter; such would be more properly the work of a treatise.  Instead, it does what any book of essays ought do: look at its subject from many perspectives, and thereby illuminate various facets of its subject.

     An attempt to summarize each of the twelve essays would do justice to none of them, and so I shall not attempt to do so.  A number of points are immediately evident, however.  One is that the book is not primarily meant to argue systematically against the position of those Catholics who have concluded that capitalism is the best economic system for men.  The authors of the essays generally assume that their readers are already members of or sympathize with their position.  Some essays paint very appealing pictures of distributism: Dale Alquist’s essay, for instance, entitled “G.K. Chesterton’s Distributism,” portrays distributism with all of the rhetorical verve and flair of his essay’s title character.  He also portrays it with Chesterton’s usual unconcern for the statistics and mathematical arguments that are usually so appealing to those of an economic bent.  Similarly, Dr. Rupert Ederer’s essay, “Heinrich Pesch and the idea of a Catholic Economics,” is an outline of his subject’s work and not a complete exposition of it; Dr. Edward McPhail’s essay, “Distributism and ‘Modern Economics’” is of similar detail.  This is not a flaw in any of the essays; it merely means that those who desire an in-depth and rigorous defense of distributism ought look elsewhere.

     The book succeeds better in giving a broad historical overview and philosophical background for the entire distributist project.  Gary Potter’s essay, “R.I.P Triumph Magazine,” would be interesting reading for any Christendom student, even if it were only for finding the names of authors that he or she ought to have read.  Mackey’s and Anthony Cooney’s essays outline the history of distributism from its roots in England to today.  Similarly, one gains a very good feel for the general ideals of distributism: that property ought to be widespread and not be concentrated; that the areas of production and consumption ought to be coterminous as far as possible; that an economy ought to be shaped around the good of the family and not the family about the good of the economy; and that distributism must primarily begin in each home.

     Two essays are worth special mention. Dr. Christopher Blum’s essay outlines the life and thought of Rene de La Tour du Pin, a French, aristocratic, monarchist conservative, who, like certain other writers, is perhaps too often ignored in American circles because he was French, aristocratic, and monarchist.  Dr. William Fahey’s essay covers the most humble subject of any essay in the book, but draws from it deep and worthwhile reflections in slow and unhurried prose reminiscent of Belloc; if one could read but one essay of this book, this would be the one to read.

     The skeptical reader of the this book will not have found, by the end of it, a complete defense of the tenets it contains; its contents and the advice that it offers certainly form no geometrically rigorous science, with its theorems already conceptually contained in its axioms.  On the other hand, so also does ethics offer a series of tenets that, at first glance, appear random and unrelated: do not steal; tell the truth; be chaste.  Yet, when viewed with man’s end in mind, such moral laws reveal themselves to be closely related.  Similarly, advice given in this book may appear random and unrelated at first glance.  But, when viewed from the perspective of the science of ethics in its broadest sense—which enfolds both personal ethics, domestic ethics, and political science—such theories and advice are, if not agreeable, at least understandable.