Alongside the tremendous economic growth generated by modern capitalism’s emergence and the Industrial Revolution went enormous social upheaval. Lifestyles established for centuries underwent radical change in comparatively short periods of time.

The phrase used to describe this turmoil was “the social question.” It especially concerned the emergence of a large and restless industrial working class. This phenomenon attracted the attention of figures such as Karl Marx but also that of conservative thinkers.

Many of the latter busied themselves with schemes to revive an attachment to the land following the mass migration of millions to cities. This, they believed, would de-radicalize an increasingly militant urban proletariat and blunt capitalism’s purportedly socially disintegrative effects.

One such school of thought was “distributism.” Drawing upon modern Catholic social teaching (CST), distributists wanted a wider distribution of property and an emphasis on “smallness.” Both capitalism and centralized government ownership of the means of production, distributists argued, dehumanized economic life. The economy thus required rescaling to the local level.

Distributism’s heyday was in the 1920s and 1930s as people searched for alternatives to socialism and capitalism. Distributists such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc also decried the philosophical and practical materialism that, they believed, characterized modern economies, liberal or collectivist.

Whatever the validity of such concerns, they should not distract us from the deep flaws in distributism’s economics. Realizing a distributist economy would require massive state economic intervention in the form of endless fiddling with the allocation of land, capital, wages, and therefore prices to realize an unrealizable — and unknowable — optimal property distribution.

Distributism also acquired some unfortunate associations. Many distributists regarded fascist regimes’ corporatist economic policies as close to what they had in mind. Belloc never disguised his admiration for Mussolini’s Italy. Nor is it hard to find strong antisemitic sentiments expressed by 1930s distributists, Belloc being particularly notorious. Such tendencies should not surprise us. Anti-capitalist attitudes went hand in hand with the antisemitism that flourished on the Marxist Left and the traditionalist Right in these decades.

Despite these flaws, distributism occasionally draws attention from intellectuals today. In The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good, the economist Alexander William Salter considers how distributist ideas might contribute to today’s intra-conservative debates about common-good capitalism.

Salter’s book is concerned less with articulating an economic program than with stimulating discussion “between economists interested in social philosophy and social philosophers interested in economics.” His end goal is to lay “a secure cornerstone” for the “edifice of common-good capitalism,” not least because making that program “a reality,” he maintains, “will take many persons many years.”

Salter begins by outlining CST principles as expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church alongside the two papal encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, most referenced by distributists. He then examines works by Belloc and Chesterton that, he believes, best express distributism’s imagination.

In terms of its economics, Salter finds distributism wanting, sometimes severely so. Nonetheless, he maintains that Belloc and Chesterton have much to say about “the economic foundations of human dignity,” particularly in their attention to property’s role in providing people with security and sustaining liberty against “bigness.”

A major concern of these thinkers, Salter states, was how markets generate what economists call “externalities”: costs or benefits of a given economic activity affecting people who did not initiate it. For distributists, negative externalities of capitalism included the undermining of small-scale enterprises and the diminishing of widespread property ownership. The dispersion of property — and state action to keep it dispersed — was viewed as one way to minimize such externalities.

It is, however, the German free-market economist Wilhelm Röpke who features most prominently in Salter’s engagement with distributist thought. In the 1940s, Röpke invested considerable time in analyzing the rise of collectivist politics and economies.

Looking for social ballast to preserve freedom against totalitarian pressures, Röpke incorporated ideas from Belloc’s and Chesterton’s writings into his widely read 1942 book, The Social Crisis of Our Time, especially their emphasis on wider property ownership’s significance for liberty.

For all distributism’s economic deficiencies, Salter maintains that its strictures on property can help express the requirements of respecting human dignity in contemporary economies. Since Aristotle’s time, property ownership has been recognized as having beneficial effects that go beyond economics.

The strength of Salter’s book is that it reminds us how liberty is dependent on property, and how property gives institutional birth to liberty. This theme can never be emphasized enough in an age when property rights are so trivialized by progressives and, increasingly, conservative interventionists.

That said, I remain skeptical of distributism’s capacity to make a distinct contribution to illuminating the significance of this link. Leaving aside its economic deficiencies, distributism offers little by way of a normative conception of property’s importance beyond what already can be found in more sophisticated forms in, say, natural-law philosophy.

The latter has a long history of engaging economic questions in ways far more cognizant of economic truths about prices, economic value, exchange, and money than has been the case for distributist thinkers. Likewise, natural-law theorists — ancient, medieval, and modern — have written extensively on how property ownership facilitates economic and personal freedom, allows people to exercise responsible dominion over the earth, and limits state power. Moreover, they have generally done so without embracing distributism’s wrongheaded economics.

This leads me to a second observation. The influence of CST and distributism on Röpke’s thought has, I’d suggest, been overstated. He was certainly a devout Lutheran Christian and, by any standard, a genuine Renaissance man unafraid to venture beyond economics’ disciplinary boundaries.

Nonetheless, Röpke’s engagement with CST was driven less by a concern for synthesis than by his strategic calculation that it might persuade market-skeptic European Catholics and post-war Christian Democrats to take markets seriously at a time when market liberals were a beleaguered minority.

As detailed by scholars of his life, Röpke spoke frankly in private correspondence of CST’s serious deficiencies. He was also scathing about the blind spots of prominent mid-20th-century CST proponents such as Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., the German sociologist, corporatist, and significant contributor to Quadragesimo Anno’s drafting. In public, Röpke wrote about CST’s failure to acknowledge the problems created by overmighty unions and about its virtual silence on inflation.

Such factors may explain why it is harder to find substantive reflection from the late 1940s onwards on Catholic social teaching in Röpke’s commentaries on the market’s normative foundations. As for Belloc and Chesterton, they are, at best, peripheral influences on these later writings. That includes Röpke’s most well-known book in the English-speaking world, A Humane Economy, in which neither is cited.

Distributist-sympathetic commentators have long sought to put distributist glosses on this text. But while the market’s moral foundations remained central to Röpke’s post-war research, his primary normative reference points in A Humane Economy were broader ideas about Western Christian humanism.

If A Humane Economy has any éminences grises, one is Edmund Burke. He had few of the reservations about dynamic markets that one typically encounters among distributists. Another major influence is Alexis de Tocqueville. His stress on civil society’s importance formed a basis for Röpke’s devastating critique of post-war welfare states. And it is John Locke’s writings on property rights and their importance for liberty that Röpke references in A Humane Economy — not the ideas of distributists.

Similarly, Röpke’s very useful Economics of the Free Society (1937), the ninth and significantly revised edition of which was translated into English in 1963, stresses property ownership and decentralization. But most of its attention to the market’s extra-economic dimension is on (1) the framework of rules within which markets operate and (2) what Röpke called “the social problem” of our time: the centralization of political power. These are typical ordoliberal concerns, first stressed by German free-market economists such as Walter Eucken in the 1930s. Again, distributists are not referenced in this book.

Where, then, does this leave us with regard to the common-good capitalism that Salter wants to influence?

Common-good capitalism’s advocates insist on targeted state interventions to realize different economic and social outcomes from those otherwise delivered by markets. They seem to think that if you correctly calibrate the economic intervention, beneficial social effects will follow. To that extent, they are on the same page as distributists.

Salter recognizes that many of the challenges that common-good capitalists seek to address are not amenable to government tinkering. Nonetheless, he wants to ameliorate negative externalities associated with the creative destruction unleashed by free markets. That is consistent with distributist thought. Beyond, however, pointing to the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom on private governance, Salter refrains from specifying the content of a neo-distributist agenda to address such problems. That, he says, should be worked out by scholars and policy-makers.

Overshadowing this, however, is another question. To what degree should creative destruction be considered an externality in the first place? If people decide to frequent a new Walmart rather than a local hardware store, is this an externality? Surely it is some consumers expressing their preference for lower prices over familiarity with more expensive local retailers whom other consumers may continue to patronize because they prioritize familiarity over lower prices. If this is true, it is unclear how the common good is undermined.

Thinking about the market’s place in the wider social order matters. The idea of the common good reflects the truth that humans have obligations to one another beyond contracts. In the final analysis, however, I think that Salter’s exploration of distributism ends up demonstrating that good-faith common-good capitalists will need a very different starting point from distributism.