The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty and the Common Good

Another review of Alexander Salter’s “The Political Economy of Distributism”. Mr Storck is another well-known writer on the Church and Distributism.

From Practical Distributism

By Thomas Storck, MA

First published in The Chesterton Review, Volume 50, Issue 3/4, Fall/Winter 2024

Alexander Salter’s recent book on distributism and its relationship with political economy is a welcome sign of interest on the part of academic economists in distributism. Salter is generally sympathetic to what he calls the socio-economic goals of distributists and he carefully reviews four classic distributist texts, Belloc’s The Servile State and The Restoration of Property, and Chesterton’s What’s Wrong With the World and The Outline of Sanity. Recognizing that distributism finds its context in Catholic social teaching, he also reviews the sections on social doctrine from the Catechism of the Catholic Church , although he hardly deals with the text of any of the foundational social encyclicals themselves.

Salter also devotes two chapters to the German economist, Wilhelm Röpke (d. 1966), who, he claims, was sympathetic to distributist social policies and who, as an economist, was able to harmonize economic science with a social policy inspired by distributism. Salter claims that Röpke is a good example of a trained scientific economist who was nevertheless open to the kinds of proposals that distributists make and who strove to reconcile them with the demands of a rigorous economic analysis. Yet despite the rhetoric friendly to distributism that Salter cites from Röpke, it seems to this reviewer that in the end Röpke favored essentially a free-market economy. He celebrates the demise of the medieval European craft guild system, which, he said, “liberated the crafts and commercial activities…from the stigma of the feudal era” and posits that we must choose either a (free) market economy or a collectivist economy. But this is not true. Unless we are to reject the entire tradition of Catholic social teaching, we must admit that our choices are not limited by the two extremes of a command economy or what is called a free-market economy. This is not to speak of the much-maligned “third way,” for in fact there are certainly more than three ways an economy can be organized, and capitalism itself exhibits rather different features in Germany or Japan than it does in the United States or Bangladesh.

But it is Röpke’s position as an economist that is crucial here for Salter’s argument. For while Salter sees much merit in distributism as social policy, he sharply distinguishes what he calls political economy or social policy (or sometimes “political-economic art”) from economics proper, which he designates as a science and therefore as properly concerned not with ethical (normative) questions. Thus, while distributist ideas deserve a hearing and ought to become part of the current conversation on economic policy, “rigorous economics is a necessary component of humane political economy. We need hardnosed, price-theoretic analyses of various government and market reforms informed by distributist thought.” Without economic science we are apt to promote or enact measures that will fail to achieve our policy goals, or even worse, produce the very opposite of what we aspire to.

This is the crucial point. For much more important than whether or how much Röpke in practice favored distributist economic measures is the distinction which Salter alleges between political economy and economics. Most contemporary economists look upon their discipline as something akin to physics, a simple descriptive account of the workings of an economy, which can be adequately represented by means of graphs. But is this correct? Salter himself more than once acknowledges that some critics, for example, “social philosophers (especially those in the Catholic intellectual tradition) who are skeptical of economics,” will object to much of his thesis. This is because the understanding of economics, and of any human science, in Catholic tradition is hierarchical. Economics is in fact dependent upon ethics. As Pius XI wrote in Quadragesimo Anno (no. 42), “For, though economic activity and moral discipline are guided each by its own principles in its own sphere, it is false that the two orders are so distinct and alien that the former in no way depends on the latter.” It is true that economic justice cannot be achieved merely by moral exhortation or wishful thinking, but it is equally true that to attempt to engage in a merely descriptive type of economics betrays a lack of understanding of both the hierarchy of human sciences and even of human behavior. Any adequate understanding of man’s economic activity must take account of its inherent telos, the very reason that we engage in such activity. And if we do so, we necessarily recognize the ethical dimension of economic activity. A purely descriptive economics, like a purely descriptive psychology, fails to capture essential aspects of human nature and life.

Moreover, even within the framework of conventional economic thought one often finds unrecognized prescriptive assumptions, for example, that economic growth is the summum bonum, or that an economy is best when it possesses what is called efficiency in the highest degree. Salter, it is true, does recognize these faults and even quotes Chesterton from The Outline of Sanity that


The aim of human polity is human happiness…. There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier.

Salter’s problem, however, is that that after admitting the biases inherent in mainstream economic thinking, a few pages later he will forget them again and will simply return to the old orthodoxies. He insists that economic thought proper, as a science, is governed by a few fundamental axioms and thus is confined within the straitjacket of a way of looking at an economy that is a product of eighteenth-century deism and nascent industrial capitalism: the economy is a great machine operating according to a few principles, everyone is out to maximize his material possessions or pleasures, increased production of stuff is an unquestioned good, and there are few if any lessons to be learned from economic history and from the way that other times and cultures have organized their economies.

In addition to this fundamental criticism we can also note, although mainstream neoclassical economists seem reluctant to admit it, that there are perfectly intellectually respectable schools of economics that posit different starting points and methodologies from the mainstream.1 There are, for example, the various historical schools, most notably the German Historical School, which insisted that instead of looking at economics as something deducible from a few fundamental axioms, such as supply and demand, we ought to look at actual economic history, and that if we do, we will see that there have been successful, functioning economies with rather different practices and sets of rules and in which the motives which Adam Smith held to be universal axioms of human behavior are by no means dominant. Or the original American Institutional School which focused on the important role of institutions and legal systems in shaping an economy. For example, the modern kind of limited-liability corporation, so ubiquitous a feature of our economy, did not exist before the second half of the nineteenth century. It came into existence not as the result of inexorable economic laws, but because of changes in the legal system, including Supreme Court decisions, that permitted what had up to then been generally forbidden. Incidentally, the sort of economic analysis which one finds in the papal social encyclicals is closer to the Institutional type of analysis than to that of any other school of economists.

So while distributists should welcome this volume, I think we need to challenge its thesis on a deeper level than simply agreement or disagreement about some of the distributist proposals of Belloc or Chesterton. Distributists must insist that economics proper is not something divorced from ethical concerns. Orthodox mainstream economic thought is little more than a gloss on capitalism. We need to look more at economies, past and present, and at the rules, institutions and systems that mankind has constructed in order to provide the goods and services we need. Fortunately we do not have to start afresh; there is plenty of sound thinking about the economy upon which to draw. In addition to the distributists themselves, Catholics and others might want to consult the monumental writings of Heinrich Pesch, S.J. (d. 1926), a priest and trained economist, who wrote a series of substantial volumes setting forth an approach to economics that takes account of Catholic theological and philosophical truths.2 Pesch termed his system solidarism, and together with distributism it ranks as the most serious attempt to apply Catholic social thought to modern economic conditions.

It is good that Professor Salter manifests an interest in and an appreciation of distributist thinking. But his strict bifurcation of economics from political economy, making the former a value-free science entitled to pass judgment on social policy, is not the correct way to proceed. If we do this, we relegate distributism to the margins of economics, under the illusion that economic knowledge is contained in the deductive approach so much in favor today. In doing this we place ourselves at a disadvantage and distributism will seem at best a quirky oddment of primarily historical interest.

Printable version

Alexander William Salter, The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty and the Common Good. Washington: Catholic University Press, 2023. 238 pages, including bibliography and index. $24.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8132-3681-0.

For a discussion of some of these alternative or “heterodox” schools, see my review of the volume, Why Economists Disagree: An Introduction to the Alternative Schools of Thought, edited by David L. Prychitko, in this journal, vol. 25, no. 3, August 1999, pp. 356-367. ↩︎
See my review in this journal of Pesch’s Lehrbuch der Nationalökonomie/Teaching Guide to Economics, translated by Rupert J. Ederer, vol. 30, nos. 3/4, fall/winter 2004, pp. 389-395. ↩︎