After more than 66 years since Belloc's masterful Distributist essay was issued by the Distributist League, IHS Press brings you a newly edited, footnoted edition of the Essay on the Restoration of Property, by Hilaire Belloc.
This concise, 104pp, easy-to-read but thorough and engaging essay, is Belloc's sketch of just what Distributists have in mind when they say that they long for a society of widely distributed productive property. In this clever essay, Belloc demonstrates that the society to which we've grown accustomed — a society in which most of us must work for someone else in exchange for a wage — is by no means necessary, but rather it is the result of free decisions by free men; and he says just as convincingly that those conditions can be changed by similarly free decisions, by similarly free men.
Many Americans, both Catholic and otherwise, become immediately defensive whenever someone suggests that there may be an economic alternative that is preferable to Capitalism. Immediately images of Soviet-style planned economies come to mind.
It is especially for these readers that Belloc's essay will be both illustrative and instructive, for he explains how it is possible to re-build a society in which men are both economically and politically free — free from the tyranny of state ownership of economic assets, as well as from the arbitrary tyranny exercised by huge corporations and industrial conglomerates.
In this era of Enron, Worldcom, JP Morgan, and you-name-which-other financial and business scandal, few will need serious persuading that the search f or another way of doing business is worth undertaking. What Belloc provides is a description of where such a search might possibly lead, and — if we're lucky — where it will lead.
Order your copy of this exquisite title today. Call IHS at (757) 423-0324, write them at IHS Press, 222 W 21st St. Suite F-122, Norfolk, VA 23517, email their order department at info@ihspress.com, or go directly to the order page of their website by clicking here.
(IHS Press was founded to re-issue critical editions of the great works of Catholic social criticism from the early 20th century, making the wisdom they contain available to the current generation. HIS Press presents the timeless principles of the Church's Social Doctrine, as expressed by some of the Catholic world's greatest minds, and applied to the problems of modern society without compromise or apology.)
