G. K. Chesterton

An engaging work sure to appeal to both scholars and students for the depth of its thought and the freshness of its claims, this is a two-part book by one of the 20th century's greatest writers. The first part is a coherent analysis of the theory, effects, and claims of capitalism. The second is a lengthy collection of articles from Chesterton's vast journalistic output. The author challenges the fundamental tenets of capitalism without favoring socialism or Marxism by providing a philosophical analysis of the pitfalls, drawbacks, and falsehoods regarding capitalism and its inevitability. This is must reading for any serious investigation into anti-capitalist thought. It is also an exemplary text of how Christian principles and thinking apply to the socioeconomic world.

Utopia of Usurers

Zeke Taylor

[Page 60-63 quotes out of order to make Chesterton’s point clear to me:]

It will be long before the poison of the Party System is worked out of the body politic.

[need to reread to add transition to next quotes]

For a long time past in our politics there has not only been no real battle, but no real bargain. No two men have bargained [while] each knowing the other to be a power.

[By the tenacity of real difference and disagreement] everyone sees at last that there is something in the other person’s position.

…in real revolutions men discover that no one man can really agree with another man until he has disagreed with him.

Everybody is in revolt; therefore everybody is telling the truth…It is out of these real differences that real things can be made, such as the modern French democracy. For by such tenacity everyone sees at last that there is something in the other person’s position.

It is not a flippancy, it is a very sacred truth, to say that when men really understand that they are brothers they instantly begin to fight.

[The rich Englishman will not believe the actual facts and realities of the French Revolution] because he has no humility, and therefore no realism. He has never been inside himself; and so could never be inside another man.

“…doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man.”

man into himself. This complete and reconstructed man is the nightmare of the modern capitalist. His whole scheme would crack across like a mirror of Shallot,"if oncea plain man were ready for his two plain duties ready to live and ready to die. And that horror of holidays which marks the modern capitalist is very largely a horror of the Vision of a whole human being: something that is not a "hand" or a fhead for figures." But an awful creature who has met himselfin the. wilderness. The employers will give time to cat, time to sleep; they are in terror ofa time to think.

Utopia of Usurers

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