Distributism and Natural Law

Abstract

Distributism and natural law thought seem like they should be natural allies: the early architects of distributism, Chesterton and Belloc, must to some extent have been influenced by Aquinas— Chesterton, of course, wrote a book about St Thomas.1 And so must have been the architects of the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching (CST), as it was developed in and from Rerum Novarum. I suspect most distributists would say that distributism is an application of the natural law as well as CST. But certainly not every natural law thinker would identify as a distributist, including those deeply shaped by the Thomistic strand of natural law. Moreover, in the work of contemporary natural law theorists such as John Finnis and Germain Grisez, distributism is not mentioned even in passing, and the indexes of Natural Law and Natural Rights, and Grisez’s threevolume Way of the Lord Jesus Christ contain not a single reference to distributism, to Chesterton, or to Belloc. In consequence, I think it is worth exploring the relationship between natural law theory (including, and perhaps especially, “new” natural law theory) and distributism, understood in a very broad way, as encompassing not just Chesterton and Belloc and those directly influenced by them but also agrarians, localists, and conservatives— Burkean and Kirkian— where these seem to overlap with distributism. I’ll proceed in the following way: I’ll identify a cluster of ideas I take to be important to distributism and allied forms of thought and then I’ll say something about how natural law theory addresses these ideas, or could, or should address them and, occasionally, how such treatment does or might diverge from characteristically distributist treatment. Here are the ideas I take to be centrally important: (1) private property, (2) localism, (3) agrarianism, (4) the family, (5) an antipathy toward war (at least modern war), and (6) beauty and the imagination. Numbers five and six are perhaps a little more peripheral but nevertheless interesting. In what follows, I’ll try to identify some characteristic claims made by distributists about these ideas and, in each case, then address them from the natural law standpoint. As will be clear, I have varying degrees of sympathy with the claims I’ll discuss.