The Outline of Sanity

by G.K. Chesterton

This antiquarian book contains Gilbert Keith Chesterton's 1926 thesis, "The Outline of Sanity." Within this famous book Chesterton explores the subjects of poverty, concentration of wealth, work, agriculture, machinery, and capital gain. Chesterton championed wealth distribution, but was staunchly opposed to socialism; he was an advocate of private ownership, but was an anti-capitalist. This fascinating text will appeal to those with an interest in economics, and it constitutes a veritable must-read for fans of Chesterton's seminal work. The chapters of this book "Some General Ideas," "The Beginning of the Quarrel," "The Peril of the Hour," "The Chance of Recovery," "Some Aspects of Big Business," "The Bluff of the Big Shops," "A Misunderstanding about Method," "A Case in Point," "The Tyranny of Trusts," "Some Aspects of the Land," etcetera. We are republishing this vintage text now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a new biography of the author.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy, Christianity, Christian, Religion

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 30, 1925

About the author

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic.

He was educated at St. Paul’s, and went to art school at University College London. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly.

Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology.

Reviews

[G.R. Hewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book certainly makes you stop and ponder; even more so when you realise that not much, if anything has changed since it was written over 90 years ago. Corporate monoliths are alive and well; advertisers still “... tell people in a bullying way that they must ‘Do It Now’ when they need not do it at all.” - taken from my favourite chapter ‘The Bluff of the Big Shops.’ Written in the usual Chestertonian style it does not have the wit of some of his other works and rightly so; this is a serious work about serious matters close to his heart, which point out in many ways that we don’t have to accept the status-quo and that we easily do. In the aforementioned chapter he writes “... I am merely pointing out that if we came to the conclusion that big shops ought to be boycotted, we could boycott them as easily as we should (I hope) shops selling instruments of torture or poisons for private use in the home.” Chesterton ventures that it is not a “... question of necessity but of will.” I think we have forgotten this.

[Bryan Kibbe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Chesterton wrote this book in the early twentieth century, it remains just as relevant today in a world where we continue to see massive consolidation, corporations too big to fail, relentless standardization of the products that shape our lives, and the increasing machine mentality to make the so called medicine go down. This book is a summation of an ongoing series of debates that Chesterton engaged in with a range of Capitalists and Socialists on the question of a proposed third alternative that he and others advocated for, called "Distributivism." In short, Distributivism is deeply opposed to the tendency to consolidate power that is characteristic of both Capitalism and State Socialism, and instead argues for the radical distribution of the means for individuals to possess and maintain private property and creative enterprises in pursuit of life in a particular place. On this approach, Chesterton imagines a flourishing society of small shopkeepers and people that are committed to the land that is able to sustain them. In many ways Chesterton's Distributivism shares a number of similarities to an ethic of agrarianism that has been propounded at various times in the United States. In both, there is a fascinating criticism of the way in which we relate to modern technology and this should be studied further as we look for a more meaningful life than cycles of boom and bust consumption in the 21st century. This book is not quite as tight as Orthodoxy was, but nonetheless, every few paragraphs there are deep and penetrating insights that are worth pondering and that make this a worthwhile read from beginning to end.

[Цветозар · Rating 3 out of 5]

Доста интересна и силна в началото, когато директно се съпоставят идеите на Честертън с идеите на времето, но към края малко се изгубва острието.

"I read of the great conception of Men Like Gods and I wonder when men will be like men."

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great primer on Distributism, to be prefaced by Rerum Novarum.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the type of book that changes how you think about the world. This book asks a very simple question: are you willing to give up your freedom for security? Chesterton shows how both Capitalism and Socialism take freedom from the individual for the promise of security (most often false security) - either physical or material. This leads to a broader question: is it better to be uncomfortable and free, or comfortable and a slave. Chesterton states that men easily accept despotism and slavery. We see this acceptance all around us. Let us heed the words of this book and once again assert that we are men, and that freedom is worth fighting for.

[Janet Bufton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chesterton's prose can be great but here he is mostly only easy to read.

A thoroughly illiberal thinker lays out a case for land redistribution to establish a peasant class that is meant to act as a conservative bulwark for society. Chesterton's concept of freedom is one that requires the ability to rule over something, and so he believes that households need to own three acres and a cow in order for men (and he does mean men) to have a slice of the world in which to exercise that freedom. Neither capitalism nor socialism will support such a vision, he says, and he sees little difference between them.

Chesterton is against cities (he'll allow for some towns), businesses over a certain size, flats, car trips that don't end at a cottage, and concepts of the good other than his own. His arguing is flimsy and based on unbacked but confident assertions that fall apart when applied to his own arguments—no bother, though. He means to favour one side.

Often I feel it would have been more effective to rely on his Catholicism openly. But I take it that he is persuasive to people who already agree with him.

Common good constitution folks like Chesterton these days, I'm told, so this may be a good book to pick up as a corrective about conservative vibes if you still think that conservatism has to be about small government and liberal conceptions of freedom.

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you follow my Goodreads, you might have a sense of what I'm up to right now with all these distributist-aligned books. This is, of course, a classic in that space, elucidating what Chesterton saw as the major problems of the economy and society and putting forth some broad solutions classified as "distributist" in nature. Chesterton's writing is entertaining, heavily reliant on comical metaphors. His approach to decentralizing economic power allows for the existence of state action, and his outlook is pragmatic, making Chestertonian distribution very applicable to our current time. This work contains some timeless answers to criticisms of economic change, which I appreciate. However, his collection of essays could have used more conceptual 'glue' between chapters. Chesterton himself acknowledges in the conclusion, which usefully ties everything together. I also feel that some of his arguments, especially regarding machines, could have used more non-metaphorical support. Nonetheless, this is a great primer for anybody interested in GK's economic ideas.

[Etienne OMNES · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dans son "Outline of Sanity" Chesterton défend la validité de la théorie économique distributiste.

Les phrases sont toujours très plaisantes à lire, mais le raisonnement est typique de Chesterton: baroque, acrobatique et si au final il a beaucoup de bon sens et qu'il a raison, les arabesques littéraires dans lesquelles il se lance -et qui lui sont caractéristiques- nuisent globalement à la clarté de son propos.

Ce livre reste utile si jamais vous êtes enracinés dans le capitalisme ou le socialisme (économique) et que vous avez besoin d'un coup de bélier pour voir les défauts dans votre position. Mais pour moi qui espérais une exposition du distributisme, j'ai davantage trouvé mon bonheur chez Hilaire Belloc.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too many good quotations!! I do not think it right, on this occasion, to apologise.

On Capitalism:
"that economic condition in which there is a class of capital­ists, roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage."
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

"A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But he is not a champion of private property. The point about capitalism is that it preaches the extension of business, but not the preservation of belongings; it also tries to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate. The point about communism is that it tries to reform the pickpocket by forbidding pockets."
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

"The present system, especially as it exists in industrial countries, has already become a danger, and is rapidly becoming a death trap. This system rests on two ideas: that the rich will always be rich enough to hire the poor; and the poor will always be poor enough to want to be hired by the rich."
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

"I think the big shop is a bad shop. Shopping there is not only a bad action, but a bad bargain. The monster emporium is not only vulgar and insolent, but incompetent and uncomfortable. And I deny that its large organization is efficient. In truth, large organization is always disorganization."
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

“There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

“From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

"A great nation and civilization [i.e., the British] has fol­lowed for a hundred years or more a form of progress which held itself independent of certain old communications in the form of ancient traditions about the land, the hearth, or the altar. It has advanced under leaders who are confident, not to say cocksure. They are quite sure that their economic rules were rigid, that their political theory was right, that their commerce was beneficent, that their parliaments were popular, that their press was enlightened, that their science was humane. In this confidence they committed their people to certain new and enormous experiments; to making their own independent nation an eternal debtor to a few rich men; to piling up private property in heaps on the faith of financiers; to covering their land with iron and stone and stripping it of grass and grain; to driving food out of their own country in the hope of buying it back again from the ends of the earth ... till there was no independence without luxury and no labor without ugliness; to leaving the millions of mankind dependent on indirect and distant discipline and indirect and distant sustenance, working themselves to death for they know not whom and taking the means of life from they know not where."
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

It is time that man exercise his free will and decide to regain the fullness of his individual, familial, and community life by renouncing or tempering his involvement with an economic system, and with its technological substructure, which rips from him two of his most precious commodi­ties, his own labor and the fruit of it. How can a man be happy, with a truly human happiness, unless his own work is controlled by his own will and not subordinated to the profit-making demands of the owners of capital and the means of production? How can the God-ordained nature of work be realized if neither his hands nor his mind manipu­late materials provided to him directly by the Hand of Almighty God according to forms that are derived, through the agency of the human intellect and imagination, from the natural created structure of the world?
― G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chesterton's usual bombast is freighted a little bit in this one in that he has to keep edging back to particulars: he's discussing the economic conditions of the early 1900s, and he's Outlining what he thinks will be a Sane, that is to say sustainable, way of easing the tensions that looked like they were going to rip society apart. It's interesting to note that, while Chesterton's impact as a serious thinker has never been seriously entertained, some of what he argued for-- like supporting small businesses as a lifestyle choice and increasing the possibilities for eccentricity as modes of dodging centralization -- are starting to happen, at least in the popular imagination, here in the early 2000s. Some of his more weighty suggestions, as he says of Christianity itself, "were not tried and found wanting, but found difficult, and left untried."
Chesterton thought through quite a few of the issues that we've been banging our collective capitalist heads against in the financial labyrinth. Ultimately, he says, people need to have something real to work for in order to be trusted to work at all. Sounds downright reasonable.

[Alexander Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chesterton firing on all cylinders! He is mocking, derisive, witty, and perceptive. He outlines Capitalism, Bolshevism, and Distributivism very clearly and makes a fantastic case for the third. I laughed out loud at least a dozen times while reading this and the audio version by Seth Trey is wonderful.

[Lara Lleverino]

This was the third book of the the Mumford and Sons bookclub! Wow! Will have to check it out. I've read one other Chesterton book and didn't understand it at all so I'll have to try again.

[Katrina · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be perfectly honest, I find Chesterton a bit difficult to read. That doesn't mean he was a bad writer; his style just takes a lot of extra thought and work. In other words, don't try to read this before going to bed. :)

However, I did find this book fascinating and intriguing. Chesterton certainly did not agree with centralized government and government control over everything. In our day, we struggle with far too many government regulations over things like farming, small businesses, food, education, and pretty much every other area of society and economics. This is not as it should be. Where have our freedoms gone? You can't even sell raw milk anymore without expensive certification, just because big government has said raw milk is potentially dangerous; what right do they have to meddle in such things? Is it the government's job to take away guns, to educate our children, to fund wicked institutions? In "The Outline of Sanity", Chesterton lays out his vision for Distributism, which is a turning away from big business and big government to small businesses, farms, property ownership, and self-government. Ultimately, he believed that machines and mass production have not made anybody any happier; you can get more for less, sure, but is that the meaning of life? He claimed that a peasant in a village, working his own land, buying locally made goods in little stores, is far happier than the man slaving in a factory.

But Chesterton didn't expect change overnight. As he said, "Action ought to have been taken long ago, but action can still be taken now... Do anything, however small, that will prevent the completion of the work of capitalist combination... Save one out of a hundred shops... Keep one door open out of a hundred doors; for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison... the smallest prick will shrivel the biggest balloon. If this tendency of our time received anything like a reasonably definite check, I believe the whole tendency would soon begin to weaken in its preposterous prestige. Until monopoly is monopolist, it is nothing... one stumbling block can be the turning point" (89). If we will have the courage to be that stumbling block, great change can be affected for good. Chesterton saw the danger of capitalism and government control even a hundred years ago, and it has only grown worse in our day. We can't wait any longer. Yes, action should have been taken long ago, but it can still be taken now.

So support small shops, teach self-government, live off of your land, and never despise the day of small beginnings (Job 8:7, Zechariah 4:10).

[Stefan-Rares Crisan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, witty, convincing. At first, it may seem that the author gets distracted from what should be a discussion of economics, and that he has a tendency to turn the attention to the seemingly trivial details, but his exact point is that the trivial individual and his trivial life is what's not trivial at all.

Nonetheless, the book serves extraordinary well. There is no argument he did not address. Everything said was memorable. All the romantic descriptions of the aspects of the idyllic society of a peasantry were indeed romantic.

I am now a truly convinced Distributist in the manner in which a lover is truly convinced of the beauty of his lady.

[Charles Krouse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chesterton is against monopolies and in favor of small, private property. This book about Chesterton’s Distributism economic theory is a little too heavy on the metaphorical side and a little too light on the practical side for me personally. He makes a case for each man to do what he can to support small businesses and fight against the despotism of capitalist combination. At times, his thoughts appear to ramble and stray, but he uses the conclusion to tie it all together. Although I’m highly in favor of supporting small businesses and having personal property, this book did not sell me on the idea of Distributism.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chesterton was far ahead of his time, anticipating the need for the "buy local" trend that wisely supports small farms, craft breweries, Etsy, and other unique products that puncture the banal monopoly of cheap Chinese goods sold by massive stores like Walmart and Amazon.

I finally undstand distributism and agree that men need a stake, some private property to be truly free and dignified.

Chesterton is too prolix at times and seems to enjoy digressing. His lines are so of gems, however. I found myself underlining quite a few.

[Pastor Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really want to like Chesterton. I certainly do like many of his ideas on a gut level. For instance, the idea of a widespread "peasantry" is great. And he's absolutely right that there is an undeniable spiritual element to the well-being of society.

For all that, the man just can't let pass the opportunity to use an analogy. He piles one on top of another. They can be excellent, they can be amusing, they can be elucidating. But the sheer volume of them overwhelms.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started copying down some quotes, but I quickly realized that I was going to end up quoting the entire book. I am not shy about my disdain for capitalism, but I am also not an orthodox Socialist. Chesterton perfectly articulated my feelings about finding a "third path" between these two ends. This not a perfectly fleshed out socioeconomic system, nor does it aim to be. Distributism in some form is a most noble ideal nonetheless.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intelligent, eloquent defense of Distributism on the part of Chesterton, just as we would expect . . . unfortunately without him giving us any very good idea on of what Distributism actually is.
I rate it high for the prophetic 'roll' he enters into at the end.

"Meanwhile I sit amid droves of overdriven clerks and underpaid workmen in a tube or a tram; I read of the great conception of Men Like Gods and I wonder when men will be like men."

[Vinicius Cheliga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um bom livro sobre arranjos econômicos e a situação atual que vivemos. Seu pensamento é rico, com opções a nossa vivência em sociedade. É preciso ter paciência, pois sua leitura é um pouco truncada, por vezes datada. É necessário não observar não o escrito em si, mas acolher o espírito que o livro trás. Livro recomendado principalmente a quem estuda a Doutrina Social da Igreja.

[Iñaki Lizárraga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thourough distributist manifesto. There is no longer difference between the centralizing economic systems: capitalism and communism. We must have the courage to chose another way.

[Oolalaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

14/20

[Audrey Lenahan · Rating 1 out of 5]

The most rambling, long winded, and pompous book I have ever read

[Sierra Finlinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite from the class so far. Bravo

[Luis Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

“…I read of the great conception of Men Like Gods and I wonder when men will be like men.”

[Justin Pollock · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderfully written, I always enjoy the wit and intelligence Chesterton weaves into his works

[Zbigniew Zdziarski · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is an alternative to socialism or capitalism: distributism.

[ltcomdata · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chesterton presents his views of Capitalism and Socialism: both are wrong-headed and end up in the same place. The paradise of the capitalist turns out to be socialism. Instead, he recommeds Distributism: that is, the subsidiarity principle to the maximum, which leads to a return to the land as the only feasable solution.

He lacks some of his wit as in other books; I found myself somewhat bored at times. Though there are some jewels of passages throughout.

Is it feasable? We should rather ask: are there enough brave men to make it feasable?

[Rhonda D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is thought provoking. It outlines Chesterton's dream economy, distributism. It reprints several essays he wrote on the topic. Some ideas from is essays (in a nutshell): land/business ownership is good, smaller is better, local is better, profit is good but look at the whole picture and how private enterprise does not always work for the good of the common man.

[Ak Hauck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always amazing how prescient Chesterton remains. In a time when Distributiism is being legislated in our country, it would be wise for the citizenry to familiarize themselves with the cogent and brilliant argument Chesterton raises against it and other hinderances to our economic and social well-being.