The Scandal of G.K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as you probably know (or you wouldn’t be reading this) was an English essayist, journalist, novelist, and what-have-you in the early twentieth century who managed to write and say enough sufficiently witty things to be remembered by those who read the right books or watch the wrong television channels. As Maurice Evans noted in 1938 in G.K. Chesterton, The Le Bas Prize Essay,

Chesterton’s wit has made him one of the best read and least studied of all modern thinkers. His essays are clusters of brilliant epigrams, and their substance is none the less true for being neatly stated. . . . Yet that very verbal felicity, which has so admirably performed its function of amusing, is the cause of widespread distrust. It is enough to call Chesterton “paradoxical” to destroy his claim as a serious thinker in the eyes of many people.

Another thing that undermined Chesterton’s reputation as a serious thinker in the eyes of many people was his opposition to capitalism, defined here as concentrated private ownership of capital, and socialism, defined here as concentrated public ownership of capital — “capital” being defined as the non-human factor of production. Given that most people even today are firm adherents of capitalism, socialism, or that curious yet prevalent amalgam of the two Chesterton’s confrere Hilaire Belloc called “the Servile State,”…