These thinkers reject both capitalism and socialism in favor of localized, land-based, traditional economies.
Wendell Berry
Essential Works:
- The Unsettling of America – Critique of industrial agriculture
- What Are People For? – Essays on community, land, and culture
- Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community – Interconnection of tradition and place
- Life is a Miracle – Against scientism and reductionism
Key Ideas:
- Membership – Belonging to a place, a community, a land
- The economy of the household – Oikos, not industrial extraction
- Agrarian permanence – Stewardship, not exploitation
- Rejection of progress ideology – Not all change is improvement
G.K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc – Distributists
Essential Works (Chesterton):
- The Outline of Sanity – Distributist economics
- What's Wrong with the World – Critique of modernity
- Orthodoxy – Christian metaphysics and tradition
- The Everlasting Man – History as sacred drama
Essential Works (Belloc):
- The Servile State – Critique of capitalism and socialism
- An Essay on the Restoration of Property – Distributist economics
Key Ideas:
- Three acres and a cow – Widespread property ownership, not concentration
- Subsidiarity – Decisions made at lowest possible level
- Guild system – Craft, vocation, and honor
- Family as economic and social unit – Not state, not corporation
Distributism is the economic philosophy compatible with Traditionalism. It's neither capitalist nor socialist—it's Christian and human-scale.
The Southern Agrarians – Regionalist Traditionalists
Essential Work:
- I'll Take My Stand (1930) – Manifesto by 12 Southern writers
Key Ideas:
- Agrarian vs. industrial – Farming as way of life, not extraction
- Tradition vs. progress – Southern culture as rooted, humane, and pious
- Regionalism – Distinct cultures and places vs. homogenized mass society
The Southern Agrarians articulate an American Traditionalism grounded in place, land, and community.