The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 05: The Outline of Sanity; The End of the Armistice; The Appetite of Tyranny; Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays

by G.K. Chesterton, George Marlin (Editor)

The second volume is devoted to Chesterton's political, sociological and economic writings. Throughout his life Chesterton struggled against scepticism and selfishness and defended the interests of the common man. Chesterton defended democratic principles, individual freedom, property holders and small businessmen in his work The Outline of Sanity because he was convinced that capitalism and socialism were oligarchies that would suffocate the individual. There was hardly ever a more fierce, more romantic, more combative defender of private property in the history of Christianity than G.K. Chesterton. He was an ardent foe not only of socialism, but also of that form of collectivised capitalism that would ape socialism by creating the welfare state.Also in this volume, Dr. John McCarthy examines and edits Chesterton's polemical volumes and pamphlets published during World War I, including a posthumous volume entitled The End of the Armistice. This collection demonstrates that early on Chesterton recognized the evil of Nazism. Chesterton prophesied that Hitler was bent on destroying the Jews and Poland.

Genres: Philosophy, Classics, Economics, Politics, Religion, History

663 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1987

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

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume contains a number of books by Chesterton. Normally I would read them on their own and write a review for each. For some reason I did not in this case. And it makes reviewing the book awkward. The writings of this collection come from different periods of time and handle a range of topics and are of of very different value.

The first text, written in 1926, The Outline of Sanity was to me almost not recognizable as Chesterton. The only thing Chestertonian in it is the title. It is a long essay on the ideal economy, as far as I understood. Chesterton came up with something he called distributism. It is of course neither capitalism nor communism, he dreams of a society that is self-determined. No goods are to be imported, if I remember correctly. This theory (or doctrine?) must have meant a lot to him as he avoids using any humour.

A lot of the books/essays in this volume were quite disturbing. There is a contempt and hatred for Germany (or Prussia in particular) that I thought he would be incapable of having, or of allowing himself to have. Even the book The Crimes of England (written in 1916) is mostly about the crimes of Germany/Prussia.

But, of course, you will find truly excellent essays in here, for example the one about racism (The Heresy of Race), or the one about eugenics, which should be required reading for everyone: Science and the Eugenics.

I also really liked a short piece called On Throwing Stones. We all know the wise saying “Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.” Chesterton reminds us that the story does not end there. Jesus says to the sinner: “Go and sin no more”. To judge by many modern references, Chesterton continues, the whole scene endend with the words, “Go on and sin as much as you like”.
Chesterton in a nutshell.

For a book with more than six hundred pages of Chesterton there are surprisingly few aphorisms that are worth repeating. Maybe these:

The civilsed man, like the religious man, is one who recognises the strange and irritating fact that something exists besides himself.

A Frenchman is proud of France, but a Prussian is not proud of Prussia. He is simply proud because he is Prussian.

But the Germans will to find it difficult to persuade any German, let alone only European who is fond of Germany that Schiller is a poet and Heine is not.

This is the great Prussian illusion of pride for which thousands of Jews have recently been rabbled and ruined or driven from their homes. I am certainly not enough of an antisemite to say that it serves them right.

In the crusades they spread Christianity in the Napoleonic wars they spread equality but both these ideas when accepted, are applicable to all races. This sort of Crusade may be a mistake but it's a real mistake and it's a Christian mistake; Race is not.

I do not doubt for a moment that we were right (WWI) I know of no course in history that was so right. But I have sometimes come to doubt whether we had any right to be so right.

Everyone who knows any history, knows that the French and English understood each other far better when they fought each other at Crezy and Agincourt, then when they fought side by side at Mons and the Marne.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume of GKC's collected works includes several books on his economy theory -- known as distributism -- and then a mass of historical essays. The Outline of Sanity, a marvelous little book with a marvelous title, is in here, as well as his First World War-era polemical writings. Even when he is writing wartime polemics, Chesterton rarely fails to enlighten and provoke. But the historical essays were, in my view, the highlight of this volume -- not least because of the range of scholarship and insight the man possessed. Remarkable.