Poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, biographer, and literary & art critic Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Kensington, London, England on this day in 1874.
"A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep."
—from "The Everlasting Man" (1925) by G.K. Chesterton
—from "The Everlasting Man" (1925) by G.K. Chesterton
The first one-volume reader of the best of G. K. Chesterton’s writing in the full range of genres he mastered. Chesterton was a towering literary figure of the early twentieth century, accomplished and prolific in many literary forms. A forceful proponent of Christianity and a critic of both conservatism and liberalism, he set out to describe nothing less than the spiritual journey of humanity in Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, his most enduring books. He is famous as well for his beloved Father Brown detective stories, his satirical and comic verse, his profoundly witty paradoxes and aphorisms, and his penetrating studies of such figures as Charles Dickens, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Thomas Aquinas. THE EVERYMAN CHESTERTON contains samples of his poems, stories, essays, and biographies, as well as the influential works of religious, political, and social thought in which he championed the common man and for which he is most admired. READ an excerpt from the introduction here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/…/the-everyman-chestert…/
From 2009: A. N. Wilson on the development of G. K. Chesterton’s (Born #OTD 1874) ideas and his progress towards Roman Catholicism
From an early age Belloc knew Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, who was responsible for the conversion of his mother to Roman Catholicism. Manning's involvement in the 1889 London Dock Strike made a major impression on Belloc and his view of politics, according to biographer Robert Speaight. Belloc described this retrospectively in The Cruise of the Nona (1925); he became a trenchant critic both of unbridled capitalism[11], and of many aspects of socialism.
With others (G. K. Chesterton, Cecil Chesterton, Arthur Penty) Belloc had envisioned the socioeconomic system of distributism. In The Servile State, written after his party-political career had come to end, and other works, he criticized the modern economic order and parliamentary system, advocating distributism in opposition to both capitalism and socialism.
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