Alice Gorton is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, where she specializes in modern British social and cultural history. She won a Research Travel Grant from the Cushwa Center in 2021 for her project, “Ethics and Industry: Rerum novarum and Catholic Social Teaching in the Anglosphere.” During her research visit to campus, Philip Byers sat down with Gorton to learn more about her project.
Philip Byers: Your project examines a cohort of Catholic journalists and lay theologians who sought to apply an encyclical’s social teachings while operating “outside of traditional governing channels.” Who were these Catholics, and why did they work on “the political fringe”?
Alice Gorton: The essay pays particular attention to English Catholic intellectuals who played an instrumental role as conduits for translating and disseminating Rerum novarum’s core ideas in the Anglo world. Taking a genealogical approach, I trace how a series of thinkers interpreted the broad principles of the encyclical to create specific solutions suited to their own national contexts. Looking at the English case, the place to begin is with Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, a pre-eminent convert known for his commitment to labor issues. Manning published a brief bulletin in The Dublin Review heralding the publication of the encyclical in 1891 but after his death in 1892 the writers Hilaire Belloc, a mentee of Manning, G.K. Chesterton, Father Vincent McNabb, and those in the “distributist” circle became perhaps the most vocal advocates of Catholic social teaching. As these ideas were taken up in new ways during the Edwardian period, Catholic activists did indeed begin to work more on the political fringe than Cardinal Manning had when he was alive. Whereas Manning had been an Oxford graduate, a close friend of William Gladstone, and a key figure in labor politics, this later group fixed on the encyclical’s criticisms of centralized and state-based solutions, emphasizing the importance of community and the heteropatriarchal family over the state.
PB: Your grant proposal describes how these Catholic activists “used and altered” the teachings in Rerum novarum. What were some of the ways they adapted the encyclical’s message, and what factors prompted those adaptations?
AG: The bulk of the essay focuses on Catholic activists’ desire to blend and implement the encyclical’s teaching in states with long-established parliamentary or liberal traditions. Rerum novarum opposed both laissez-faire liberalism and socialism but did not provide directives tailored specifically to any given national setting. The intellectuals that I am interested in used the encyclical to develop a decentralized and experimental back-to-the-land movement, blending their ideas with a longer tradition of anti-modern protest represented by the Arts and Crafts movement and symbolized by craftsmen like William Morris. We see a similar process, if not a similar outcome, of adaptation happening in a variety of predominantly Catholic states, such as in Ireland, where, as Rose Luminiello has demonstrated, the Irish laity drew upon the Thomistic philosophy present in Rerum novarum in ways almost entirely at odds with Pope Leo’s original intentions in the years following the Land Wars.1
PB: You situate “distributism” within the context of broader resistance to 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism. What distinguished the distributists—both in the nature of their critique and in their suggested solutions—from other contemporary movements such as the Fabian Society?
AG: In some ways, all the social movements that emerged in this period resembled one another in their diagnoses of the ills of laissez-faire liberalism: things could not continue as they had been in the nineteenth century. Whether it was the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, or the distributists, all were keen critics of the society in which they lived, but their proposed solutions were often fiercely, even diametrically, opposed. The Fabians believed that change should be made gradually, technocratically, using educational and state-based means. Though they too were interested in how best to redistribute wealth and property, their solution was top-down and gradualist. The distributists slotted into this landscape of social reform in a slightly different way, as their aims were at once radical and deeply conservative. In one sense, the twin poles of their programme followed an intellectual genealogy back to St. Thomas Aquinas, who argued that private property was essential to securing the common good, through to Pope Leo XIII, who made private property a key tenet of Rerum novarum. Evidently, this embrace of private property differentiated the distributists from contemporary “new” liberal and socialist movements, which encouraged more universalist and collectivist legislation in both housing and labor policy. Though Catholic intellectual criticized and responded to industrial capitalism, they also argued that the unequal distribution of property brought about by enclosure was a root cause of many contemporary social problems.
PB: Your project aims to direct attention “beyond the borders of Christian Europe.” Why have analyses of Rerum novarum tended to fixate on the continent, and what benefits are there to examining the encyclical’s reception in North America?
AG: One reason why analyses of Rerum novarum have fixated on the continent is that often Catholic social teaching was given more space as an accepted part of the political discourse in Europe, making its way into mass social movements and constitutional politics in a range of states. Analyses of Rerum novarum have flourished in places with large Catholic lay populations, and this makes sense. I’m interested in the kinds of political possibilities available in states that lacked such an institutional structure, places where Catholic activists had less of an entrée into politics and unions than they did elsewhere. Modern European historians agree that the end of the nineteenth century saw the rise of Catholic social movements all across Europe, many of which coalesced into political parties.2 By and large, these groups emerged to combat a similar set of issues: from the 1870s, Catholic and Christian revival movements cropped up in a bid to protect disenfranchised peasant smallholders, defined as prototypically Christian, and guard against the erosion of tradition in the face of liberal free trade and transformations in global agricultural markets, but they took on particular characteristics in each place. A handful of excellent recent analyses have shown that this was true in France, Poland, Hungary, Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere. What these studies reveal is that Catholic social movements looked remarkably different on the ground in each place, but comparatively few of these existing examples have looked in detail at what happened when Catholic social movements emerged in Protestant-majority states.
PB: Tell us about a particularly revealing source you identified during your visit to the Notre Dame Archives. What did you learn from the source?
AG: The archives at Notre Dame are home to so many rich primary sources that it’s hard to choose just one, but I’ve been going through some photographs I took of The Game, an occasional magazine helmed by Douglas Pepler and published by the Ditchling community in Sussex. I’d never been able to access this material before but what I love about this print run is just how clearly it demonstrates the bridge between Catholic social teaching and the Arts and Crafts movement, which is something I hope the piece will really bring out. The set of pamphlets betrays a clear commitment to redefining work in a moment when “the social” was at the top of the political agenda. The magazines provide a clear illustration of how English Catholics had sought to redefine work and worship while emphasizing the authority of the family, the workman, and the Church over the state, which they believed should be retrenched.
The methodology that I work with attempts to reconstruct a social world. What is so useful about the collections at Notre Dame is how they provide a glimpse not only of my historical subject matter’s life-worlds, but also the worlds of those scholars after them who have attempted to grapple with their lives and legacy, including for example Chesterton’s biographer Maisie Ward.
PB: We know that completing your dissertation is object number one, but after that, where do you imagine taking this project?
AG: Part of what I want to do with the piece as I move forward is to think through what sorts of relevance these intellectuals have in the present. This is especially true given their links with European fascism and the revival of new right-wing movements today. But I am also interested in how their commitments to local and especially rural politics are again becoming relevant in an age of climate catastrophe, and how many of the themes touched on in their writings—about the nature of work, the ethics of consumption, and our responsibilities to the land, are now being mobilized across the political spectrum.
Philip Byers is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center.
Editor’s note: At the interviewee’s request, the title and select content of this interview has been updated to reflect changes to the research project.
Notes
1 Rose Luminiello, “‘Ireland is not going to take her orders from Rome’: Leo XIII, Thomism, and the Irish Political Imagination.” 46: 7 History of European Ideas (2020): 964.
2 Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Wolfram Kaiser and Helmut Wohnout, eds., Political Catholicism in Europe 1918-45 (London: Routledge, 2004); James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Catholic Church (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2018); Piotr Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and ‘Revolution’, 1891-1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Paul Hanebrink, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Anti-Semitism, 1890-1944 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).