This book should be of particular interest to readers
of The Philosopher as G.K. Chesterton was a very active member of the Philosophical
Society of England in its early days.
Father Quentin Laver has a fine reputation as an Hegelian
scholar, and here uses all his skills in presenting a coherent account
of Chesterton's passionately held and powerfully expressed opinions on
reason, values, religious belief, the limitations of science, and social
cohesion.
Chesterton never attended a university and would never
have described himself as 'a philosopher' [that's what you think! - Ed]
but he left behind him an enormous body of work including a fine biography
of St Thomas Aquinas, Orthodoxy, The Common Man, Heretics, and Twelve
Types.
Chesterton was opposed both to allowing market forces
unrestricted play, not believing that profits would be defeated by bureaucratic
conformity to pettifogging rules.Instead he proposed a system he called
'Distribution' in which profit would not be the main measure of value,
but which would aim at increasing the dignity and well-being of the community
as a whole. He founded a 'Distributive League', but lacked the time and
the support for its organisation.
Father Quentin also faces the less attractive of Chesterton's
opinions : his attack on Jews, or at least on wealthy Jewish monopolists,
his apparent conviction that Blacks were inferior to Europeans, and his
opposition to the enfranchisement of women. [I cannot believe this of the
Soceity's much-loved 'Philosopher of Fun!' as he has always been to us
- perhaps some ill-founded misconcpetions are provoking these rumours.
Ed]
This is an impressive book, not only as a depiction of
the opinions of one man, but as a guide to the conflicting ideas current
at the beginning of this century, which remain unresolved at its end.
Reviewed by Derek Douglas Johnston
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