Forward Progress
Return to Order: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society
by John Horvat II
York Press, 2013
(353 pages, $21.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Allan Carlson
Calls for a return to the organic social economy of medieval Europe, as an alternative to the "creative destruction" of industrial capitalism, have been heard since the late nineteenth century. Some of these wound up caught in the dangerous currents of European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. More creative and useful visions of such a restoration can be found in the "Distributist" theories of the British authors Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton and in the quest by Austrian economist Karl Polanyi for an order in which productive activities would be "embedded" once again in social relationships.
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Allan C. Carlson is the author of numerous books, including Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis and The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity. He attends St. Paul Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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