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 . . .

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Allan C. Carlson is President of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois (www.profam.org). His books include Conjugal America: On The Public Purposes of Marriage and The Natural Family: Bulwark of Liberty. He is married and has four children and is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He is a senior editor for Touchstone.

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