Localism:
Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching
edited by dale ahlquist and michael warren davis
sophia institute press, 240 pages, $21.95
How often do politicians talk about love of country? I live in England, and I would say: not often. Apart from when some boilerplate is felt to be a requirement—either for a big set-piece occasion or when pleading for belief in their good and true intentions in the wake of some perceived misjudgment or misdemeanor—it is a concept they keep largely to one side. America is different, no doubt. But even in America and elsewhere, as ties between citizens or subjects grow looser, attachment to the nation seems to exist more and more at poles: at times directed at something visceral, primal, ancestral; and at other times toward a heady legal abstraction. But where does ordinary, day-to-day, place-oriented love fit into political discourse, when eyes are not fixed on throne or flag or constitution?
I recall well the time I heard a junior minister in the British government actually using the term “love”—casually, almost in passing, and all the more resoundingly as a result. It was quite some time ago. He was talking about provisions in the 2011 Localism Act that gave ordinary people, not politicos, new powers to influence building developments in their parishes and neighborhoods. These powers were legal, technical, political. They required committees, meetings, hearings, votes. There was a lot of detail to absorb. But, he said, these things would all be done in the name of love: love of a human settlement that, however humble, was different from any other; that was yours; that had a substance and savor worth retaining.
I was intrigued, therefore, to see a substantial new volume of essays from the U.S.A. with the same title as this legislation: Localism. In his foreword, Dale Ahlquist, one of the book’s co-editors, explains how he sees localism as another name for distributism, the vision of economic life in which (to simplify things greatly) ownership of productive property is as widely distributed as possible.
It does not take long for love to surface. In one of the essays, Fr. Michael Rennier describes his own personal journey from stark, anti-materialist minimalism to “creative thrift.” He writes that he has come to realize that the answer to consumerism is “moderation and love”: Moderation in consumption, and the genuine love of beautiful objects. Rennier’s use of the term is instructive, suggesting to us the elasticity of the application of love in a philosophy of localism. It involves love of place, yes, of course; but it can extend to love of objects, too, and love of the ultimate locale, the family. And families anywhere can practice localism, even when lodging in unpropitious cityscapes: “Be willing to live the life before you get the land,” writes Max Becher, founder of the Catholic Agrarian, in his essay. “Every dollar we spend is a vote cast for a better or worse world,” Joseph Pearce wisely reminds us.
The other deep lesson of these essays is best summed up by Ryan Hanning, a professor of theology and an active homesteader: “Distributism makes not only an economic claim but an anthropological one as well.” It is “inborn, a part of nature; capitalism and socialism are learned traits.”
This idea cascades through the volume, an alternative anthropology to the one that silently but mercilessly orders modern life: “Our outsourced, disembodied, click-to-order world is a continuous assault against the truth of who we are,” notes Matthew Giambrone. “If anything is necessary for distributism to work, it is human beings who know what it means to be human,” observes Sean Fitzpatrick. “So far from providing freedom,” Herbert Agar warns, “monopoly capitalism does not even desire it” (even as, one might add, its mighty arm of advertizing dangles before us ever more exotic facsimiles of freedom).
This idea resonates far beyond the pages of Localism. In his 2024 Erasmus Lecture, “The Desecration of Man,” Carl R. Trueman concluded that the “modern crisis of anthropology must find its solution among religious communities worshipping in local contexts.” And this revised anthropology leads also to a recovery of the other American Dream, too often forgotten, steeped in poetry and history. E. Wesley Reynolds the III describes it as the dream that sought to weave together “simplicity, locality, and beauty in America.”
According to Jason Craig, the “romance of the village ideal,” in particular, still haunts Americans (as it does Europeans): That “beautiful yet practical integration in a place of religion, work, festivity.” Craig notices how, more and more, corporations attempt “to assume within themselves the life of a village.” It’s a con, though, and one test of this is in the contrast with fathers who are actually engaged in a local economy: They are “more on display with their virtues and vices, unable to live a double life at work or home.” Anthony Esolen, as ever, acts as both perspicacious diagnostician of our ills and lyrical evoker of how things could be, giving wholesomeness its argumentative teeth. He asks us to consider the child’s bus journey to a far-off school (“You take a machine to get to a machine”) before painting beguiling pictures of the tangibility and variety of childhood freedom when returned to a locale. The new volume provides absorbing accounts of how the philosophy has been put into practice in communities in Sierra Leone and Italy.
In many ways, Jason Craig concludes, localism brings “considerations of justice and rights closer to home and out of the clouds.” Localism remains one of our last best hopes.
John Duggan is a freelance writer based in England.
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Image by Alfred Sisley, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via the public domain. Image cropped.
