Arthur Penty

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Arthur Joseph Penty (1875 –1937) was a British architect, and writer on Guild socialism and distributism. He was first a Fabian socialist, and follower of Victorian thinkers William Morris and John Ruskin. He is generally credited with the formulation of a Christian socialist form of the medieval guild, as an alternative basis for economic life.

Around 1900, working in his father's architectural practice in Leeds, he met A. R. Orage; with Holbrook Jackson they founded the Leeds Arts Club. All three moved to London in 1905 and 1906; Penty in fact led the way, and Orage lodged with him in his first attempts to live by writing.

For a time, from 1906, Penty's ideas were widely influential. Orage, as editor of The New Age, was a convert to guild socialism. After World War I guild socialism dropped back as a factor in the thinking of the British Labour movement, in general; the idea of post-industrialism, on which Penty wrote, attributing the term to A. K. Coomaraswamy, receded in importance in the face of the economic conditions. Several of Penty's books were translated into German in the early 1920s. Penty was an acknowledged influence of the Spanish writer Ramiro de Maeztu Whitney (1875-1936).

[edit] Penty the distributist

The somewhat complex British development of distributism emerged as a conjuncture of ideas of Penty, Hilaire Belloc and the Chestertons Cecil and Gilbert. It reflected in part a first split from the Fabian socialists of the whole New Age group, in the form of the Fabian Arts Group of 1907.

Orage was a believer in Guild socialism for a period. After C. H. Douglas met Orage in 1918, and Orage invented the term Social Credit for the Douglas theories, there was in effect a further split into 'left' (Social Crediters) and 'right' (distributist) thinkers. This is, though, fairly misleading as a classification; it was also to some extent a split between theosophist and Catholic camps.

Penty went with the distributists. Distributism in the 1920s took its own direction, as Belloc wrote his version of it in the period 1920 to 1925 and connected it with his political theories. The British Labour Party declared against Social Credit in 1922.

Gradually, although G. K. Chesterton supported the General Strike of 1926, distributism found itself on the right wing. Alignments with the British ruralist writers, such as H. J. Massingham, approximate equivalents of American agrarians, brought it into contact with a number of far right believers. In this context Penty wrote his 1937 Distributism: A Manifesto, the year after the death of Chesterton.

[edit] Works

The Restoration of the Gild System (1906)
Essays on Post-Industrialism (1914) edited with Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy
Old Worlds for New (1917)
Guilds and the Social Crisis (1919)
The Guild Alternative
A Guildsman's Interpretation of History (1919)
Post Industrialism (1922)
Gilden, Gewerbe und Landwirtschaft (1922) translated by Otto Eccius
Towards a Christian Sociology (1923),
Agriculture and the unemployed (1925) with William Wright
The Elements of Domestic Design (1930)
Means and Ends (1932).
Communism and the Alternative (1933)
Distributism: A Manifesto (1937)
The Gauntlet: A Challenge to the Myth of Progress (2002) collection, introduction by Peter Chojnowski
Distributist Perspectives: Volume 1 - Essays on the Economics of Justice and Charity (2004) with others