Arthur J. Penty
Arthur Joseph Penty was born in York, in England, in 1875. His first practical and professional experience was in his father’s drawing office, and by 1902 his skill as an architect was rather widely acknowledged; his work received public commendation and was the subject of at least one work published in Germany. Intellectually Penty’s development was marked initially by association with the Fabian Society in London, whose members, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Philip Snowden and George Bernard Shaw, advocated a moderate form of State Socialism. Though routinely referring to himself as a Socialist, he was a vigorous opponent of bureaucracy, centralization, and collectivism; as Fr. Kiernan noted in his 1941 thesis on Penty for the Catholic University, “in those days [‘Socialism’] had a rather loose significance, and anyone who was not in agreement with the prevailing social and economic philosophy was liable to term himself or be called a Socialist.”
Penty’s association with the Fabians broke in 1916, by which time his vision had been further formed by thinkers such as John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, who looked to the Middle Ages as the quintessential example of a period in which sound principles governed society, and which principles could be applied to remedy modern social ills. As a result of his acquaintance with A. R. Orage, a onetime fellow Fabian, and part owner of the weekly newspaper The New Age, Penty became involved with various thinkers like Orage who were questioning — from various perspectives — the industrial and wage-earning nature of the modern economy; these included the Distributist thinkers Chesterton and Belloc, who were also working out their own theory in the pages of The New Age, among other places. Penty’s thought developed greatly during the period of his association with the paper, and he began to concentrate upon two problems which he thought fundamental to the economic ills of society: the unrestricted use of machinery, and the unrestricted use of money. Both problems, he believed, could be addressed by the formation of Guilds modeled — but in updated form — upon their medieval predecessors. From then on Penty was the champion and chief spokesman of the Guild System, and became the most profound thinker of the Distributist and related Guild movements. Penty’s thought was also significant in that it reacted upon other thinkers such as A. R. Orage, G. D. H. Cole, M. B. Reckitt, and S. G. Hobson to produce the movement known as Guild Socialism. This latter was, again according to Fr. Kiernan (paraphrasing H. G. Wells), “the result of the impact of guilds and Mr. Penty on the uneasy conscience of Mr. Orage.”
Penty expressed and defended his vision in numerous different forums. His published works on the economic question include The Restoration of the Guild System, Old Worlds for New, Guilds and the Social Crisis, A Guildsman’s Interpretation of History, Guilds, Trade and Agriculture, Post Industrialism, Towards a Christian Sociology, Agriculture and the Unemployed, Protection and the Social Problem, Means and Ends, Communism and the Alternative, Tradition and Modernism in Politics, and Distributism: A Manifesto. Of these titles several were translated variously into German, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. His works received considerable attention in his day, being reviewed by organs of the Catholic, Anglican, and secular press with remarkable regularity. His articles appeared in various journals such as The New Age, The New Witness, New Standards, G. K.’s Weekly, The American Review, The Criterion, The Daily News, the Daily Herald, A Journal of Workers’ Control, The Church Socialist, The Crusader, The Guildsman, The Guild Socialist, the Architect’s Journal, and the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. He was a member of various organizations advocating the Guild System and/or a moral and spiritual solution to the economic problem, such as (for a time) the Fabian Society, the Church Socialist League, the Crusader League, and the Rural Reconstruction Association (which he helped to found); he also served as President of the Architects’ and Surveyors’ Assistants’ Professional Union.
