Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910-1950 - Hardcover

Lothian, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 026803382X ISBN 13: 9780268033828

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009

Synopsis

In The Making and Unmaking of the English Catholic Intellectual Community, 1910–1950, James R. Lothian examines the engagement of interwar Catholic writers and artists both with modernity in general and with the political and economic upheavals of the times in England and continental Europe. The book describes a close-knit community of Catholic intellectuals that coalesced in the aftermath of the Great War and was inspired by Hilaire Belloc's ideology. Among the more than two dozen figures considered in this volume are G. K. Chesterton, novelist Evelyn Waugh, poet and painter David Jones, sculptor Eric Gill, historian Christopher Dawson, and publishers Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. For Catholic intellectuals who embraced Bellocianism, the response to contemporary politics was a potent combination of hostility toward parliamentary democracy, capitalism, and so-called "Protestant" Whig history. Belloc and his friends asserted a set of political, economic, and historiographical alternatives―favoring monarchy and Distributism, a social and economic system modeled on what Belloc took to be the ideals of medieval feudalism.

Lothian explores the community's development in the 1920s and 1930s, and its dissolution in the 1940s, in the aftermath of World War II. Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, joined by Tom Burns and Christopher Dawson, promoted an aesthetic and philosophical vision very much at odds with Belloc's political one. Weakened by internal disagreement, the community became fragmented and finally dissolved.

About this title

About the Author

James R. Lothian is visiting assistant professor of history at Binghamton University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 026803382X
• ISBN 13: 9780268033828
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512