Yes, But What Do You Mean by Progressivism?

And, of course, What do you mean by “America”?  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has come out with a warning against something he calls “progressivism.”  In his opinion, “progressivism” has the potential to destroy America.

“Freedom is Not an Empty Sound”

In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at William Cobbett, to whom some have referred as “the Apostle of Distributism,” meaning a sort of proto advocate of small ownership.  Of course, in some cases, the people who attach such a label have little understanding of what ownership consists.  We can sum up what Cobbett was talking about by quoting American statesman Daniel Webster: “Power naturally and necessarily follows property.”

“Power Tends to Corrupt”

From 1824 to 1826, William Cobbett (1763-1835), whom G.K. Chesterton and others consider “the Apostle of Distributism,” published segments of A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland.  In the book, portions of which were later adapted for The Poor Man’s Friend (1829), Cobbett’s goal was not to defend the Catholic faith.  As he clearly stated, he was a Protestant, and never had any intention of being anything else.

Not Owning Up: Why Dining Out is Dying Out

A recent New York Times story related the horrors of dining out in today’s society.  Bemoaning the high cost of food and the low level of service, the article went to great lengths to assert it’s point that it’s personal service and warmth that make the difference in whether people enjoy their dining experience.  Lack of experienced wait staff, the pandemic, and a few other factors were cited as contributing to the problem.  The high cost was virtually ignored, although the cited $200 for a simple dinner and drinks comes to more than four times this writer’s monthly food budget (food only, by the way. none of the other things you might get in a grocery store).

The Fatal Omission

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, there was a movement in the early nineteenth century to broaden the base of capital ownership throughout society.   This was justified based on individual human dignity (Cobbett), economic stability (Morrison), and as a counter to the spread of the “New Things” of modernism and socialism (the Catholic Church).

The Problem of Liability

As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, there were significant institutional barriers preventing Ebenezer Scrooge from doing the completely right thing by Bob Cratchit and making him a partner instead of a mere employee.  For example, anyone who “participated” in any way in a business was considered a part owner, even if he didn’t have legal title to anything.  That made him jointly and severally liable for all debts of the business.  If the enterprise went belly-up, he could go to debtor’s prison.

The Magic of Future Savings

If you want to baffle and outrage both socialists and capitalists — kin under the skin more than either group realizes — tell them that it is possible to have expanded capital ownership without either redefining ownership or redistributing what belongs to others.  Socialists will bellow that you cannot have widespread ownership without changing the meaning of ownership, while capitalists will shriek that the only way others can own anything is to take it from them.

“But You Are a Slave”

In his Advice to Young Men, the English Radical politician and journalist (among other things) William Cobbett said, “To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.”  As the “Apostle of Distributism” (as G.K. Chesterton called him), Cobbett had even stronger things to say about the necessity of widespread capital ownership:

Religion Without God

Following up on the previous posting on this subject (i.e., John Henry Newman), we need to look at the specific situation in which he found himself.  As was the case with all mainstream Christian churches in the early nineteenth century, the Church of England was in serious trouble.  Nor was this situation limited to religious society.  In the wake of the French Revolution, Church, State, and Family seemed to be dissolving in chaos everywhere in Europe.

What is Socialism?, III: Why It’s Wrong

Yesterday we looked at a correct understanding of private property: it is both a natural right that is absolute in the sense that every human being has the right to be an owner, and a set of manmade and socially determined rights and duties that define how an owner may use what he or she owns.  Today we look at why socialism, defined as the abolition of private property in capital, is wrong, that is, contrary to nature.

Socialist Delusions, Capitalist Illusions, III: Life, Liberty, and Property

Socialists-Who-Deny-They-are-Socialists (as well as a number of socialists) often reject the claim that socialism can be defined as the abolition of private property.  They will point out that there are differences between Marxist communist socialism, communist socialism, Fabian socialism, National Socialism, Christian socialism, guild socialism . . . etc., etc., etc., and say that proves that anyone who says that (in a sense) socialism can be defined as the abolition of private property doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.

"A Second Call to Battle" — Happy 500th

Shortly after co-founding the Center for Economic and Social Justice ("CESJ") in 1984 to develop practical applications of his analysis of the social doctrine of Pope Pius XI and the economic justice principles developed by Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler, Reverend William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., "America's greatest social philosopher," began a massive revision of his 1941 doctoral thesis. This had been published in 1943 as The Act of Social Justice, and condensed in 1948 as Introduction to Social Justice. Having been left unfinished at Father Ferree's death in 1985, the manuscript still awaits completion, but the reason for the effort was embodied in the new title: Forty Years After . . . A Second Call to Battle. After his exposure to the Kelso ideas, Father Ferree seemed to catch fire and saw in the revolutionary concepts of binary economics a necessary complement to the equally revolutionary social doctrine of Pius XI. This fire still inspires CESJ and the wider world of the Just Third Way.

We therefore thought it might be appropriate to break between the two parts of our "Own the Fed" series, not just to give the reader a breather, but to pause a bit to celebrate our 500th posting on the blog. We realize that for the past six months or so the postings have been getting longer and, for a blog, pretty deep. This reflects both our basic "blog philosophy" as well as our concern for the world's political situation. Most especially, we are concerned for the economic situation that, for good or ill, largely determines the stability of the political system and the degree of freedom enjoyed by people within the system. We need to renew our commitment to the Just Third Way, and to reflect on the best way to heed a "second call to battle" in order to implement the vision of Kelso and Adler, and Pius XI at the earliest possible date and in the most effective and efficient manner.

This blog serves two purposes, 1) bring important events to the attention of the readership, and 2) help teach Just Third Way principles. Our basic blog philosophy is that blogs fill more or less the same role as newspapers in Jacksonian America. While these periodicals reported some news, they were, by and large, organs to publicize the personal opinion of the editor, who was often also the publisher, reporting staff, and printer, all in one. While there was doubtless a great deal of tripe published, there was also a significant measure of well-considered political commentary. The press was, in a sense, the literary equivalent of the social and political activism Alexis de Tocqueville noted as prevalent in the United States during this period in his monumental sociological study, Democracy in America.

As for our concern for the economic situation, both national and global, it should be obvious to anyone familiar with the "four pillars" of an economically just society that the powers-that-be are still unfamiliar with the basic principles of the Just Third Way. We are convinced that for the mere survival of any degree of civilization it is becoming increasingly critical that Just Third Way reforms be adopted as soon as possible. We only hope that the global financial meltdown that appears imminent holds off long enough to implement necessary reforms. The last economic disruption even remotely approaching the scale of what we anticipate should Just Third Way reforms not be adopted gave us the Second World War.

For that reason, it is becoming increasing critical that all our readers as well as all supporters of the Just Third Way heed the "call to battle" and work to the best of their abilities to open doors for the CESJ "core group" to deliver the message that something other than the remarkably confused and grim world situation is more than possible, it is entirely feasible and achievable within a remarkably short period of time. All it takes is you, and a personal commitment to action.

First, do not hold yourself back from a false or even genuine sense of modesty. As Father Ferree pointed out, each of us has an individual and personal responsibility for the common good. Opening doors so that the Just Third Way can get a fair hearing is, in a very real sense, your duty, both to yourself and to the rest of humanity.

Second, do not assume that you need to be able to "make the sale" yourself. You are not the best salesman for these ideas. (Neither am I, for that matter — as should be evident from the length and content of these blog postings. My job is to fill in the blanks and present the arguments for people who want to find out more about the Just Third Way, not to convince them that they should investigate our claims.) The best you can do is get a good grasp of the four pillars so that you can present a quick introduction, inspire some interest, and get a commitment to meet with a member of the CESJ core group. If pressed for more details, you can use the late Senator Russell Long's declaration when, after years of avoiding coming to grips with the Kelso ideas integrated into the Just Third Way, he stated emphatically, "One of my basic principles that I had from the time I first entered politics is that I don't care who's right, I care what's right. This is right." As for the four pillars,

One, a limited economic role for the State. For at least a century, and a good argument could be made that the process has been going on for at least half a millennium, the State has been assuming more and more control over people's lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. In light of the bumbling over the current economic crisis a good case can be made that the State, a very specialized and powerful tool, long ago passed the stage of functional overload and is now causing the very chaos, both economic and political, the State is established to prevent.

Two, free and open markets as the best means of determining just wages, just prices, and just profits. Leaving such matters to the State, no matter how beneficent, is simply to substitute the limited knowledge of one person or a small group for that of everyone. The collected mass of people may not be smarter than a single individual or a small group — but the individuals who make it up have the natural right to be free from unnecessary coercion. The State's role must be limited to maintaining the common good, policing abuses, and providing a "level playing field," that is to providing a strong juridical order that supports human freedom and the dignity of the human person in all its complexity.

Three, restoration of the rights of private property, particularly in corporate equity. The unique social invention of the corporation has been excoriated by self-appointed champions of human freedom. That is because the corporation, designed to allow participation by many people in a single productive enterprise, has, instead, been used to concentrate ownership instead of spreading it out. This is a direct result of the methods of finance used to form capital. Most people assume incorrectly that it is essential to cut consumption in order to save, then invest. On the contrary, using modern commercial and central banking, it is possible to invest first, then generate the production necessary to repay the financing. Most simply put, the old way assumes incorrectly that production is a derivative of money. On the contrary, money is a derivative of production. This is obvious if we stop to think about it.

Four, widespread direct ownership of the means of production. Most simply put, private property in the means of production links the human person to the means of sustaining and protecting his or her life in the most intimate manner possible, whether we are talking about the ownership each person has of his or her labor, or of the capital instruments that, increasingly, are replacing human labor as the predominant factor of production. As William Cobbett declared, "Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, — and it means nothing else, — the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave."

That's it. There are only two steps to effective door opening. At this critical time, however, that is all that is needed. This is your "call to battle." It is up to you to respond.

#30#

William Cobbett, "The Poor Man's (and Woman's) Friend," Part IV (Final)

Cobbett's emphasis on widespread ownership of the means of production readily explains his evident hostility to industrialization. The process of industrialization, while not inevitably linked to the capitalist economic model (ownership of the means of production concentrated in the hands of a private elite), was bound to it by the usual form of financing capital formation and the reliance on existing accumulations of wealth. Under these prevailing (and incorrect) assumptions, workers in industrial concerns were considered necessarily stripped of ownership and forced to rely exclusively on wages for their subsistence, and forced to work in inhuman conditions.

That being the case, Cobbett naturally tarred industrialization with the same brush he used to blacken the system developed under the Tudors that concentrated ownership of land in the hands of an elite few. Cobbett attributed the start of this process to Henry VIII Tudor and his confiscation of Church lands and the property of the multitudes who disagreed with his religious and political changes. (See Cobbett's A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 1829.)

The concentration of ownership of the means of production, however, actually began earlier, under Henry VII Tudor. Henry VII asserted a right to rule based on something other than the consent of the people assembled in parliament, and abolished the near-autonomy of the duchies of York and Lancaster that had always provided a counter to the concentration of power in the crown, and always cherished a deep hostility toward Ireland, which had provided a base of support for the House of York as well as putting forth a seemingly endless stream of pretenders to the crown, such as Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

Thus, industry was not evil, per se, but the structures of ownership and the method of financing capital formation presumably required that the working classes be reduced to a condition that Cobbett characterized on more than a few occasions as slavery. This set up a paradox, for Cobbett was fully aware that the agricultural life he advocated was impossible without an adequate industrial base to support it.

Thus, it was the presumed necessity of concentrated ownership that accompanied industrialization, not industrialization itself, that Cobbett condemned. (This is a distinction that many authorities today, indoctrinated in the Keynesian dogma that wealth must be concentrated if society is to advance, seem unable to make. This may be the source of the blanket assertion that Cobbett was "always wrong" in his economic analysis.) The United States was thus, for Cobbett, the Land of Opportunity because there was widespread ownership of the means of production (chiefly land), and industrialization, with its presumed inevitable concentration of ownership and the stripping of the working classes of private property, had not yet gained a foothold. In sum,

What he [Cobbett] saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was not there. And some cannot see it — even when it is there. (G. K. Chesterton, William Cobbett)

While Cobbett did not state it explicitly, the importance of America was that it was a truly new thing, a genuinely novus ordo that broke with the past at the same time that it delivered on all the promises previously made but which could never be kept under the old social arrangements and structures. In America,

• The reliance on the rich to form capital out of their existing accumulations of savings and thus provide jobs for workers who thereby became their effective slaves was eliminated due to the free or extremely inexpensive land.

• There were no real social classes because everyone had equal opportunity to be economically self-sufficient; classes could be discarded without any danger of harm to the social order.

• With artificial distinctions of social and economic class removed, every person was politically equal, with equal rights and duties.

• Under equal opportunity to advance socially, economically, and politically, people were closer to what God made them, and thus individuals and society were more peaceful and less prone to unrest in civil, domestic, or religious society.

In other words, in America people could become more fully human than they were able within the institutional structure of Europe.

It is possible (very easy, in fact) to poke some very big holes in Cobbett's view of America . . . if we concentrate on finding specific instances where the principles of America were contradicted, the most obvious being the institution of chattel slavery. That does not change the fact that in America Cobbett saw an important advance in the form of a break from old, flawed institutions, and a move toward something more consistent with what it means to be fully human.

Like the individual human being charged with the duty to acquire and develop virtue — the habit of doing good — America now had the duty to acquire and develop institutional patterns of doing good. Both individuals and societies have this potential. It therefore becomes the obligation of the human person with respect to him- or herself, and the citizen organized with like-minded others with respect to the whole of society, to acquire and develop individual and social virtue, respectively.

The ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the U. S. Constitution, etc., — all were directed at creating and sustaining a new order within which the human person could become more fully him- or herself. The principles were there. It was now up to apply them in a manner consistent with the natural law that defines the human person as human.

William Cobbett, "The Poor Man's (and Woman's) Friend," Part II

It's common these days to pay lip service to people like William Cobbett, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, and "support" the policy of widespread ownership of the means of production embodied in "distributism." Unfortunately, a number of the people who claim to support something they call "ownership of private property" don't really understand ownership or private property. As one self-appointed "authority" has declared on more than one occasion, "property is a right, but it is not an absolute right."

Now, the claim that "property is a right, but it is not an absolute right" can be understood in one of two ways, one right, and one wrong. The right way to understand it is that the right to be an owner is absolute, a natural right, inherent and inalienable in every single human being that is, was, or ever will be born. What is not absolute is what an owner can do with what he or she possesses, even, in some circumstances, what a person may own. That is, the exercise of private property must be limited by the wants and needs of the owner, other persons, and the common good as a whole.

The wrong way to understand the statement, "property is a right, but it is not an absolute right" is to assert (usually without any proof other than personal faith) that private property is "prudential matter" so that some or all people can have their allegedly natural right to be an owner taken away if some other people (those with the clubs, guns, or guillotine) decide that is the "right" thing to do.

Cobbett disagreed most emphatically with the idea that private property is somehow "prudential matter," and said so in no uncertain terms:

You may twist the word freedom as long as you please, but at last it comes to quiet enjoyment of your own property, or it comes to nothing. Why do men want any of those things that are called political rights and privileges? Why do they, for instance, want to vote at elections for members of parliament? Oh! because they shall then have an influence over the conduct of those members. And of what use is that? Oh! then they will prevent the members from doing wrong. What wrong? Why, imposing taxes that ought not to be paid. That is all; that is the use, and the only use, of any right or privilege that men in general can have. Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, — and it means nothing else, — the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave. (William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 1829, §456)

As surely as America's Founding Fathers (especially George Mason of Gunston Hall, who embodied the natural right to be an owner in the first section of his draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776), Cobbett saw that political life — civil life itself — was rooted in private property: "All men are equal by nature; nobody denies that they all ought to be equal in the eye of the law; but, how are they to be thus equal, if the law begin by suffering some to enjoy this right and refusing the enjoyment to others?" (William Cobbett, Cobbett's Advice to Young Men, and (Incidentally) to Young Women, 1830, § 338) All of the italics in the quote are Cobbett's, by the way.

Is the point still unclear? Just in case anyone had any doubts on the matter, Cobbett kept repeating it — in italics:

What is a slave? For, let us not be amused by a name; but look well into the matter. A slave is, in the first place, a man who has no property; and property means something that he has, and that nobody can take from him without his leave, or consent. (Ibid., § 344)

Private property not a natural right? Private property "prudential matter"? Not likely — unless you are an advocate of mass enslavement, or a toady of the slavers.

In light of this, there is only one possible distributist — or Just Third Way — response to someone who claims that private property in the means of production is not a natural right, or that the wage-welfare system that forces people into dependency on the State is the only way to temporal salvation (instead of being, as Chesterton and Belloc emphasized over and over [and over and over] another form of slavery). That is to point out the rather obvious fact that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863 . . . why are you trying to undo all his work?

William Cobbett laid it out quite plainly. Own or be owned. It's that simple.

William Cobbett, "The Poor Man's (and Woman's) Friend," Part I

As faithful readers of this blog have seen, the working assumption of most economic theories is that the chief means to acquire and possess capital — credit — is available only to those who have already accumulated sufficient savings to invest, or who can persuade those who have saved to lend them the money. This, the basic assumption of Keynesian economics, seems to invalidate Say's Law of Markets. How can people purchase "capital and land" when they lack the means to do so, and jobs do not exist that enable them to sell their labor? Worse, what if the available jobs pay below the amount necessary either for the worker and his or her dependents to live in a manner befitting the demands of human dignity, or fail to clear all the goods and services that have been produced at market prices?

In the early 19th century, however, there was one answer: the United States of America. Until relatively late in the century, it was possible for almost anyone to come to the United States and, if willing to take the risks, gain a property stake ranging from the moderate to the gargantuan. In America of the early 1800s, the theories of Malthus were a dead letter. In 1829, one commentator referred to the United States as, "that anti-malthusian country where Malthus would certainly be burned alive." (William Cobbet, The Emigrant's Guide. Arlington, Virginia: Economic Justice Media, 2008, 189-190.)

William Cobbett was a champion of the poor and downtrodden in the late 18th and early 19th century in Great Britain. Unlike most such self-appointed authorities, however, he certainly chronicled the crimes of the wealthy and the government, but most of his efforts were directed to what was necessary to lift people out of poverty and empower them to resist the political and religious oppression of the English establishment.

In contrast to today's "conspiracy theorists" — whatever they might call themselves — Cobbett's goal was not to seek out and punish the presumably guilty. This program seems to be advocated in the hope that an ideal world will somehow spring up spontaneously like a phoenix out of the ashes of the old order once the criminals have been executed as painfully as possible. No, Cobbett's goal was to identify and promote what would make life better for the poor, not what would make life miserable for the rich.

That being the case, Cobbett's writings may seem at first simply a long catalogue of crimes and criminals. Nowhere, however (at least that I recall), is there any of the prevalent demands for punishment and vengeance that masquerade as a well-formed "social conscience" today. As G. K. Chesterton characterized Cobbett,

The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in the one, anything that he could not find in the other. One man, however, happened to look up from the book and see things for himself; he was a man of too impatient a temper, and later he showed too hasty a disposition to tear the book up or toss the book away. But there had been granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort of faith. He could believe his eyes. (William Cobbett, 1926)

Thus, seeing reality, Cobbett tried to focus on what would make things better, not what would make them worse. What we therefore see in any of his writings following the (extremely) long list of what is wrong in society, is something that many people today regard as a virtual obsession on Cobbett's part: widespread individual and joint ownership of the means of production. There were other things as well, but nothing seemed more calculated to inspire Cobbett's ire than denial of the natural right to be an owner of the means of production, for nothing else has the same capacity as property to empower people with control over their own lives.

The Poor Man's Friend

Nearly two centuries ago William Cobbett ran for parliament. He failed to get elected, but the series of pamphlets he wrote was collected and published as The Poor Man's Friend. In the pamphlets he carefully explained why he was running for office:

How there came to be so much poverty and misery in England? This is a very interesting question; for, though it is the doom of man, that he shall never be certain of any thing, and that he shall never be beyond the reach of calamity; though there always has been, and always will be, poor people in every nation; though this circumstance of poverty is inseparable from the means which uphold communities of men; though, without poverty, there could be no charity, and none of those feelings, those offices, those acts, and those relationships, which are connected with charity, and which form a considerable portion of the cement of civil society: yet, notwithstanding these things, there are bounds, beyond which, the poverty of a people cannot go, without becoming a thing to complain of, and to trace to the Government as a fault. Those bounds have been passed, in England, long and long ago. (The Poor Man's Friend, 1829, § 90)

His answer? Lack of widespread direct ownership of the means of production. As he made clear in another book he published the next year in a tome purporting to give advice to young people starting out in life,

What is a slave? For, let us not be amused by a name; but look well into the matter. A slave is, in the first place, a man who has no property; and property means something that he has, and that nobody can take from him without his leave, or consent. (Advice to Young Men, and (Incidentally) to Young Women, 1830, § 344)

This is not empty rhetoric, but a simple statement of fact:

Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, — and it means nothing else, — the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave. (A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, 1829, §456)

It might be something to think about.

William Cobbett's "The Emigrant's Guide"

No, we're not suggesting that anyone leave the United States to get ahead in these difficult times. We'd just like to announce that our latest publication, a new, annotated edition of The Emigrant's Guide by William Cobbett, is available for sale on Amazon, and will probably be up on Barnes and Noble within a short time. The book features an in-depth foreword by CESJ's Director of Research, which explains the context of the book and shows how Cobbett's thought fits in with the principles of the Just Third Way.

We'll be sending out some press releases in the near future, but loyal blog readers and participants in the Kelso Binary Economics Discussion Group have the opportunity to get in ahead of the crowd and get their copy before the rush starts. To purchase a copy retail, go to the link above for Amazon (or Barnes and Noble, when we get it), or put in a special order at your local bookstore. The ISBN for our edition is 0-944997-01-5 (10-digit) or 978-0944997017 (13-digit), and the cover price is $20.00. If you want to purchase quantities in bulk (e.g., ten or more copies), you can order direct from CESJ for $16.00 per copy plus shipping of $1.50 per copy within the continental United States. As the back cover of The Emigrant's Guide will inform you,

William Cobbett (1763-1835) was a British journalist, reformer, and politician. Greatly admired by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (With Hilaire Belloc the found of "distributism") and Dorothy Day of the "Catholic Worker Movement," Cobbett's continuing theme was the economic disenfranchisement of the average person. To Cobbett economic power was rooted in one thing: access to the means of acquiring and possessing private productive property, which more and more modern commentators are beginning to realize is the basis of a sound political as well as economic order. As Chesterton said of Cobbett, "The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in the one, anything that he could not find in the other. One man, however, happened to look up from the book and see things for himself; he was a man of too impatient a temper, and later he showed too hasty a disposition to tear the book up or toss the book away. But there had been granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort of faith. He could believe his eyes."

To get the most out of the book, you might want to be familiar with the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America (the first volume of which was published the year Cobbett died) gives a much broader and institutional view of the United States that fits very well with Cobbett's extremely personal approach. Although certainly not in the same class as de Tocqueville's masterpiece (considered the first great work of sociology), Cobbett's Emigrant's Guide gives a unique, personal perspective on Jacksonian America that cannot be obtained from textbooks or formal histories, that fleshes out Democracy in America better than all the learned lectures or heavy treatises on what America was "really like" in the early 19th century.

You don't need to read de Tocqueville to appreciate Cobbett, however, be a diehard Chestertonian, or even think of Cobbett as the "Apostle of Distributism," as Chesterton put it. From the first sentence you'll realize you've got hold of an extremely opinionated, often irascible, yet (in a paradox that probably delighted Chesterton) kindly man who kept the individual as well as social good of himself and others always in the forefront. He's also extremely entertaining, as a reader of any of Cobbett's other books can tell you.

Although weighing in at 200 pages or so (not counting the extended foreword of more than 40 pages), the book is a quick and enjoyable read. It is head and shoulders above other "how to" manuals and guides due to Cobbett's obvious interest in actual people, rather than in demographic classes, movements, or anything other than the essential dignity of the human person. Nor do you have to agree with Cobbett in every particular, or even most particulars to gain "instruction and amusement" from the book, any more than you have to be an English pauper in the early 19th century to derive pleasure and a little bit of learning.

Try it. I think you'll like it.