The Guild Alternative: An Answer to the Chaos of the Modern World At the beginning of the twentieth century G.K. Chesterton asked in one of most celebrated books: ‘What is Wrong with the World?’ In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, he would be forced to ask: What is Right with the World?
There can be few thinking people in the world nowadays who do not realise that we stand before an apocalyptic crisis. Everywhere one looks, one sees division, disintegration, decay. No aspect of our lives is left untouched, be it in the temporal order or in the spiritual order. No-one appears any longer to have any credible answers to the most pressing and vital questions of our age. One looks in vain to the clergy, to the politicians, to the pundits and thinkers of the ruling class for a semblance of a vision; they all seem content to utter platitudes and seek photo-opportunities.
Arthur Penty was a man before his time and one courageous enough to face reality head on. He was not afraid to say that something was radically wrong with the world; he was no afraid to say that our society had taken a wrong direction and that the only answer was to retrace our steps, however difficult materially and psychologically this might be, and set out on the path of salvation.
He knew that the world could only be saved by a wholesale return to those Christian beliefs and values which had made Europe the centre of world civilisation. He likewise knew that the spiritual revitalization of our society went hand-in-hand with its material transformation from a society based on greed to a society based on justice; from a society based on economics to a society based on morality; from a society based on material values to a society based on spiritual values.
In this truly astounding book he outlines where we went wrong, what we did wrong and where this path is leading us. Thereafter, he determines to show us what philosophy of life and what actions we must embrace if the world is to have any future beyond a lifeless and conformist world tyranny.
This book, originally published under the title 'Guilds, Trade and Agriculture', challenges ideas and principles. It provides analysis and guidance. It provides the philosophy and the practice that this age needs. It makes no claim to infallibility, but it does claim to point us in the right direction.
No honest reader will be left untouched by this book, for it does what so many tens-of-thousands of books published by the huge publishing corporations fail to do - it provides, just as it claims in its subtitle, 'An Answer to the Chaos of the Modern World'.
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