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	Briefly Reviewed By Paul Bower New Oxford Review January 7, 2008 http://www.newoxfordreview.org/briefly.jsp?did=0109-briefly Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies — and Why They Disappeared. By Allan C. Carlson. ISI Books. 225 pages. $21.95. Most of us have grown up taking for granted a dichotomy of two essential views of mankind: capitalism and communism. These two worldviews exist as the basic premises upon which any idea of society is based. You view man either as a prime mover in the action of his own life, individual par excellence, or as a very small piece of a much larger mechanism designed for the happiness and prosperity of all. The problem with these two views is that they both reduce man to a mere economic unit. Thus, one can rightly see them as two sides of the same coin — which has not to this point been proven the only coin in the realm. Allan C. Carlson, working closely with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and aided by a grant from the Earhart Foundation in Ann Arbor, sets out to examine social ideas and ideologies of the 20th century that eschewed both capitalism and communism. The result, Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies — and Why They Disappeared, is a fascinating examination of the will of citizens to self-govern. The first subject of Carlson's study is the distributist movement in early 20th-century Britain. Distribu tism is used by Carlson as a blueprint for the various societies that he explores in the book, and it serves rather well, as all the movements he deals with share some basic tenets of distributism in one way or another. Fathered by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the early 1920s, distributism sought to recreate the traditional role of the peasantry in England by making it possible for the vast majority of men to own their own property, however small that property might be. At the dawn of distributist thought, 90 percent of England's population did not own property. Chesterton and Belloc, echoing Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), wrote about the primacy of private property: In order to be a good steward, one must have something to be a good steward over. The essential concept of dis tributism, Carlson maintains, is that the family is the basic unit of society — one that cannot be adequately dealt with in merely economic terms. Carlson does his best to defend this often misunderstood political system, which fell prey to many ad hominem attacks, mainly rooted in the fact that the formative meetings of the distributists always somehow ended up taking place in public houses. What fascinates author and audience about this movement is its steadfast claim that people are more than the total of their economic output. Bypassing the thought of Marx and Engels, as well as Adam Smith and other capitalists, Chesterton and Belloc envisioned a society in which man was applauded more for how good of a life he lead than for how much money he had when he shuffled off this mortal coil. Immediately after his treatment of distributism, Carlson launches into a detailed history of the rise and fall of the "family wage." During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the economies of the bulk of countries in the North Atlantic, as well as the U.S. and Australia, were based on the ideal of the family wage. In this system, Carlson maintains, a married man, with or without children, would necessarily make more money than a single man, owing to the fact that he was expected to financially support a family. The numbers overwhelmingly point to this novel idea being ultimately beneficial to families in particular and society in general. Unfortunately, according to Carlson, by the 1970s the idea of a family wage was all but removed from Western society. In an interesting section of Third Ways, Carlson brings to light the work of seemingly out-of-place Russian economist Alexander Chaya nov, whose subtle defense of the Russian peasantry during the early years of the Bolshevik government was seen as radical and dangerous to the state. Chayanov, writing under the pen name Ivan Kremnev, wrote a novella about a vastly different future from the one imagined by many figureheads in the Russian communist government. Published in 1920, The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia envisioned an underling in the Bolshevik bureaucracy mysteriously waking up in Moscow in 1984. Society is run by an agrarian peasantry, which has outlawed cities with populations of over 20,000. The government and the state are seldom mentioned, and act only when needed by the peasantry. Ultimately, it is a family-centered and family-run society, in which the economy of the society is intricately linked with the family economy. What Chayanov saw as the glory of the traditional Russian peasantry, which had been decimated during the Bolshevik revolution, and completely wiped out later in the 20th century, was that its social and economic life was based on the family. Finances and political control were subservient to the health of one's family, and in this way the Russian peasantry operated outside the parameters of both communism and capitalism. Carlson's essential idea in Third Ways consists of the primacy of the family and how the family has fallen under the boot heel of what Belloc termed the "servile state." With the majority of property, as well as the means of production, being held by a scarcer minority than ever before, the mass of people in Western society are forced to eke out a living as wage slaves. While Carlson paints a rather bleak portrait of modern life, he finds hope in the examples of the past, and offers this study as a relic of what might have been, and what very possibly might yet come to pass.
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