Arthur Penty

Arthur Joseph Penty (17 March 1875–1937) was a British architect, and biographer on Brotherhood socialism and distributism. He was aboriginal a Fabian socialist, and addict of Victorian thinkers William Morris and John Ruskin.1 He is about accustomed with the conception of a Christian left-wing anatomy of the medieval guild, as an another base for bread-and-butter life.

Early life

Arthur Penty was built-in at 16 Elmwood Street, St Laurence, York, the additional son of Walter Green Penty (1852–1902), architect, and his wife, Emma Seller. Afterwards accessory St Peter's School in York he was apprenticed in 1888 to his father. He admiring civic and alike all-embracing attention, including favourable apprehension in Herman Muthesius's Das englische Haus (1904).

Penty larboard his father's appointment in 1901, and confused to London in 1902 to accompany his absorption in the arts and crafts movement. His adolescent brother Frederick T. Penty (1879–1943) took over the business afterwards their ancestor died.

Around 1900 Penty met A. R. Orage; calm with Holbrook Jackson they founded the Leeds Arts Club. All three confused to London in 1905 and 1906; Penty in actuality led the way, and Orage lodged with him in his aboriginal attempts to alive by writing.

Influence

For a time, from 1906, Penty's account were broadly influential. Orage, as editor of The New Age, was a catechumen to brotherhood socialism. After World War I brotherhood socialism alone aback as a agency in the cerebration of the British Labour movement, in general; the abstraction of post-industrialism, on which Penty wrote, advertence the appellation to A. K. Coomaraswamy, receded in accent in the face of the bread-and-butter conditions. Several of Penty's books were translated into German in the aboriginal 1920s. Penty was an accustomed access on the writings of Spain's Ramiro de Maeztu (1875–1936), who was murdered by Communists in the aboriginal canicule of the Spanish Civil War.

Penty the distributist

The somewhat circuitous British development of distributism emerged as a accident of account of Penty, Hilaire Belloc and the Chestertons Cecil and Gilbert. It reflected in allotment a aboriginal breach from the Fabian socialists of the accomplished New Age group, in the anatomy of the Fabian Arts Accumulation of 1907.

Orage was a accepter in Guild socialism for a period. Afterwards C. H. Douglas met Orage in 1918, and Orage invented the appellation Social Credit for the Douglas theories, there was in aftereffect a added breach into 'left' (Social Crediters) and 'right' (distributist) thinkers. This is, though, adequately ambiguous as a classification; it was additionally to some admeasurement a breach amid theosophist and Catholic camps. Penty associated with the Catholic Ditchling Community.2

“ By a analytical accompaniment the accession of Douglas reproduced for a moment the old leash of Jackson, Orage and Penty, who ten years afore had appear from Leeds to London to barrage the Fabian Arts Group. Jackson anon abandoned abroad afterwards introducing Douglas to Orage; but Penty ... affianced in a continued attempt with this rival, Douglas, to anamnesis the absorption of Orage.... The authority of Penty over Orage was assuredly broken, and the artist was larboard to appraise his theories alone, catastrophe in the thirties as Pound was to end in forties, an adherent of Mussolini.3 ”

Penty went with the distributists.4 Distributism in the 1920s took its own direction, as Belloc wrote his adaptation of it in the aeon 1920 to 1925 and affiliated it with his political theories. The British Labour Party declared adjoin Social Credit in 1922.

Works

The Restoration of the Gild System (1906)

Essays on Post-Industrialism (1914) edited with Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy

Old Worlds for New (1917)

Guilds and the Social Crisis (1919)

The Guild Alternative

A Guildsman's Interpretation of History (1919)

Post Industrialism (1922)

Gilden, Gewerbe und Landwirtschaft (1922) translated by Otto Eccius

Towards a Christian Sociology (1923),

Agriculture and the unemployed (1925) with William Wright

The Elements of Domestic Design (1930)

Means and Ends (1932).

Communism and the Alternative (1933)

Distributism: A Manifesto (1937)

The Gauntlet: A Challenge to the Myth of Progress (2002) collection, addition by Peter Chojnowski

Distributist Perspectives: Volume 1 - Essays on the Economics of Justice and Charity (2004) with others