Family, Society, Politics: The Outline of Sanity, The End of the Armistice, Utopia of Usurers--and others (G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works, Volume 5)

I have finished collected works Vol 1, 2 and 3 and am looking forward to more Chesterton. An amazing writer, philosopher and theologian.

If one has only read a few Father Brown mysteries, or the novel, "The Man Who Was Thursday", or even the nonfiction works like "Orthodoxy", reading "The End of the Armistice" in this volume may seem like reading a different Chesterton. However, as Ian Ker points out in his biography, Chesterton thought of himself as a journalist, and as such, he was a controversialist. It was reading brief excerpts from it in Ker's book that made me want to read this book.Chesterton died in 1936, after finishing his autobiography. "The End of the Armistice" was published in 1940 by Frank Sheed, who realized that Chesterton had been writing about the world situation since the 'twenties, and continued to for the rest of his life, in these essays Sheed here collects.What GKC mainly warns of is the increasing power and militarism of Prussia, an unknown name today but very much a force in the world prior to and leading to WWI. The short version is that Prussia, which we might think of as Northern Germany, annexed to itself what were then termed the Southern Germanies (in other words, the entirety of Germany).Many of these essays were written after the armistice ending "the War to End All War" when the war- weary world seemed to only want peace and a return to normal life. With one exception: Prussia, which was already arming itself, preparing for round two. Chesterton was one of the few voices warning of the rise of Hitler, which he did tirelessly.This book reads journalistically, like commentary on breaking news. Although some terms and situations were unfamiliar to me, many are explained in the course of the reading. Also in this collection is "The Outline of Sanity", which I already read as a separate book. For readers like myself, who are never sure what Chesterton means by his idea of "Distributism", this is the book which lays it out. I cannot comment on the other books in this collection, as I have not read them, but this volume, no. 5 in the Ignatius Collected Chesterton series, is certainly worth obtaining for these two books.

ENLIGHTEN YOUR SOUL GREAT FOOD FOR TRUTH I RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THOSE WHO SEEK TRUTH IN THIS WORLD FILLED WITH LIES

happy w/this

This volume of Chesterton's Collected Works brings back into print The End of the Armistice, the last book GKC wrote. I have always thought this was one of his finest pieces of non-fiction. It is thoughtful and articulate, as he always was. It shows how clearly he saw Hitler and the Nazis for what they were, at a time when an embarrassing number of English and Europeans who should have known better admired Nazi Germany. Finally, it connects Chesterton's abhorrence of the Third Reich with his religious convictions, making GKC in retrospect immensely more admirable as a Roman Catholic than Pius XII. The End of the Armistice is by itself worth the price of this book.