In his review of Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered (“Big Is Still Ahead,” Reviews, January), Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “True enough, Schumacher became a Catholic just before Small Is Beautiful came out in 1973 and remained devout until his death in 1977 . . . But his classic book has no discernible Catholic influence and is based on articles and lectures he wrote before his conversion.  It’s odd to read Catholicism into it.”

This is an oversight on Mr. Sale’s part.  In Chapter Two (“Peace and Permanence”) of Small Is Beautiful, Schumacher writes, “The third requirement is perhaps the most important of all—that methods and equipment should be such as to leave ample room for human creativity.  Over the last hundred years no-one has spoken more insistently and warningly on this subject than have the Roman pontiffs.  What becomes of a man if the process of production ‘takes away from work any hint of humanity, making of it a merely mechanical activity’?  The worker himself is turned into a perversion of a free being.  ‘And so bodily labour (said Pius XI) which even after original sin was decreed by Providence for the good of man’s body and soul, is in many instances changed into an instrument of perversion; for from the factory dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded’.  Again, the subject is so large that I cannot do more than touch upon it.”

Quoting pontiffs seems to indicate a discernible Catholic influence.  It is more odd to read Catholicism out of the book, when one also considers the numerous scriptural references and the presence of the Catholic teaching that the family is the building block of society.


        —Matthew Soileau
Oakdale, LA

Mr. Sale Replies:

Just because I like to quote various popes’ denunciation of materialism as a persuasive critique of our capitalist culture doesn’t mean that I have, I trust, any discernible Catholic influences.  But I am willing to grant that increasing Catholic themes may have been coming into Schumacher’s thought by 1970, when the chapter in question was written.

On Writing Philosophy

I love reading good writing and often find it in Chronicles, but Donald Livingston’s January View “What Is Wrong With Ideology?” is not just well written but beautifully crafted.  Its presence in the magazine shows just what Chronicles is capable of, and why it is so valuable to readers.

I’m not sure if I am in tune with Dr. Livingston’s use of the word reflection or reflective (I like to think of myself as reflective), but it may just be that my simple view of those terms gets in the way, and I need to work that problem out.  In any case, thank you, Dr. Livingston, for a wonderful short course in philosophy.


        —Howard Sitton
Carmel Valley, CA