Disturbers of the Twentieth Century: Catholic Social Critics in Modern Britain

Building on his acclaimed The Third Spring, Adam Schwartz presents a pioneering analysis of the social commentary of G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. These four converts were exemplars of the Catholic literary revival as a “counter-politics” that provided a radical, supernaturalist alternative to predominant secularist social ideologies and systems from a distinctly Roman Catholic standpoint.  Disturbers of the Twentieth Century explores this facet of each writer’s work more thoroughly than earlier studies have done, and does so in comparison to his counterparts’ thought.  The Catholic literary revival hence emerges as a vital, yet largely neglected, voice in historical and sociological discussions of the relationship between religion and politics in the modern era.In the process, Schwartz uniquely situates these Catholic authors in broader heritages of British and Western protest thought dating to the Romantics, showing how their shared resistance to industrial technocracy (and its socio-political effects) and growing secularization was defined distinctively by Roman Catholicism.  The converts’ challenge was bolder than post-Reformation British Catholics had usually uttered in an often-hostile political culture.  Nonetheless this quartet’s criticism was always constructive, as they eschewed nostalgia and endeavored consciously to engage twentieth century society in its particular genres and discrete conditions to transform it into an “alternative modernity” governed by Roman Catholic principles.Schwartz therefore recasts understanding of movements like Chesterton’s distributism while elucidating originally other counterstatements, such as Dawson’s Christian corporatism, and deploying newly discovered and published material, including poetry and prose by Jones and letters and journalism by Greene.  Schwartz in turn interrogates misconstruals of the authors’ relationships to totalitarian ideologies, even as he confronts forthrightly controversial subjects such as antisemitism.  Disturbers of the Twentieth Century is thus an accurate, textured account of the “public doctrine” these trenchant Catholics proposed as the source of social renewal and cultural regeneration for a “century of bones.” Read more