In more civilised, dimly remembered times one could find reactionaries who understood socialism and did not concentrate criticism on chimeras. Bertrand de Jouvenel (Baron de Jouvenel des Ursins) was one such remarkable conservative thinker – a dashing man-about-town who had become a committed, convinced, card-carrying fascist for a while and, in consequence, after the second world war had to spend his life in a sort of internal exile.
Still, he was invited to deliver the Boutwood Lectures at Corpus Christi in 1949 which later appeared as The Ethics of Redistribution (1953, 1990). There, right at the beginning, he made an extremely important tripartite distinction between the three main kinds of “progressive” politics.
The first he dubbed “agrarian redistribution”, or an “agrarian egalitarianism” present in history from times immemorial. This is the traditional redistribution of land in every new generation, which creates an equality in seed capital, but no equality of income: de Jouvenel calls it an equality of rewards.
