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"Explores the political economy of distributism, an alternative to capitalism and socialism formulated in the early 20th century by prominent Catholic intellectuals such as Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Distributism emphasizes the importance of widely dispersed property ownership for human flourishing. Suggests that distributists' claims about markets and government that must be revised in light of contemporary social science but judges positively their insights about the nature of liberty and the social foundations of human dignity. Presents a contemporary interpretation of distributism as both a research program and a blueprint for political-economic reform."

AbstractI develop a robust political economy of bureaucracy by highlighting the conditions necessary for hierarchical administrative bodies to govern protectively and productively, but not predatorily. These conditions are residual claimancy and jurisdictional competition. I make this argument by exploring a post‐cameralist interpretation of governance. Cameralism arose as a governance philosophy in the fractured principalities of seventeenth‐century Germany following the Thirty Years' War. Post‐cameralism focuses not on particular cameralist governance strategies but on a paradigm which sees governance as an activity provided within a larger exchange order, rather than imposing itself on that order as in more conventional treatments of public economics. While a post‐cameralist conception of governance comes with its own challenges, such as tensions with normative visions that promote self‐governance, it nonetheless presents an intriguing synthesis of monocentric and polycentric insights.