The writings collected here are from a school of English thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s who were concerned about the desperate state of modern society. The writers include G. K. Chesterton, H. J. Massingham, Eric Gill, Hilaire Belloc, Herbert Shove, and Arthur Penty. They study various parts of the problem of capitalist society, the origins, benefits, and demerits of industrialism, the importance of art to society and its sufferance under capitalism, the size of commercial organization and its relevance to efficiency, the nature and purpose of work as a concept, and the crucial nature of understanding the present through real knowledge of the past.
