As an advocate of Distributism, an early 20th-century school of social thought developed by the author and his colleagues, Chesterton addresses the topics of concentration of wealth, poverty, work, agriculture, machinery, and capital in this famous work. He favored distribution of wealth while being antisocialist; he advocated ownership of private property while being anticapitalist. He argues that the economic order is bound by moral law and that man should be served by the economy rather than serving it.