asserts his own moral superiority and invokes religious shame in readers.

Logos

Chesterton was well known for his rationality. Though he often wrote in satirical and humorous fashion, his arguments—right or wrong—were always grounded in logic. “The Fallacy of Success” is no exception. After introducing his topic, Chesterton establishes his own framework for discussing success. He posits that evaluating success as an abstract principle is useless. Instead, he asserts that a thing is successful merely by existing as itself. Therefore, advice regarding how to be successful must account for the specificity of a given situation.

By establishing his own framework for success, Chesterton appeals to logos by giving readers a clear criteria by which to judge his arguments. By putting his own definition of success in conversation with the language of self-help literature, Chesterton is able to logically establish the flaws in the genre.

Chesterton also crafts appeals to logos by calling on relevant evidence and mythological scholarship. Rather than relying solely on his wit, Chesterton employs concrete examples of the vapidness of self-help literature by quoting a direct source. This allows him to directly critique the rhetorical and structural components of self-help literature. It also allows him to criticize the illogical appropriation of the Midas myth common in self-help literature. Though Midas did turn everything he touched into gold, the mythological context offers a story of failure and foolishness, not glory. By returning the myth to its proper context, Chesterton highlights the ignorance and inaccuracy of his opponents’ arguments—in this case, the claims of self-help authors.

Paradox, Hyperbole, and Alliteration

In addition to the Aristotelian rhetorical appeals, Chesterton also employs structural techniques to make his writing more memorable. Paradox intrigues readers and asks them to consider Chesterton’s words more carefully; hyperbole undermines the claims of success books, manipulating their language to expose their farcical nature; and alliteration creates memorable phrases that stick in readers’ minds.

• The line “But these [books] are about nothing; they are about what is called Success,” represents how Chesterton uses paradox to strengthen his arguments. On the surface, something cannot be about both “nothing” and “success.” However, the deeper implication is that “success,” at least as it is defined by self-help authors, is meaningless.
• As he mocks self-help authors, Chesterton employs hyperbole to highlight the absurdity of their claims. By exaggeratedly implying that these authors profess to be able to make a “sporting yachtsman” out of a “grocer,” Chesterton undermines the alleged wisdom of the books and instead portrays them as ludicrous fantasies.
• Alliterative phrases such as “the mysticism of money” and “avowedly by his vices” are scattered throughout “The Fallacy of Success.” They add musicality to the prose and help readers recall significant phrases and concepts from the essay. By making his prose impactful, Chesterton strengthens his arguments and ensures that his words will be carefully considered.

Historical Context

The Industrial Revolution and the Self-Made Man

Chesterton wrote “The Fallacy of Success” in 1909, around a century after the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in the late 18th century, rapid technological innovations drastically altered the British and American socioeconomic landscapes. Gone was the era of communal pastoral living, and in its wake rose an increasingly competitive capitalist economy. Figures like Cornelius Vanderbilt, an American railroad mogul, became incredibly wealthy after investing in new industries. These “rags-to-riches” stories of common people who transcend their social classes and join the ranks of the elite spawned admiration and scorn in equal measure. For the common person, they became aspirational figures to emulate; for the aristocratic elite, they were begrudgingly tolerated trespassers on the status quo. As the cultural landscape of Britain and the United States shifted in response to the Industrial Revolution, money and wealth became the new standards for “success.” The plethora of books and articles written about figures like Vanderbilt sought to explain how the newly wealthy made their riches and thereby replicate the process. Chesterton pushes back against this tide by arguing that the societal fixation on wealth encourages greed and pride, undermining Christian morality.

G. K. Chesterton and Distributism

G. K. Chesterton was a vocal critic of both capitalism and socialism, believing that both were exploitative systems that relied excessively on state control. Instead, Chesterton and longtime friend Hillaire Belloc were proponents of a third economic system: distributism. Distributism draws heavily from Catholic teachings and asserts that productive assets should be owned on smaller scales by individual family units. Distributists believed that every citizen ought to be given a small plot of productive land so that they might invest their energy into shaping it. Chesterton’s extensive writing on the subject—found most prominently in his publications What’s Wrong With the World, The Outline of Sanity, and Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays—evokes images of the small-scale, pastoral communities of the preindustrial world. This same idealization of the past and preference for a preindustrial society is evident in Chesterton’s criticism of success literature in “The Fallacy of Success.” In his eyes, the veneration of Vanderbilt and the societal fixation on accruing wealth are symptoms of the increasingly capitalist world order.