The Thing

Chesterton, G. K. (1929). The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic.

Type

Book chapter

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1929

Link

https://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/The_Thing.html

Cited from

philosophy

Cited by

7 citations across 7 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Chesterton's Fence
  • Institutions and law — long-standing rules and precedents often encode hard-won responses to past failures (separation of powers, double-entry bookkeeping); repeal can resurface the original failure, as with capital-requirement rollbacks preceding bank crises.

Mechanisms

• Benefit-Preserving Transition Plan
  • The guarding discipline is Chesterton's fence

    This sourceArgues that an institution should not be removed until the reformer can explain its use.

• Chesterton's Fence Review Gate
  • The name comes from the parable of the fence across a road: the reformer who cannot say why the fence is there is exactly the person who should not yet be allowed to remove it.

    This sourceGives the fence-in-the-road parable and says reformers should not clear it until they can explain its use.

• Legacy and Maintenance Register
  • The discipline is to date every entry, record why each item exists so that removing it is an informed judgement rather than a guess
• Policy Review
  • Retire too eagerly and you strip out a rule

    This sourceWarns against removing an existing rule or institution before understanding the purpose for which it was established.

• Scope Change Review
  • And the classic misuse: removing a boundary because its purpose has been forgotten, when the boundary was load-bearing all along — the discipline is to treat every proposed loosening as requiring a positive reason the original constraint no longer applies, not merely the absence of a remembered one.

    This sourceArgues that a constraint should not be removed merely because its purpose is not understood.

• Workaround Review
  • The guarding discipline sits between them, and it is old: Chesterton's fence

    This sourceStates the 1929 fence-removal principle later known as Chesterton's fence.

Verification

This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.

Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 3 other ways.

• https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Thing.html?id=3qnPAAAAMAAJ ×3
• https://books.google.com/books?id=3qnPAAAAMAAJ ×2
• https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65688 ×1

Registry ID ref:097ca5a21e6b · see in the full table