“Home sweet home,” we often say. That phrase encompasses the family home, the home of young couples who start their lives there. A place to be with our loved ones, brimming with interpersonal relationships, shared experiences, and objects with a history. A house we return to for the comfort of our parents, siblings, children, grandparents… A haven to retreat to, to breathe fresh air, to mend our hearts, and to give substance to our family narrative. House, things, and people—a whole microcosm of meaning that makes life worth living.

Aurora Pimentel has written a thought-provoking book, *  At Home: An Approach to Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s Ideas on Home and Domesticity*  (Madrid, CEU 2024), in which she weaves together a wealth of ideas about home with glossed excerpts from Chesterton’s writings. We know that married people want a home. Chesterton, from his distributive perspective, proposes more: each person, each family, should have access to a small property so they can organize their family life with the colors, aromas, melodies, spaciousness, or constraints inherent in the adventure of creating a family.

Each day with its own worries, each country with its own challenges: facilitating services for households or promoting access to homeownership. Chesterton lived in the first third of the 20th century. Much has changed since then. He perceived the State and the rampant capitalism of his time as the two fiercest enemies of the home. The former for its intrusion and the latter for drawing its inhabitants out of the house, preoccupied as they were with making businesses productive. Understandably, this was not an opposition to order or to the wealth produced; rather, it was a concerned view of the excesses of the State and capital. On the one hand, there was the statism that controlled social life to the point of generating a collectivist mentality that stripped citizens of their entrepreneurial capacity; and on the other hand, there was the rampant capitalism focused solely on the pursuit of profit, absorbing the time and space needed for family tranquility.

There is, of course, much to do. Each hemisphere has its own tasks, and the home has its own particular affections. In his defense of the home, the author points out, Chesterton champions the “embodiment” that, to begin with, is that initial attraction between men and women, in a shared life with its nights and days, its joys and hardships, capable of embracing life; forging its path—wearily, so often—amidst a consumer society trained so that the user cannot distinguish the superfluous from the necessary.

What does society need? What kind of country do we want to leave for future generations? These are common questions in public discourse. The answers are more or less the same: eradicate corruption, zero hunger, a healthy ecosystem, inclusion, and so on. We keep going over these questions and answers and arrive at education. Chesterton says: “The science that is studied in the home is the greatest and most glorious of all sciences, very inadequately expressed by the word education, and it deals with nothing less than the mystery of the formation of human beings” (p. 76). Higher education provides professional training, but it is in the home where we learn the most important skill: how to be a person.

Having a home is a gift. It takes a lot of dedication to make it a home where our loved ones can learn the basics of life. There is no good society without engaged citizens, and there is no citizenship without family.