The Fallacy of Success

The essay’s title sets the foundation of readers’ expectations. In philosophical discourse, a fallacy is an error of reasoning. Before his first sentence, Chesterton puts his readers in a position of suspicion, though not toward himself. Rather, somebody somewhere is thinking of success incorrectly, and it is Chesterton’s task to identify who that is and to explain the nature of the fallacy to his readers. The title thus signals the essay’s persuasive nature.

Chesterton makes use of the literary device of argument throughout his essay: He cannot merely state his position but must defend it to convince readers and earn their allegiance. He first identifies a nebulous category of authors of various books and articles about success as those responsible for fallacious reasoning about success. In what follows, Chesterton’s argumentative strategy evolves from a logical refutation of the relevance of the idea of success, to a practical refutation of books about success as useless, culminating in an ethical refutation of the ideal of material success as morally degenerative.

Considering Chesterton’s rhetorical context—writing for an illustrated journal marketed to a broad audience of ordinary people—his commitment to writing an essay structured on argument is not without risk.