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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 330
EAN num: 9781602068674
ISBN number: 1602068674
Label: Cosimo Classics
Manufacturer: Cosimo Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 208
Printing Date: November 01, 2007
Publishing house: Cosimo Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 330211
Studio: Cosimo Classics
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The Servile State, published in 1912, is Hilaire Belloc's foray into economic theory and philosophy. In it he promotes the idea of 'distributism,' as opposed to capitalism and socialism. 'The servile state is that in which the mass of men shall be constrained by law to labor for the profit of a minority,' Belloc says. And this state is the ordinary and natural ends of both capitalism and socialism, though they may arrive there by different routes. In contrast, Belloc envisions a society in which each individual strives to be the owner of means of production, rather than a worker who merely earns wages. By owning what he needs to make his living, man can experience true freedom. It has happened before, he says, most notably in Britain before the Protestant Reformation. Modern readers will hear many echoes from Belloc in today's campaigns for co-ops and locally-owned businesses, which seek to replace large corporations with smaller operations that more adequately distribute wealth. Students of economics and history, as well as those interested in politics and the effects of economics on society, will find this a thought-provoking and galvanizing read. French writer and thinker HILAIRE BELLOC (1870-1953) is known as 'the man who wrote a library.' He expounded extensively on a number of subjects, including French and British history, military strategy, satire, comic and serious verse, literary criticism, topography and travel, translations, and religious, social, and political commentary. Among his most famous works are The Path to Rome (1902) and Emmanuel Burden (1903).
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Rated by buyers 
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Hilaire Belloc was a brilliant and prolific author whose writings on virtually every imaginable topic catapulted him into the top ranks of English intellectuals. Despite his enormous body of work, Belloc is not nearly as famous yesterday as his friend and compatriot, G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton wrote some books on economic and social policy, but still left some areas unexplored. Belloc's "The Servile State" plugs a major gap by explaining the economic history of Britain.
To begin with, Greece and Rome were slave states. Large majorities of the population were enslaved, abused, and denied any hope of freedom or dignity. It was only with the arrival of Christianity that slavery disintegrated. Through the Middle Ages the ordinary people gained more and more rights, and eventually Europe had a population of free and self-sufficient men and women.
Then came the moment that Belloc views as the turning point: The Protestant Reformation. In England, the seizure of the monasteries ended the advance towards freedom. Millions of peasants were deprived of their land and denied a means to make a living. They migrated to the cities, and were soon exploited by rise of factories and industry. By Belloc's time, 95% of the population owned no property and were wholly dependent on the wealthy and the government.
As Belloc wrote this book, socialism was the dominant trend in intellectual life in England. Almost everyone agreed that it was only a few years until the establishment of a socialist paradise. Begging to differ, Belloc predicted that there would be no socialist paradise (right), slavery would be re-established (wrong), and the rich would get richer while the poor remained poor (right).
Belloc was not right about everything, but he certainly saw through the rhetoric of the socialists more readily than other men of his time. "The Servile State" is a model of crystal-clear reasoning and straightforward writing, and it belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who wants to understand history.
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The central thesis of this book is that Western countries have largely become Servile States. This might come as a shock to the average modern reader. While everyone can relate to the feeling of being a slave in our modern world of big business and government, they would have a difficult time agreeing to the notion that they are slaves by law. After all, the Westerner has the political freedom to choose whether he wants to work or not.
As Belloc explains, freedom is made up of more than just political freedom. True freedom consists in the ability to produce, which by nature requires capital or land in addition to political freedom. Consequently, both capital and land are monopolized by a very few owners. The rest are proletarians that must work for their ability to produce on the owner's terms. The proletarians' political freedom does give them the liberty to bargain for their work, but the proletarian is constrained by the uncertainty of sustenance, so the bargain isn't quite an equal one. "The vast bulk of so-called `free' contracts are to-day leonine contracts: arrangements which one man was free to take or to leave, but which the other man was not free to take or to leave, because the second had for his alternative starvation."
Belloc acknowledges that the Servile State requires laws upon which the political freedom is also eliminated. Belloc shows how these laws are in place already in the form of welfare and minimum wages. The modern reader is compelled to question the reasoning here, as he sees how such laws as the minimum wage do not bind either the worker or the owner to the extent of slavery. Still, the underlying principle, that the legal framework for the modern Servile State will be abstract and indirect, as opposed to overt, is convincing.
Most importantly, this book does not explain how to avoid the Servile State and to return to what Belloc promotes as the only stable form of society, the Distributive State. To redistribute property would go against the principles that the Distributive State relies upon--the ownership of property. In a confined world, the reader is left to wonder if it is possible after all.
This should not discourage the potential reader. There is enough insight in this short volume to enlighten even the most ardent capitalist or socialist, and the fresh perspective offered therein is sure to incite more fruitful motives by all.
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The Servile State is perhaps Belloc's most complete exposition of his theory of the various possible forms of political economy. Belloc argues that Western Civilization was very first founded on a servile economy, where a very small group of men owned the land, labor, and the capital necessary for production. Yes, they owned the labor. Hence, the appelation, servile. Belloc then argues that Western Civilization gradually became, from this servile state, a distributive political economy. By this, Belloc meant that ownership was widespread among free men. Belloc argues quite convincingly that this is the natural state of man. And it is certainly the state of Western Civilization when the predominat influence on civilization was the Mystical Body of Christ, His Holy Church. Belloc argues that this state of affairs came to be changed with the Reformation, what he, in other books, has styled the "shipwreck of civilization". Focusing on England, in particular, Belloc proves that a small, landed aristocracy became overwhelmingly powerful in this "rising of the rich against the poor" and, later, established the inherently unstable capitalist society.
Writing in 1912, Belloc held that the capitalistic society could not endure in its then present form. Looking back, it is how remarkable how prophetic was his vision. He argued that the collectivist form of socialism was, in essence, a chimera. Further, he set forth that the decayed capitalist state would ultimatley revert to a servile status.
As we look about us in 2008, it is truly striking how many of the features of the servile state are upon us. One factor that Belloc did not emphacize so much, but that is also dispositive of our current situation is the crushing impact of debt. Acknowledging that point, we can say that Belloc's book is remarkably prophetic, beautifully written, as are all of his works, and still tremendously important. Pick up this important little book. Give it a good and thoughtful read. And be richly blessed by the experience.
Rated by buyers 
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Hilaire Belloc's 1912 classic represents the former UK Liberal Party parliamentarian's break with capitalism, state socialism and the welter of piecemeal liberal and social democratic reforms that would ultimately evolve into the modern welfare state.
The book is simultaneously easy to read and clearly argued, yet sometimes verbose and long winded. Still it's logically argued and conceptually sound.
The `Liberty Press' edition I read included an excellent introduction by American sociologist Robert Nisbet. This extended essay includes personal biographical insights which indicate that `The Servile State' played an important role in the development of Nisbet's own stream of pluralist conservative thought, a line hitherto neglected by Nisbet's intellectual biographers. Nisbet, following Belloc, champions the role of intermediate institutions, between the citizen and the state, as providing the true institutional skeleton of freedom. Although usually characterized as a conservative, Belloc's Servile State played a critical role in influencing such radical non-conservatives as Dorothy Day and John Anderson, the founder of the Sydney left libertarian movement. This movement later spawned such prominent Australian international intellectuals as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Clive James. Anderson, I believe, even attributed his rejection of Marxism to Belloc. One can easily imagine Belloc engaged in lively debate over drinks with these now prominent, if somewhat wayward, descendants.
Still `Servile State' is not purely a polemical book. It includes insightful historical analysis of the rise and decline of slavery in the west. It shows just how deep rooted and unpeculiar "the peculiar institution" has been. And just how poor most of the more popular explanations for it's survival across the centuries have been. The great myth of slavery is that it represented the permanent subjugation of defeated foreign enemies. Although prisoners of war were often enslaved, this source of slaves was statistically trivial. Belloc's explanation has the advantage of explaining the relative "success" of slavery, both in it's historical longevity and relative absence of social or intellectual critique. Slavery flourished as it provided a means to avoid poverty. The destitute would sell themselves and their descendants to provide for immediate needs. This piece of inconvenient history has actually become even more inconvenient since Belloc's day as the welfare state, and it's corresponding net of taxes, border controls and ID cards, has grown. Has 'democracy' allowed 'the masses' to sell themselves into state slavery on an installment basis?
The book touches on Belloc's own explorations of the role of Henry VIII's confiscations of Church property and it's redistribution to court favourites thus founding the great landed fortunes of England. Thus as Belloc notes in other books, establishing a powerful vested interest materially invested in the official anti-catholicism that held sway in the anglo-saxon world virtually for centuries. Belloc sees this act and subsequent actions pushed through by a state dominated by the same interests, for example, the enclosure of the commons, as tilting the development of English capitalism and industrialism against the now landless masses and proletariat. Propertyless masses are simultaneously prey to both the advocates of socialism and victims of economic instability. The servile state, Belloc hypothesizes, is built by these pressures from below and above. The most prominent capitalists have no problem aligning themselves with the state, however interventionist. This insight, offered in 1912, before the great wars and great depression accelerated the growth of big government, is perhaps the book's most accurate prophecy.
So has the growth of the modern welfare state proved Belloc's prediction of a new servile state? His prediction fails, although the 20th century did see new slave regimes under totalitarian guise, the liberal democracies did not evolve as far in the direction of forced labour as Belloc and later day followers imagined. But then again the dreams of the original founders and pioneers of welfarism failed too. The original welfare pioneers imagined a society of economic justice and security with the poor and homeless protected by impositions on the rich. They never foresaw a day when middle income earners would often be taxed at rates from 30 to 50% of their income with no apparent shift to egalitarianism. Although state enforced compulsory labour has not emerged (yet), Belloc's imagined servile future with a progressively disempowered mass and a surviving class of super-rich but politically well connected capitalists sometimes seems somewhat closer to modern reality than the vision splendid of the welfare pioneers.
Maybe we need to think of Belloc's book as a warning rather than a prophecy.
Rated by buyers -
In this liberty classic, the Catholic intellectual Hilaire Belloc writes that the present system of capitalism is likely to give rise to something new, the servile state, because of inherent instabilities within it. Belloc defines this state as, "That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor we call the servile state." This servile state is a return to the form of pagan slavery that existed in Europe before the advent of Christianity abolished it. Belloc contends that from the original pagan form of slavery, Christianity brought about a new system of society, the distributivist society. In this system, every individual was an owner of property and belonged to guilds which allowed for him to own the means of production. However, the distributivist system failed with the breakdown of the Christian faith. For example, the Reformation allowed for the Crown to confiscate monastic lands. Thus, a small group of indiviudals, the capitalists, came to own the means of production and the property. Belloc does not blame the existence of capitalism on the Industrial Revolution like most other thinkers have. Rather, he sees the problem in society as existing before the Industrial Revolution. Belloc contends that had distributivism not broken down, the Industrial Revolution would have been beneficial to all concerned. The current system of the capitalist state is unstable however, and may give rise to one of two separate things. Reformers have tried to create from the capitalist system a collectivist (or socialist) state. In the collectivist state, private property would be abolished and a group of managers would control all property for the proletariat in trust. Belloc contends that this form of collectivism is likely to give rise to a third thing, the servile state. One way reformers have tried to accomplish this goal is through "buying out" capitalism. Since the state is an older institution than the capitalist owners, it has been considered possible that the state can "buy out" the capitalists. Belloc finds such an idea problematic and shows how this is not possible to occur. Alternatively, the other possibility is for society to return to a distributivist system in which all individuals own property and the means of production. Belloc finds this alternative to be the best, however, he notes that it is unlikely to happen given the current direction in which society is taking and amounts to "swimming upstream". So, while the socialist alternative works within the capitalist system, it will ultimately lead to servitude. Belloc points out examples of how legislation designed to benefit the proletariat has actually increased the development of the servile state. Examples of this include regulation such as employee compensation and minimum wage laws, which were in the initial stages of being enacted in Belloc's England. The future for freedom looks grim because the proletariat is willing to give up its political freedom in exchange for security and guarantee of subsistence standards. For example, Belloc points out that minimum wage laws actually benefit capitalists because they guarantee that there will not be unruliness among the workers. Also, such laws and regulations involve the creation of a class distinction between proletariat and employer. Given the direction the welfare state has taken contrary to liberty and towards further regulation, these cogent writings of Belloc from near the beginning of this last century serve as an important warning and prophecy for the future. We have indeed headed in the direction of servitude, and Belloc's distributivist ideal seems less and less likely.
For an interesting alternative understanding of the modern world and its condition see Julius Evola's _Revolt Against the Modern World_.
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