In "Road to Serfdom" economist F.A. Hayek recognized the vision of Hilaire Belloc's 1913 book "The Servile State". Writing during World War II, Hayek said: "Even much more recent warnings [about Socialism] which have proved dreadfully true have been almost entirely forgotten. It is not yet thirty years since Hilaire Belloc, in a book which explains more of what has happened since in Germany than most works written after the event, explained that `the effects of Socialist doctrine on Capitalist society is to produce a third thing different from either of its two begetters - to wit, the Servile State."
In short, Belloc said, you get the worst of both worlds, a master class (monopolist Capitalists) using the power of government (Socialism) to control workers. There is name for the condition where one group of people uses the force of law to control the work another group of people; it is called "slavery".
He wrote this in a much different era and it takes some effort to put aside some of the things we take for granted. Belloc saw things like worker's compensation laws as baby steps toward slavery. They tended to create in the law two classes of people, employers (read "Masters") and workers (read "serfs"). It divided "us" into "us and them".
"Servile State" goes full circle, beginning with slavery in the Roman Empire. The slaves had a degree a freedom and could save up money to free themselves, but they were still slaves. Under Christianity the slave became a peasant with rights of inheritance. Christianity introduced a rough egalitarianism ("And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, `Abba, Father.' So that he is no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, an heir through God." - Galatians 4:6-7.) and the breakdown of the empire encouraged rights by tradition (A farmer might say, "Well, we get to keep 2/3 of everything we grow because it's always been that way."). Belloc argues that rights were increasing throughout the Dark Ages. His view of the time may be a bit rosy, but recent scholarship has tended to lighten up that Darkness and vindicate Belloc's reading.
Then came the Renaissance and Reformation. The aristocracy began taking commonly held peasant lands. In England the aristocracy used these lands to graze sheep in order to sell the wool. Thomas More, a fierce defender of traditional rights, lamented this at the time in "Utopia": "`Your sheep,' I said. `Once they were gentle and ate little, but now I hear that they have become so greedy and wild that they are devouring the human population." Calvinism's theory of predestination would come along to justify this redistribution of wealth. The rich were rich because they were also the Elect. The newly impoverished peasants were poor because they were the damned. That the "ignorant peasants" tended also to cling to the Old Religion of Catholicism only reinforced this view. The aristocracy took the opportunity to extend their land monopoly by confiscating Church lands as Christendom crumbled.
From there on, according to Belloc, things tended to go downhill, at least in Europe. The State was growing in power and intrusiveness. Pure sweatshop monopoly Capitalism and pure Communism were both bound to fail, Belloc wrote. He said they were too unstable and he was right. Perhaps we would create a society where each person would own enough of the means of production to support himself. Perhaps we could become nations of small farms and family businesses. Belloc called this Distributivism and it owes much to Pope Leo XII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum" where the pope outlines a just society. Belloc, ever the pessimist, thought this would make a great ideal society, but that people weren't up for it. Instead he thought we would decline into a new thing, the Servile State. Whether it would be the slavery of fascism or the Welfare "Nanny" State run amok, he didn't say.
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- Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2001
Top reviews from other countries
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- LarkReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 18, 2009
Overlooked political master piece, best edition
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HannielReviewed in Germany on February 22, 2019
Distributionismus als dritter Weg: Eine Wirtschafts- und Politgeschichte Europas
