The Servile State [Audio Cassette]

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.

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_.

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.

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