The Servile State

by Hilaire Belloc

Overview

In his treatise on European economic history (The Servile State, 1912) Hilaire Belloc explores the many failings of the Capitalist system. He explains that Capitalism emerged from the English Reformation, reached its present form during England's Industrial Revolution, and from there was exported to the rest of the world.

"It was in England that the Industrial System arose. It was in England that all its traditions and habits were formed; and because the England in which it arose was already a Capitalist England, modern Industrialism, wherever you see it at work to-day, having spread from England, has proceeded upon the Capitalist model."

Belloc also suggests that Capitalism has supplanted another, earlier system, one that had developed throughout Catholic Europe, a system he and his good friend G.K. Chesterton referred to as "Distributism."

"Property was an institution native to the State and enjoyed by the great mass of its citizens. Co-operative institutions, voluntary regulations of labour, restricted the completely independent use of property by its owners only in order to keep that institution intact and to prevent the absorption of small property by great."

"This excellent state of affairs which we had reached after many centuries of Christian development, and in which the old institution of slavery had been finally eliminated from Christendom, did not everywhere survive. In England in particular it was ruined."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780913966327
Publisher:	Liberty Fund, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/01/1977
Series:	Liberty Fund Classics on Liberty
Edition description:	2d ed.
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	708,074
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hilaire Belloc was a French-English writer and historian who lived from July 27, 1870, to July 16, 1953. Belloc was also a soldier, an orator, a poet, a sailor, a satirist, and a writer of letters, a sailor, and a poet. His Catholic beliefs had a big impact on what he wrote. Belloc became a British citizen by naturalization in 1902, but he kept his French citizenship. He was President of the Oxford Union while he was at Oxford. From 1906 to 1910, he was one of the few people in the British Parliament who said they were Catholic. Belloc was known for getting into fights, and he had a few that went on for a long time. He was also close with G. K. Chesterton and worked with him. George Bernard Shaw, who was friends with both Belloc and Chesterton and often argued with them, called them "Chesterbelloc" because they often argued with each other. Belloc wrote everything from religious poetry to funny verses for kids. His Cautionary Tales for Children were very popular. They told stories like "Jim, who ran away from his nurse and got eaten by a lion" and "Matilda, who lied and got burned to death."

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION, by Robert Nisbet 13
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 27 Introduction
THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK
It is written to maintain the thesis that industrial society as we know it will tend towards the reestablishment of slavery—The sections into which the book will be divided 39 Section One
DEFINITIONS
What wealth is and why necessary to man—How produced—The meaning of the words capital, proletariat, property, means of production—The definition of the capitalist state—The definition of the servile state—What it is and what it is not—The reestablishment of status in the place of contract—That servitude is not a question of degree but of kind—Summary of these definitions 45 Section Two
OUR CIVILIZATION WAS ORIGINALLY SERVILE
The servile institution in pagan antiquity—Its fundamental character—A pagan society took it for granted—The institution disturbed by the advent of the Christian church 63 Section Three
HOW THE SERVILE INSTITUTION WAS FOR A TIME DISSOLVED
The subconscious effect of the faith in this matter—The main elements of pagan economic society—The villa—The transformation of the agricultural slave into the Christian serf—Next into the Christian peasant—The corresponding erection throughout Christendom of the distributive state—It is nearly complete at the close of the Middle Ages—"It was not machinery that lost us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind" 71 Section Four
HOW THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE FAILED
This failure original in England—The story of the decline from distributive property to capitalism—The economic revolution of the sixteenth century—The confiscation of monastic land—What might have happened had the state retained it—As a fact that land is captured by an oligarchy—England is capitalist before the advent of the Industrial Revolution—Therefore modern industry, proceeding from England, has grown in a capitalist mold 85 Section Five
THE CAPITALIST STATE IN PROPORTION AS IT GROWS PERFECT GROWS UNSTABLE
It can of its nature be but a transitory phase lying between an earlier and a later stable state of society—The two internal strains which render it unstable—(a) The conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis—(b) The insecurity and insufficiency to which it condemns free citizens—The few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many nonpossessors—Capitalism is so unstable that it dares not proceed to its own logical conclusion, but tends to restrict competition among owners, and insecurity and insufficiency among nonowners 107 Section Six
THE STABLE SOLUTIONS OF THIS INSTABILITY
The three stable social arrangements which alone can take the place of unstable capitalism—The distributive solution, the collectivist solution, the servile solution—The reformer will not openly advocate the servile solution—There remain only the distributive and the collective solution 121 Section Seven
SOCIALISM IS THE EASIEST APPARENT SOLUTION OF THE CAPITALIST CRUX
A contrast between the reformer making for distribution and the reformer making for socialism (or collectivism)—The difficulties met by the first type—He is working against the grain—The second is working with the grain—Collectivism a natural development of capitalism—It appeals both to capitalist and proletarian—Nonetheless, we shall see that the collectivist attempt is doomed to fail and to produce a thing very different from its object—to wit, the servile state 127 Section Eight
THE REFORMERS AND THE REFORMED ARE ALIKE MAKING FOR THE SERVILE STATE
There are two types of reformers working along the line of least resistance—These are the socialist and the practical man—The socialist again is of two kinds, the humanist and the statistician—The humanist would like both to confiscate from the owners and to establish security and sufficiency for the nonowners—He is allowed to do the second thing by establishing servile conditions—He is forbidden to do the first—The statistician is quite content so long as he can run and organize the poor—Both are canalized towards the servile state and both are shepherded off their ideal collectivist state—Meanwhile the great mass, the proletariat, upon whom the reformers are at work, though retaining the instinct of ownership, has lost any experience of it and is subject to private law much more than to the law of the courts—This is exactly what happened in the past during the converse change from slavery to freedom—Private law became stronger than public at the beginning of the Dark Ages—The owners welcomed the changes which maintained them in ownership and yet increased the security of their revenue—Today the nonowners will welcome whatever keeps them a wage?earning class but increases their wages and their security without insisting on the expropriation of the owners 139 An Appendix showing the collectivist proposal to "buy out" the capitalist in lieu of expropriating him is vain. Section Nine
THE SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN
The manifestation of the servile state in law or proposals of law will fall into two sorts—(a) Laws or proposals of law compelling the proletariat to work—(b) Financial operations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society—As to (a), we find it already at work in measures such as the Insurance Act and proposals such as compulsory arbitration, the enforcement of trades union bargains and the erection of "labor colonies," etc., for the "unemployable"—As to the second, we find that so?called municipal or socialist experiments in acquiring the means of production have already increased and are continually increasing the dependence of society upon the capitalist 171 CONCLUSION 199
INDEX 203

Editorial Reviews

 I have always felt that The Servile Statewas much more significant than we have suspected.

—James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University

From the Publisher