Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was already an England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was already an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand. When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalized; that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labor in the process of production until that process should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected by cooperative guilds, fenced round and supported by custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth, necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small owners. Their corporations, their little parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalization required for the new process, and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing, the balance of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalization of a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage. Such great discoveries coming in society like that of the thirteenth century would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile StateAn audio version of the Servile State can be downloaded from Yahoos for American Freedom. A variety of digitalized editions are available for download here. Belloc is embraced by the post WWII new right whether by the YAF or Murray Rothbard, as a conservative.
It is a view that is also shared by Catholic apologists and promoters of a Catholic Third Way between socialism and capitalism. Which in Canada is reflected in the ideology of Elizabeth May's Green Party.Book Review: The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc
By Leonard P. Liggio Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was indeed an Edwardian Radical as described in John McCarthy's biography (also published by Liberty Press). The Servile State represented Belloc's disgust with politics after serving in the House of Commons. He found politicians in control of organizing any new industries; cabinet officers determining which businessmen would control new industries. If capitalism were absolutely recognized, according to Belloc, government-created monopolies could not continue. But, from inside parliament, he saw “executive statesmen” determining which group of businessmen would operate that sphere of industry. The system described by Belloc in 1913 emerged most fully as the corporatism of the 1930s; it extended from Berlin to Washington. F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom saw Belloc as a prophet; and Robert Nisbet, in his introduction to this edition, notes “just as Belloc predicted, we find the real liberties of individuals diminished and constricted by the Leviathan we have built in the name of equality.”
Though at the time of his publishing the Servile State in 1912, the American Marxist; Daniel De Leon declared Belloc a communist anarchist. Of course it was a backhanded compliment, since De Leon himself was strongly opposed to communist anarchism, being a party man. His party the Socialist Labour Party, had attempted unsuccessfully to align the IWW with it as their party union, which was rejected by the membership through a counter campaign organized by the anarchists.Hilaire Belloc "and All the Rest of It"
In Land and Water, his speculations on the developments of the First World War won accolades from the Times. In his classic The Servile State, is there not an anticipation of that socialist choking of individual liberty as is evidenced in post-war Western governments? Already in 1913 Belloc seemed to see the coming Keynesian model of state control of the economy through money and taxes when he forecasted:The future of industrial society... is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the expense of the old political freedom and by the establishment of that proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile.3
From a personal viewpoint, and within the narrow latitude of my knowledge of English letters, I would put forward that next to Maritain’s seminal work on the philosophical implications of Luther’s revolt,4 Belloc’s thesis of the after-effects of the Reformation, in a socio-political context, were very accurate and not so outlandish as some of his critics have contested
Hilaire Belloc and the Liberal Revival
There is arguably a parallel liberal tradition in Britain which has usually been independent of the Liberals or Liberal Democrats.It is recognisably Liberal in its commitment to individual freedom and local self-determination, but it has included Radicals (Cobbett), Tories (Ruskin, or so he said), Socialists (Morris) and Greens (Schumacher). And though both traditions have influenced each other in every generation, they have rarely come together in Parliament.
The exception - and it was a brief exception - was in the political career of the writer, poet and historian Hilaire Belloc, Liberal MP for South Salford from 1906 to 1910.
And although the Roman Catholic political doctrines that so influenced Belloc seem pretty dusty in the UK these days, it was Pope Leo XIII who first coined the concept of 'subsidiarity' in his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1896. It was this idea that was taken up by Belloc, turned into a political creed in Distributism, rescued from obscurity by Schumacher - only to pop up again as the central tenet of Euro-ideology, and the part that knits Liberal Democrat European policy with its enthusiasm for decentralisation.
Socialism and the Servile State By Daniel De Leon There reached us some time ago from England a pamphlet containing the verbatim report of a debate on “Socialism and the Servile State,” which took place at Memorial Hall, London, on May 5, 1911, between Hilaire Belloc, Liberal member of Parliament in 1906–1910, and J. Ramsay MacDonald, then and still a Social-Democratic member of Parliament. The sender accompanied the pamphlet with a request for a review. Recent dispatches from London, reporting the Labor Party’s proposal for the nationalization of mines, give actuality to the debate. So far as Belloc’s economic views are concerned, he may, or may not, be a Socialist. Hard to tell. MacDonald not unjustly charged his remarks with obscurity. From certain sentiments that he dropped, we should judge that, notwithstanding that he was a Liberal member of Parliament as late as 1910, Belloc belongs—not at all an uncommon thing among the intellectual bourgeois—in the category of communist anarchy, a theory of small cooperative communities brought about by a cataclysm through despair. This, however, matters little to the subject. Belloc was not treating socialism, its merits, or demerits, its principles and its tactics. He spoke to a thesis, and that he elaborated with sufficient clearness. Belloc defined the “servile state” as a condition of society in which the mass of the people, although enjoying a minimum of economic “security and sufficiency,” are “permanently dispossessed of the means of production.” With the servile state thus defined, Belloc maintained that the Socialists, meaning the Socialists typified in Parliament by MacDonald, are drifting ever further away from socialism, and ever nearer to the idea or perfect servile state. In other words, Belloc’s contention is that the Labor Party makes for a social system in which, schooled in the school of experience, a capitalist oligarchy, possessed of the means of production, will wisely “leave well enough alone”; will wisely rest content with an abundance without toil, instead of striving after a superabundance; and will secure their rule by drying up the headspring of revolt through a system of organization that will “humanely” give security through economic sufficiency for the masses.His definition of Belloc's political economy as communist anarchy, is correct.It is the same same political economic stateless 'socialism' as espoused by Kropotkin as well as Proudhon and Tucker. And as Marx pointed out America was the ideal of this producers alternative to capitalism; production based on use value rather than exchange value. Belloc has influenced both the right and the left, and so while he is no libertarian we could call Belloc, a conservative anti-capitalist in much the same way Marx applied that appellation to Proudhon. The belief in a nation of small, independent landowners, craftsmen and merchants. Belloc and Proudhon,viewed their ideal as a cooperative guild socialism one influenced as it was by the role of the guilds and co-fraternities in Catholic Europe and their later corporatization in England as I have written about here. And here is the critical part of Belloc's work, his Catholic view of Europe, was that of the medieval guilds and the fact that a different kind of society could have evolved out of feudalism, rather than capitalism. Based on the ideals of the guilds and co-fraternities, an alternative had always existed to both feudalism and capitalism. Not unlike Kropotkin who posits such as movement as well in the free city states, that existed outside of the State's control. While embraced by the right, Belloc's 'communist anarchism' appealed to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.
"The Servile State" By Dorothy Day The Catholic Worker, July August 1945, 1, 3And while the right wing likes to claim Belloc's critique of the state is an attack on socialism, it isn't. Rather it is an attack on the liberal capitalist state. A state that developed after WWI, in response to the Bolshevik Revolution. A state that capitalism needed to halt a world wide revolutionary movement. As a result capitalism instead of collapsing as predicted by vulgar Marxists, embraced the state as its savior heralding the historic era of state capitalism.
On the eve of Hilaire Belloc’s seventy-fifth birthday, the Servile State was ushered into Great Britain with Prime Minister Attlee taking the place of Churchill. Contrary to the opinion of most conservatives, the new government is not a step toward collectivism, but a solidifying of capitalism, with the sop thrown to the proletariat of social security, health laws, education laws, etc. The State has taken possession of the masses, with their approval. Most people look upon the new regime as the lesser of two evils, and a step forward in progress.
Distributivism
But today the future of the Keynesian arrangement seems in doubt. In both Europe and America, the costs of government seem ready to outstrip the ability of society to support them. Further, the willingness of corporate interests to continue the arrangement is ending; they have invested great sums and great energies in seeking an end to the system and their efforts are paying off. Corporations are seeking to externalize social costs that have heretofore been part of the wage system, such as medical insurance, pensions, and unemployment costs. However, it is doubtful that shifting these responsibilities can be accomplished without introducing the very insecurities that occasioned the arrangements in the first place. Thus the Keynesian system seems to be caught in a conundrum, the very conundrum pointed out by Belloc. It cannot continue its Keynesian bargain (and this is especially so in the face of global competition), and it cannot drop it without risking chaos. John P. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978. 373 pp. $2.00. This book I have read only in cursory fashion, but I have picked up enough to know why Tolkien and Lewis are indebted to him. Tolkien was educated at the same school at Cardinal Newman's Oratory in Birmingham, but Belloc was not nearly so taken with the sacred image of Saint John Henry as Tolkien was. On the contrary, his hero was Cardinal Manning, the author of Rerum Novarum and champion of the small property owner. Newman, in Belloc’s estimate, was allied with the Old Catholics who were quite content to remain a noble and dignified minority, but Manning was an Ultramontane Catholic who championed the immigrant workers and converts. Yet Tolkien and Belloc were agreed in being Little Englanders who feared foreign alliances, not from xenophobia but because they were opposed to all nationalistic accretions of state power to defend interests abroad. Belloc is thus, like Chesterton a curious paradox: a radical Tory (323), an admirer of both the Catholic Middle Ages and the French Revolution, a hater of capitalism and a lover of private ownership of property. But Belloc is far from being mere inane contradiction. He was opposed to all privileges and monopolies in society: ownership of land, religious establishment, and local government. He wanted to extend the personal freedom and economic liberty won by the petit bourgeoisie to the entire populace: “What the radicals hoped to achieve was the extension of economic freedom attained by the middle-class entrepreneur to the population at large. They sought to correct the economic plight of the poorer classes while remaining within the laissez-faire system. They sought to put workers in more competitive relation with their employers by controls on child labor, graduated income taxes, and workmen's compensation. But in no way were these negative restraints meant to discourage savings or enterprise, nor to put industries in the hands of the state as the socialists wanted.” Such were also the original aims of the old Victorian Liberals: John Ruskin and William Morris, John Bright and John Morley, Richard Cobden, William Cobbett and Benjamin Disraeli. It was Lloyd George who first betrayed this vision. He changed an essentially negative vision of government as putting restraints on privilege to a positive vision of the welfare state as providing for all the basic needs of society. And George also linked this new omnicompetent state to an increasingly bureaucratized party supported by a plutocracy far worse than the old landowners. The party also spent most of its energy on popular elections that appealed entirely to the collectivist voter fighting for his mere economic interests: “Belloc saw the new style of mass politics and the collectivist new liberalism as closely intertwined, and subservient to the interests and needs of the newer privileged class, the capitalist plutocrats, who had come to replace the landed aristocracy.” But because these New Liberals wouldn't go all the way over to outright socialism, the Labor Party was founded to realize the full-fledged welfare state. Belloc was more opposed to the Liberals than the Fabians because he saw the former as producing a benignly servile state "where the proletariat masses would be reassured as to their economic security and sufficiency, and protected against cruelty by the owners of capital, but where at the same time they would be 'permanently dispossessed of the means of production'" (288-89). Thus did Belloc think Liberalism far more dangerous than the overt socialism of the Fabians.The Roads to Serfdom by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2005
In fact, Hilaire Belloc, in his book The Servile State, predicted just such a form of collectivism as early as 1912. Like most intellectuals of the age, Belloc was a critic of capitalism, because he held it responsible for the poverty and misery he saw in the London slums. His view was static, not dynamic: he did not see that the striving there could—and would—lift people out of their poverty, and he therefore argued that the liberal, laissez-faire state—“mere capitalist anarchy,” he called it—could not, and should not, continue. He foresaw three possible outcomes.
His preferred resolution was more or less the same as Carlyle’s half a century earlier: a return to the allegedly stable and happy medieval world of reciprocal rights and duties. There would be guilds of craftsmen and merchants in the towns, supplying mainly handmade goods to one another and to peasant farmers, who in turn would supply them with food. Everyone would own at least some property, thereby having a measure of independence, but no one would be either plutocrat or pauper. However desirable this resolution, though, even Belloc knew it was fantasy.
The second possible resolution was the socialist one: total expropriation of the means of production, followed by state ownership, allegedly administered in the interests of everyone. Belloc had little to say on whether he thought this would work, since in his opinion it was unlikely to happen: the current owners of the means of production were still far too strong.
That left the third, and most likely, resolution. The effect of collectivist thought on a capitalist society would not be socialism, but something quite distinct, whose outlines he believed he discerned in the newly established compulsory unemployment insurance. The means of production would remain in private hands, but the state would offer workers certain benefits, in return for their quiescence and agreement not to agitate for total expropriation as demanded in socialist propaganda.
Unlike Orwell or Beveridge, however, he realized that such benefits would exact a further price: “A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of a Government official. ‘Here is work offered to you at twenty-five shillings a week. If you do not take it you shall certainly not have a right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take it the sum shall stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, I will permit you to have some of your money; not otherwise.’ ”
What applied to unemployment insurance would apply to all other spheres into which government intruded, Belloc intuited; and all of the benefits government conferred, paid for by the compulsory contributions of the taxpayer, in effect would take choice and decision making out of the hands of the individual, placing them in those of the official. Although the benefits offered by the government were as yet few when Belloc wrote, he foresaw a state in which the “whole of labour is mapped out and controlled.” In his view, “The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society . . . is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed . . . by the establishment of that Proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile.” The people lose “that tradition of . . . freedom, and are most powerfully inclined to [the] acceptance of [their servile status] by the positive benefits it confers.”
An Essay on the Restoration of Property, by Hilaire Belloc
In this essay, Belloc presents an alternative to the dehumanising obsession with money, and the monopolistic capitalist power that so often flows from it. That alternative is, as the title suggests, the restoration of property; in a word, "distributism."
"The evil [industrial capitalism] has gone so far," Belloc tells us, "that the creation of new and effective immediate machinery [to counteract it] is impossible." Therefore, the restoration of property - whether it be in the shape of families farming small parcels of land, self-reliant businesses, independent craftsmen, and so on - must be the result of a new mood. "It must grow from seed planted in the breast," he says. And to have a chance at success, the distributist vision "must everywhere be particular, local, and in its origins at least, small."
Restoration of Property is, perhaps, Belloc's most famous distributist tract. It is his roadmap, guiding us through the distributist vision of things, what a distributist society looks like, and how it might be achieved and preserved.
And what benefit does Belloc see at the core of that vision? In his words: "The object of those who think as I do in this matter is not to restore purchasing power [for the average working man] but to restore economic freedom."
Of course to be set free of something, one must first be bound by something. That "something" in this case is what, in Belloc's early 20th century world, he refers to as the "servile state," i.e., that capitalist society where all men (except for the few powerful controllers of wealth) are securely nourished "on a wage, or, lacking this, a subsidy in idleness."
That description, though obviously unknown to Belloc at the time, describes a society remarkably like most of the industrialised Western world of the 21st century.
Moreover, there are indications that Belloc's notions about economic freedom for the common man, and the evils associated with the acquisition of unlimited wealth and power, were not merely reflective of the times in which he wrote.
Consider this comment from Samuel Francis in a recent issue of a popular journal of American culture: "The economic trend in the United States today, aided by the political trend of the federal government, is toward the concentration of economic and political power in fewer and fewer hands".
Welfare in the Servile State' In our century, we have recognised totalitarianism as a system of enslavement. In 1912 Hilaire Belloc, responding to the Lloyd George budget of 1909 thought he detected the emergence of something called "The Servile State".It was this phrase which the philosopher John Anderson took up in Sydney during the last war, in 1943, in the course of diagnosing the development of regimentation and servility in Australia. In 1961, Michael Oakeshott took up a similar theme in "The Masses in Representative Democracy". I want to make some comments on these last two writers.
Anderson in 1943 was in the process of liberating himself from "the worker's movement" - though not from a belief in the reality of "movements". But what he wanted to insist on was that workers are different from slaves: different both economically and politically, and the difference lies in the moral fact he called "enterprise".
Following this line, Anderson attacked the "propaganda" of social improvement. His target was wartime solidarism, the notion that we must all pull together in order to achieve victory, and that all other activities ranging from education to art and science must be subordinated to this aim. " Servile" is thus a term properly applied to " those States which are marked by the suppression of all political opposition and thus of all independent enterprise."
ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JULY 2007
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