The Servile State
by Hilaire Belloc
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Book Summary Information
Author: Hilaire BellocEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-11-01
ISBN: 1602068674
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Cosimo Classics
Book Reviews of The Servile State
Book Review: An influential classic that still has a sting
Summary: 4 Stars
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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