Wilhelmsen Belloc

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have begun to show up in the way we live. AsNixon did, “we, too, seek lives without limitsand form. We have hollowed out the institu-tions and codes that once disciplined our indi-

vidual desires and made us willing to temperprivate impulse by public ends.” In K urland’s

words, we have “long dedied] . .. nstitutionalvalues in favor of temporary political expe-diency.”

Professor K urland’s book reminds us, asdoes the article by Schaar and Carney, thatconstituting a “public” and acting within apublic world are achievements rather than giv-ens. If we are not wil ling to work for it, thepolis

achieved in 1787will not be ours.

print makes the reading of Belloc’s most influ-ential book an added pleasure.

What was The Servile State all about? Whatwas the thesis that made the late Walter

L ippmann, a man by no means sympatheticwith the wide range of affirmations that markedBelloc, declare that The Servile State was a

“landmark of political thought in this cen-tury”? In his sensitively intelligent introduc-tion, Robert Nisbet fingers the thesis in thefollowing quotation which forms the conclusionBelloc set out to demonstrate. The Servile Statecan be defined as

That arrangement of society in which so

considerable a number of the famil ies andThe question is how many Americans arestill, or may bepersuaded to become, adher-ents of the “vital center” and of the rule ofreason based on experience, both of whichguided the Founding Fathers to the framing

individuals are constrained by positive lawto labor for the advantage of other familiesand individuals as to stamp the whole com-munity with the mark of such labor we callthe servile state.

of a Constitutionfollow.

that we still purport to

Reviewed by THOMAS. EISELE

The World of Hilaire Belloc

The Servi l eState, by Hilaire Belloc; with an

Introduction by Robert Nisbet, Zn-

dianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1978. 207pp.

$8. 00 (paper $2.00).

I NTHE FULL FLOOD of alife which was to producemore than one hundred and fifty books, HilaireBelloc insisted on hefting the product before itwas published and on eyeing each page proofwith a critical squint before giving his beneplacit. He would have been pleased with thisnew edition of The Servile State by L ibertyPress in its Classic Series. The L iberty Pressmust be congratulated by having given us anearly twentieth-century classic crafted in quietbeauty, thus doing justice to its author. T hequality of paper and the large, hence generous,

Belloc marched through to his conclusionwith an argument froni definition. In definingservility in economic rather than in purely

long prejudice that understood slavery princi-pally in terms of juridical bondage. The burdenof proof Balloc laid on himself consisted indemonstrating that his definition of servilityhad begun to fit the Western world, especiallyEngland, by the time he worked out his thesisin 1913.The Servile State begins with definitions.

Belloc argued that the servile condition existsin a community when a number of men ofmodest or no capital, sufficient to stamp thecommunity with its type, is perforce constrainedto hire its services to capitalists, in suchfashion that the alternative is indigence or the“dole,” an alternative rendered so repugnantby the state that forced employment becomesthe norm. The capitalist, in turn, finds himselfto be an unpaid official of the state, providingfor the well-being of a man whose economicstatus prohibits his caring for himself in illness

and decrepitude. Belloc’s understandingof theservile state, with some not unimportant but byno means essential distinctions, coincides withwhat we in this country for some thirty years ormore have called “The Welfare State.”

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I 94 Spring 1979



For Belloc, economic alternatives-including, as they do, social and politicalalternatives-are the consequence of the pos-session of private property, whether property in

the form of land or in the form of stocks andbonds and savings. When such alternatives donot exist, or where they exist only marginally,the society in question is already stamped withthe mark of slavery. For Belloc the slave is theman who hasno significant alternative in life.He must work for a wage because the only otherchoice is the indignity of welfare, the dole:Belloc does not consider total poverty an alter-native. It follows that the proletarian is forced

to work for another man because starvation isno choice at all to any sane man and welfare iscongenial only toalazy one. It follows, too, thatthe key of personal liberty for Belloc is eco-nomic liberty and such liberty is the result ofthe possession of private property.

The conventional objection to Belloc’s thesisis easily summed up by the following com-plaint: “If you don’t like your job, find anotherone!” T he complaint well fits a capitalist sys-

tem in which, theoretically, a few own a signif-icant (but not necessarily overwhelming)number of the means of production and inwhich a majority, at least a significant andpossibly an overwhelming majority, own noth-ing but their capacity to work. In this modelcapitalist order, the many are politically andeconomically free to switch employment andthus better themselves as they move up theladder of success (or take their chances andslide into economic insolvency). But the weightof Belloc’s reasoning, especially in the earlierchapters of The Servile State, falls upon dem-onstrating the fallacy of the thinking in ques-tion. The capitalist condition-Bellocargued-is unstable by nature. This instabilityis intolerable socially. The instabil ity is re-moved gradually by asocial order which elimi-nates classical capitalism, necessarily a trans-itory situation, but which does not introduceclassical socialism. T he state does not confis-

cate capital. T he state, rather, assures thepropertyless worker of security and passes thetab to the capitalist-but the state leaves thetitle and the use of wealth in the hands of thecapitalist class. The resultant order isneither

socialist nor capitdist but servile. Many menwork for a few and, central to Belloc’s thesis,the many have to work for the few: unless theyare geniuses (and Belloc seems convinced that

such genius is associated with roguery andchicanery: there are no honest “rags-to-riches”boys for this radical traditionalist), they haveno choice. The few, in turn, must care for themany.

Belloc illustrated this point with a wryexample tucked into a footnote: If an indepen-dent author contracts with a publisher to writeahistory of the County of Rutland and falls ntoapit while doing research, the publisher i s not

responsible to pay the author’s hospital bills.Should the same author disguise himself andtake a job as gardenersat the same publisher’shouse and fall into the same pit wherein he iswounded “by afierce fish,” that publisher willbe “mulched to my advantage, and thatroundly.” Belloc observed, asearly as 1913,

that by law there is a difference recognizedbetween the relation, freely entered into, of awriter to his publisher and that same publisherto one of his “employees.” The distinctionpoints, implicitly at least, to the differencebetween a free man and a slave.

Unlike many traditionalists (Belloc was aradical traditionalist), he did not see status as anecessarily desirable condition. Status is de-sirable only if servility is desired. Iffreedom ispreferred, then contract is better than status,but contract is forced and hence the equivalentof status if the man contracting his labor doesnot have property behind him. T he capacity to

say “no” to the boss and not go on welfare isBelloc’s understanding of economic liberty. In1913he thought that such liberty existed in fewplaces in the world, and in 1978such libertyexists in ever fewer.

Belloc made a mistake, in my judgment, inhis evaluation of servitude. He envisioned ser-vility as necessarily restricting a man to a sub-sistent wage or to a slight margin above it. Thepast forty years have proven him wrong due to

the vastly more complex economic situation inwhich we today find ourselves. Servility, Iwould argue, is compatible with a very highincome, but the alternative to such an income,humanly speaking, is intolerable to a man once

Modern Age 195



accustomed to its benefits. Consumerism hasmade us all the slave to things. Our crediteconomy digs the grave of liberty because mostmen simply cannot face the possibility of livingoutside of the presumed glitter of aworld built

on advertising that seduces them into mortgag-ing their future toacredit and consuming men-tality. Belloc’ s “drop-out,’’ the man with thecapacity to say “no” and simply take off to theSouth Seas, i s McLuhan’s “Executive asDropOut.” The option exists for nobody else, but itexists for nobody else not because the middleand lower classes are one step from indigencebut because they are one step away fromaff luence-and they simply cannot, by everycultural and political canon that governs sub-urbia, retreat down the ladder. Asawag put itafew years ago: We do not sell out at forty: wesign up at twenty-two. The servile state today isbread and circuses and very few indeed canafford a ticket out of the theater. Everybody i sowned by a bank and abunch of credit cards.Belloc who abominated usury as a sin, wouldhave been appalled at its monstrous dimen-sions today, but he would have recognized theirlineaments. He commented sagely in TheSer-

vile State on the debasement of currencywhich, in his own England, was already cen-turies in existence.TheServile State is principally an exercise in

logic on the facts created by insecurity in thecapitalist world, but Belloc buttresses thosefactsbyan appeal to history. The concentrationof wealth in the hands of a capitalist class wasnot the consequence of industrialism. Thatconcentration of wealth preexisted, at least in

England, the advent of machine productionand permitted mechanization to be bent to theends of a few rather than to those of the many.The Reformation’s rape of ecclesiastical landsin England and the failure of Henry VI11 tokeep that wealth in the hands of the crownspawned a new oligarchy that was already in-closing land and freezing out the free peasant

decades before the Industrial Revolution.(Was Belloc influenced by William Cobbett ordid he come to his conclusions independently?I do not know but I incline to the second alter-native.)

Belloc argued in TheServile State that free-dom is a relatively rare occurrence in the his-tory of man; that freedom was born in the earlyM iddle Ages because Christendom found itintolerable to permit the continued existencein its midst of an institution that violated thedignity of man; that freedom was then-in1913-fast disappearing from England and in-deed from most of the West; that freedom isimpossible to achieve unless men actively want

it; that the appetite for freedom was fast declin-ing and was indeed not even a living memory tomost of his contemporaries who labored forothers in shops and factories and farms; thatonce the desire was dead, resurrection wouldbe extremely difficult indeed; that in fact it wasprobable that the West-and with it theworld-would give up freedomasan ideal to beexercised broadly throughout society: in short,that the servile state would most probably beour future.

Our world does not look very much like theworld of Hilaire Belloc in 1913, just about thetime he abandoned politics as an exercise infrustration. Our world is vastly more compli-cated financially and technically and econom-ically than Belloc’s. But TheServile State stillruns through edition after edition and mentoday still ponder the sobering thesis advancedby its writer: there is no liberty, poli tical or

social, unless there is economic liberty, which

means the restoration of property, not paperproperty owned by usurers, but real propertyowned by proprietors, by men who in one fash-ionoranother eat and drink their own. Nothingless is worth the dignity of Christian men.

Reviewed by FREDERICK. WILHELMSEN

196 Spring 1979

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Wilhelmsen Belloc