The Servile State revisited. (Philosophy & Ideas).(Critical Essay)

DOES HILAIRE BELLOC'S The Servile State, published in 1912, owe its fame more to its catchy title than to its argument? Is it, in this respect, like other well remembered but unread and misunderstood books such as Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals? This was the view of the English critic and historian Paul Johnson. But it is surely not the full story.

George Orwell certainly read it before he began work on his collectivist nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four. He believed that it had "foretold with astonishing accuracy the things that are happening now". He added that "unfortunately Belloc had no remedy to offer".

T.S. Eliot also read it closely--and it was Belloc's "remedy" that most engaged him. In responding to the threat of socialist dictatorship, Belloc did not appeal to the free market--to what Eliot saw as the Adam Smith--Ricardo philosophy--and did not fall back on what Eliot saw as the loud-mouthed moralising of the Carlyles or the Ruskins. For Belloc, private property is the central issue. He preferred it in the form of small business and small farms (he called his creed distributism) but whatever form it takes, private property is always the basis of a man's freedom--as well as an essential limitation on the power of the state.

If a sympathetic Eliot reserved some doubts about the contemporary practicality of Belloc's distributism, The Servile State deeply moved another American, the sociologist Robert Nisbet. He compared it to Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Its influence on him was so "profound", he said, "as virtually to turn my mind around". The great and key idea was private property: "Never again, after reading Belloc's book, did I imagine that there could be genuine freedom apart from individual ownership of property."

Yet in Australia one of those who did most to draw attention to Belloc's book (and took its title for one of his major essays), the Sydney philosopher John Anderson, saw the emphasis on private property as the weak link in its critique of the servile state.

Part of the problem in understanding Belloc is his own fault. At the heart of the book is his vision of a new age of servitude which socialism--whatever its libertarian appeal 100 years ago--was bringing on the word. But alongside his prophetic insights were many idiosyncratic and sometimes silly arguments.

He saw socialism as a capitalist front and did not believe that the capitalist class would allow itself to be liquidated as in Lenin's Russia, or subjugated as in Hitler's Germany, or nationalised as in Attlee's Britain. His hope for Europe was that it return to those happy Middle Ages ("Merry England") before a pagan Enlightenment and soulless industrialism had destroyed Faith and Freedom.