Thinking about life: The Servile State

SYDNEY, April 15 (UPI) -- 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."

The American poet 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 moralizing 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 of 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."

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 world. 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 nationalized 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.

Dwight Macdonald, the American editor, was not the only critic who refused to take Belloc seriously after he declared in a new preface to a 1927 edition of "The Servile State" that Soviet Russia, on the point of its murderous collectivization, was committed to an agriculture based on independent peasants.

The way to grasp Belloc's enduring message to later generations is to ignore the eccentricities and concentrate on his deconstruction of socialism, especially in Section Eight.

You have to look behind the idealist ideology, he says, at the interests that make up the socialist movement. There are four of them.

The first is the idealist who makes war on poverty and wants security for all. He has little if any interest in freedom or enterprise. His ideal is a welfare state.

A second is the planner who dreams of "a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall be scheduled." He will be its chief commissar.

The third is the apparatchik or Practical Man who has no interest in the doctrines of the idealist or in the great schemes of the planner. "Of history, of philosophy and religion, of human nature itself he is blank." But he knows how to get things done.

The fourth is the cannon fodder of it all -- the dispossessed masses who have no property and no capital. They have long lost the habits of freedom and live in fear of "the sack."

With no longer an extended family to help out in bad times, they know that unemployment will devastate them and their dependents. Already "wage slaves," they will gladly sacrifice their nominal freedom for state controls that guarantee social security and pagan hedonism.

Between them, these interests are not creating socialism but a servile state, a sort of Orwellian dystopia.

There was a curious agreement between traditionalists and revolutionaries in welcoming "The Servile State." Both saw this welfare state as making the worker content with his servile lot, with his "wage slavery." But their remedies were totally different.

For the traditionalists and distributists, the evil to be combated was propertylessness and the remedy was the distribution of property. For the anarchist or communist, propertylessness was a radical virtue: The evil was security and the remedy revolution.

There can be doubt who best understood Belloc. Few writers have been as eloquent -- and provocative -- as Belloc in his praise of property. In his time, and especially among the literary people, the Man of Property was often an object of scorn, and possessiveness a habit to be despised. Belloc and the distributists did much to restore and promote the importance of private property.

His "back-to-the-land" idea did not take off, but all later schemes for a share-owning, property-owning democracy owe inspiration to Belloc. So do schemes to combat the culture of dependency and to promote friendly societies and private insurance against problems of unemployment, sickness, and old age. So does the revival of the idea of independence and enterprise.

The revolutionaries who welcomed Belloc's attack on the servile or welfare state misread him. There is indeed a touch of the peasant anarchist about Belloc, a hint of Proudhon. His inability, when a member of Parliament (1906-10), to accept party discipline illustrates it. He saw his fellow MPs as "the dirtiest company it has ever been my misfortune to keep" and he dismissed his party branch as a pack of "grocers and pawnbrokers." He became an independent and lost his seat.

But he never scorned security with the blithe indifference of the revolutionary ideologues (many of them tenured academics) who used him as an authority on the evils of welfare. He looked for alternatives because without them workers would inevitably choose state-controlled security over destitution.

What has survived of "The Servile State" 90 years after its first publication is less an assault on security than skepticism about State solutions of insecurity -- and Belloc's appeal to the "smoldering of old fires," including the love of independence engendered by private property.

George Orwell was right: "The Servile State" was an early warning against "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

(Peter Coleman an Australian writer, is former editor of the weekly "Bulletin" and monthly "Quadrant.")