The Servile State

The Servile State

By Hilaire Belloc.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Epigraph
4. Dedication
5. Preface to Second Edition
6. Introduction
7. The Servile State
   1. I: Definitions
   2. II: Our Civilisation Was Originally Servile
   3. III: How the Servile Institution Was for a Time Dissolved
   4. IV: How the Distributive State Failed
   5. V: The Capitalist State in Proportion as It Grows Perfect Grows Unstable
   6. VI: The Stable Solutions of This Instability
   7. VII: Socialism Is the Easiest Apparent Solution of the Capitalist Crux
   8. VIII: The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile State
      1. Appendix on “Buying-Out”
   9. IX: The Servile State Has Begun
   10. Conclusion
8. Endnotes
9. Colophon
10. Uncopyright

Imprint

This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.

This particular ebook is based on a transcription produced for Project Gutenberg and on digital scans available at the Internet Archive.

The writing and artwork within are believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks releases this ebook edition under the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.

“… If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”

To
E. S. P. Haynes

Preface to Second Edition

With the issue of a second edition of this book the author may perhaps be excused for adding, by way of preface, a few words upon the thesis it maintains and the method through which that thesis is treated.

It appears the more necessary to do so because a careful comparison of the reviews and other expressions of opinion which it has received convinces the author that parts of his argument are liable to misconception. It would be a pity to correct such misconception by any changes in a completed book; a few words set down here by way of preface should be sufficient for the purpose.

First: I would point out that the argument contained in the book bears no relation to the common accusation levelled against socialists (that is, collectivists) that life in a socialist state would be so subject to regulation and order as to be unduly oppressive. With this common objection to the reform advocated by socialists I have nothing to do in this book, nor can it touch my subject at any point. This book does not discuss the socialist state. Indeed it is the very heart of my thesis that we are not, as a fact, approaching socialism at all, but a very different state of society; to wit, a society in which the capitalist class shall be even more powerful and far more secure than it is at present: a society in which the proletarian mass shall not suffer from particular regulations, oppressive or beneficent, but shall change their status, lose their present legal freedom, and be subject to compulsory labour.

Next, I would beg my readers to believe that I have not attempted to set up this thesis as a warning or as a piece of gloom. I say nowhere in the book that the reestablishment of slavery would be a bad thing as compared with our present insecurity, and no one has a right to read such an opinion into this book. Upon the contrary, I say clearly enough that I think the tendency towards the reestablishment of slavery is due to the very fact that the new conditions may be found more tolerable than those obtaining under capitalism. Which state of society might reasonably be preferred⁠—the reestablishment of slavery or the maintenance of capitalism⁠—would make an ample subject for another book: but that alternative does not concern this volume or the thesis therein maintained.

Finally, I would beg such of my readers as are socialist by conviction not to misconceive my opinion upon what their movement is effecting. The most sincere and the best writer among the English socialists wrote of this book that the author had mistaken the “social reform” of the professional politicians for socialism, and that while this “social reform” might be tending towards the reestablishment of compulsory labour for the benefit of an owning class, yet socialism had no such intention or tendency.

Now I never made such an error. What I have said in this book is that the object of the socialist (a very simple and clear matter⁠—the putting of the means of production into the hands of politicians to hold in trust for the community) is not in practice being approached; that we are not, as a matter of fact, coming nearer towards the collective ownership of the means of production, but that we are rapidly coming nearer to the establishment of compulsory labour among an unfree majority of non-owners for the benefit of a free minority of owners. And I say that this tendency is due to the fact that the socialist ideal, in conflict with and yet informing the body of capitalism, produces a third thing very different from the socialist ideal⁠—to wit, the servile state. It is important to have this point clear, and perhaps a metaphor is needed. I will present one.

A traveller sincerely desirous of escaping from the cold climate of the mountains conceives the obvious plan of going south, where he will find lower and warmer land. With this project in his head he finds a river flowing in a southerly direction and he says, “If I travel upon this river