‘Our free modern society is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do.’
In his provocative classic The Servile State, Hilaire Belloc posits that modern industrial society under capitalist ownership inevitably gave rise to a system where the majority of the population is reduced to a condition of servitude for the benefit of a wealthy minority. Through rigorous historical analysis, this work explores the historical roots of economic injustice and warns of a future where true liberty is either eroded by exploitative wages or centralised bureaucratic control. Belloc proposed a visionary alternative, Distributism, where productive assets are decentralised instead of concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few. Written in 1912 with piercing foresight, Belloc’s critique of society remains unnervingly prescient today.
Hilaire Belloc was a French-born English writer and historian. He was one of the most versatile English writers of his time, having written on various disparate topics.