The Servile State

he Servile State is a 1912 economic and political treatise by Hilaire Belloc. It serves primarily as a history and a critique of capitalism and socialism. The "servile state" that Belloc describes is a state in which the proletariat, a majority of civil society dispossessed of the means of production, is compelled by positive law to work for those possessed of the means of production. Belloc believed that capitalism was a fundamentally unstable and transitory state of affairs, viewing it as the usurpation of the natural development of property and societal norms. While Belloc states that socialism — which he generally refers to as "collectivism" — is an alternative to capitalism, he steadfastly affirms that it will necessarily lead to the servile state.
Contents
This book lays out, in very broad outline, Belloc's version of European economic history, starting with ancient pagan states, in which slavery was critical to the economy, through the medieval Christendom process which transformed an economy based on serf labour in a state in which the property was well distributed, to 19th and 20th century capitalism.[citation needed] Belloc argues that the development of capitalism was not a natural consequence of the Industrial Revolution, but a consequence of the earlier dissolution of the monasteries in England, which then shaped the course of English industrialisation. English capitalism then spread across the world.