The Servile State

In this 1912 treatise Hilaire Belloc traces how the free peasant of the Middle Ages became the modern wage worker, and warns where that road leads. Capitalism, he argues, is inherently unstable, since it concentrates ownership in few hands while leaving the many insecure, and the pressure to ease that tension pushes society toward what he names the servile state, a condition in which the propertyless are compelled by law to labor for the owners in return for guaranteed subsistence. He rejects socialism as merely another route to the same bondage, urging instead the wide distribution of property that became the heart of Distributism. Concise and sharply argued, it shaped a generation of Catholic social thought. The text is available as a free PDF and EPUB edition.