Political Philosophy PDF EPUB Audio

The Servile State

First published: 1912
Pages: 113

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Read by Ray Clare · 4 h 27 min · 18 parts

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Section 01
14:49
Section 02
16:19
Section 03
15:14
Section 04
15:58
Section 05
15:28
Section 06
15:00
Section 07
16:12
Section 08
15:04
Section 09
15:58
Section 10
15:35
Section 11
16:05
Section 12
16:08
Section 13
14:22
Section 14
15:12
Section 15
14:05
Section 16
15:17
Section 17
15:46
Section 18
5:20

The Servile State (1912) is a public domain work.

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About this book

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.

About the author

Hilaire Belloc

Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was a French-English writer and political activist. Belloc was considered one of the most versatile authors of the 20th century, producing essays on history, politics and economics as well as poetry, travelogues and satire. His Catholicism had a strong effect on his works.