The Servile State

The 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 contends that it will also necessarily lead to the servile state, albeit in a different manner.