One hundred years ago, Hilaire Belloc published The Servile State, with this provocative claim about his mixed intellectual world: “the effect of Socialist doctrine on Capitalist society is to produce a third thing different from either of its two begetters — to wit, the Servile State.”
The nineteenth century was largely capitalist in theory and in reforming direction. The twentieth century saw many socialist experiments and increasing state interventions. Now in the 2020s we are neither capitalist nor socialist — but what exactly are we? We know about We the Sheeple, the entitlement and victim mentalities, the growth of the imperial presidency, and more.
Has Belloc’s prediction come true?
Source: Footnote 2 in Chapter 1 of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1943).
Related: “Third-Way Politics and Its Bitter Fruits” — on the results of further compromise in the generation following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Sounds similar to Paul Gottfried’s argument in After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State.
I suppose you could argue that the 21st century West is similar to Belloc’s servile state.
However, I think it’s more akin to fascism with a democratic facade. The US and UK have become the most fascist of the Western nations with its perpetual bellicosity and imperial ambition, though France is playing catch-up. Germany is still a little bashful, and confines itself to financial matters.
BTW, thanks much for posting Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism. I’ve been looking for a primary source document of this nature for years. When a state fails so spectacularly in utter defeat, only primary sources are trustworthy. Though thoroughly anti-liberal and anti-individualistic, the doctrine of fascism is quite different than the comic book depiction taught in schools.
I think we are confused.
The West is torn by a largely unacknowledged philosophical civil war: Between the Enlightenment ideas that underpinned its liberties, prosperity and power and the anti-liberal reaction – Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc., – originally centered in Germany, eroding them now.
Western and Middle Eastern fundamentalists share an understandable misconception about secular humanism, seeing it as a monolithic homogeneous entity: The cause of Fascism, Nazism, “Godless” communism and a host of present-day evils. For many it’s virtually synonymous with socialism. But what is called secular humanism is in fact a deadly embrace of two intertwined yet utterly antithetical traditions: The Enlightenment and a reaction to it that distilled and surpassed in virulence the darkest themes and tendencies of traditional politicized religion, while often couching itself in the former’s sensibility and terms e.g. “scientific socialism.” (How often does one hear a scientist speak of “scientific physics”?).
In different ratios American mainstream left and right possess a contradictory mélange of both traditions while their leaders seek to appease a rising, increasingly bellicose religious fundamentalism, with more and more in what is today called the right becoming it.
I think much of the battle consists in simply making people aware that a secular, neo-Enlightenment, politico-economic liberal movement exists. Among its challenges are to dispel the notion that only rednecks, hillbillies, and religious nutbars believe in freedom and that economic liberalism is a plot by Wall Street corporatists.
“but what exactly are we”
We are in the era of the infantilization of individuals, with the nanny state that will solve (supposedly) all the problems, and a total rejection of the spontaneous order.
We are out of democracy, because democracy is when the one who pays the tax, votes the tax.
The infantilized individual is not a slave, but the nanny state preventing any alternatives, the individual must follow all the prerogatives of the state, prerogatives hardening society, while paying via tax the expensive bureaucracy that regulates.
We are in the progressive logic. The government will control everything for the good of all humanity.
Progressivism is a scourge tending to go towards a centralized world state in which the individual is no longer an actor of his destiny.
He has the right to work, to own things, but in an illiberal framework.
He no longer has the right to defend himself, to own weapons. Self-defense becomes a huge problem.
He no longer has control over his money, ending up being forced to finance things that he would never finance in normal times, on his own.
He ends up financing, in spite of himself, his own enemies.
He no longer has control over the future of his own children, because the nanny state will take care of it.
He is not a slave, but condemned to servitude by taxes.
He ended up becoming a prisoner of the administration he finances.
And with a poetry that is only found on shelves.
What is the difference between a slave and a taxpayer?
The slave does not pay his master.
🙂