Dermot Quinn: Wards of the State
[Dermot Quinn is professor of History at Seton Hall University and formerly a fellow of the James Madison Program at Princeton University.]
...Written in 1912 by Hilaire Belloc, an Anglo-Frenchman whose true home was the Middle Ages, The Servile State is an unlikely vade mecum for 21st-century Washington. Yet men with French names have a way of understanding the inner life of this country. The Servile State is not quite Democracy in America—for one thing, it is less than 200 pages long—but it has the prophetic power and moral imagination, the sustained intelligence and insight of that earlier volume. Like Democracy in America, it harbors a healthy skepticism of the political class, deplores the corrosive effects of money, recognizes the value of restraint and self-control. Above all, both volumes lament the seemingly inexorable growth of the state....
Belloc, like Tocqueville, knew America firsthand. In 1890, he walked halfway across the country to court his Californian wife, singing as he went. Like Tocqueville, he wrote trenchantly. Like Tocqueville, he knew that the old order was passing away, a fact that each man, in his different way, regretted. The difference is that whereas one of them dealt explicitly with America, the other brilliantly anticipated it. Belloc does not mention America at all, even if, looking closely, we may see its shape and outline, its long shadow in the years ahead. His subject, rather, is Britain in the dawning age of welfare when the problem of poverty was acute, when working-class radicalism was real, when mass democracy was an experiment whose success was not yet clear. No one knew at the end of the Victorian era if Britain’s industrial wealth, achieved at obvious social cost, would mean political fracture or revolt. For a while, the pessimists were in the ascendant.
Belloc’s key insight was that Britain’s ruling elites would buy political tranquility at the cost of personal liberty. “Future … industrial society,” he wrote, will guarantee “subsistence and security … for the proletariat … at the expense of … political freedom.” Britons faced a future in which there would be “the fixing of wages by statute,” “the imposition of a minimum wage during employment,” the use of compulsory arbitration during industrial disputes (“a bludgeon so obvious that it is revolting even to our proletariat”), a vast bureaucracy to herd the working classes into conformity....
Read entire article at American Conservative
...Written in 1912 by Hilaire Belloc, an Anglo-Frenchman whose true home was the Middle Ages, The Servile State is an unlikely vade mecum for 21st-century Washington. Yet men with French names have a way of understanding the inner life of this country. The Servile State is not quite Democracy in America—for one thing, it is less than 200 pages long—but it has the prophetic power and moral imagination, the sustained intelligence and insight of that earlier volume. Like Democracy in America, it harbors a healthy skepticism of the political class, deplores the corrosive effects of money, recognizes the value of restraint and self-control. Above all, both volumes lament the seemingly inexorable growth of the state....
Belloc, like Tocqueville, knew America firsthand. In 1890, he walked halfway across the country to court his Californian wife, singing as he went. Like Tocqueville, he wrote trenchantly. Like Tocqueville, he knew that the old order was passing away, a fact that each man, in his different way, regretted. The difference is that whereas one of them dealt explicitly with America, the other brilliantly anticipated it. Belloc does not mention America at all, even if, looking closely, we may see its shape and outline, its long shadow in the years ahead. His subject, rather, is Britain in the dawning age of welfare when the problem of poverty was acute, when working-class radicalism was real, when mass democracy was an experiment whose success was not yet clear. No one knew at the end of the Victorian era if Britain’s industrial wealth, achieved at obvious social cost, would mean political fracture or revolt. For a while, the pessimists were in the ascendant.
Belloc’s key insight was that Britain’s ruling elites would buy political tranquility at the cost of personal liberty. “Future … industrial society,” he wrote, will guarantee “subsistence and security … for the proletariat … at the expense of … political freedom.” Britons faced a future in which there would be “the fixing of wages by statute,” “the imposition of a minimum wage during employment,” the use of compulsory arbitration during industrial disputes (“a bludgeon so obvious that it is revolting even to our proletariat”), a vast bureaucracy to herd the working classes into conformity....