Unlike his contemporaries G.B.Shaw and H.G.Wells, Hilaire Belloc’s ideas have never been assimilated into current opinion. They are not taken-for-granted, axiomatic, anonymous presuppositions. They are external to it. They irritate the main body of our culture.

The vehemence with which Belloc’s political theories have been put forward by his small bands of followers has not helped...causing them to rebound from a general consciousness tightening itself to repel judgements that might bruise too seriously that collective self-esteem necessary to group survival.

Nevertheless as the vast structure of industrial capitalism crumbles and disintegrates it is time to remind ourselves that Belloc saw and detested as vividly as any Marxist the vast injustices and the advertising-slogan self-justifications of Financial and Industrial Capitalism. He put forward a remedy conceived in terms of constructive human happiness instead of one based upon the misery of mechanized mass revolution. Here is an outline of Belloc’s beliefs.

Widely distributed property is a condition of freedom that is necessary to the normal satisfaction of human nature. In the High Middle Ages an approach to such a life existed. Peasants had come to own and farm their land and manufacture and trade were organized by self-governing guilds dedicated to God. But it could only continue and flourish under a strong centralized monarchy holding and using its power to protect the small man.

The acquisition of monastery lands by a small number of powerful families after the Reformation began to sap the royal power which dwindled struggling until its temporary extinction during the Great Rebellion of the 17th century. It flared up again for two more reigns but was finally crushed out by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when rich men got rid of the last king to exert real power and installed a foreign puppet who would carry out their desires.

The industrial revolution was a morally neutral process. But because it occurred first in a country governed by an oligarchy intent upon the acquisition of abstract wealth and power rather than with the production and use of concrete objects it brought about an evil and inhuman oppression of the poor who had been cheated out of the lands they held by traditional tenure through Acts of Parliament that confiscated all holdings with no written proof of ownership.

What was called by historians ‘the glorious palladium of our liberties’ was in fact the glorious palladium of the liberty for the powerful to exploit the weak. In order to restore a fully human life to the vast majority of England’s twentieth century population it was necessary first to realize with humility in what miserable helplessness and frustration they lived and then to take strong measures completely to alter the structure of society.

Belloc put forward the historical justification of these beliefs in a number of narratives and biographies. A statement of the current situation and of alternatives for the future is made in The Servile State (1912)…a remarkable prophecy of Economic Totalitarianism. Plans for the restoration of individual economic independence…the only solid basis for individual political liberty…are outlined in a number of pamphlets and articles and in several books.

Economics for Helen (1924) sets the claims of freedom and responsibility against those advantages of personal security and general stability which the servile state may give. An Essay on the Restoration of Property (1936) distinguishes between the Distributist and the Social Credit proposals. The ultimate end of Distributism is economic freedom and that of Social Credit is increased purchasing power. Belloc advocates various means of distributing ownership in land, shops and collective enterprises. Belloc did not believe there to be a middle way between general small ownership and general industrial slavery.

Some of these theories were already distastefully familiar to the safe comfortable educated England of the early 20th century as formulated from the Marxist point of view…the exploitation of the weak, the meaninglessness of political liberty without economic power and the complete inadequacy of the liberal tradition to handle industrial problems.

But it was an outrage when similar views were put forward from a fresh angle by a man brought up in the Christian tradition…and indeed appealing to it. The ruling classes of early 20th century England believed the notion that their country was the leader of mankind in its inevitable progress towards perfection. So Belloc’s theories and proposals were received with that thick muffling stifling silence which is the most potent and most infuriating of all defences against an unwelcome argument. But there was another problem…Belloc’s fiery brand of Roman Catholicism.

Belloc believed in a reborn European Cultural Unity and a new Medieval Roman Catholic Empire. This led him into fierce battles with any forces he believed might oppose it. There were the Moslems in North Africa who cut down the trees Rome planted and let in the desert…and the Moslems who fought the Crusaders.

There were the Puritans and the Jews forever harking back to a primitive Old Testament God who gave divine approval to financial success…and using this to justify replacing love and contemplation as the mainspring of living with work and money-making.

There was the Modern Banking System which transformed the creative relationship between men, work and trade into a mechanical, non-moral, non-just, non-human and automatic activity in the modern business world.