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The Servile State By Hilaire Belloc Liberty Classics, 207 pp., $8; $2 paperbound Hilaire Belloc was a reactionary of a type that hardly dares exist today. The breed was all but extinguished by Vatican II, though the psychology, disguised and displaced as radicalism, survives.

Belloc hated the present (in his case, 1870 to 1953) and made no bones about it. England had been ruined by the Reformation. But the ruins might be repaired, restored: he could hardly say otherwise without calling in question the relevance of his own positive creed. So in The Servile State (1912) he offered his own prescription, which he named distributivism (better known, where known at all, as distributism). It was basically nostalgia, a cozy vision of a nation of yeomen and small craftsmen, each on his own little plot of land. This was not proposed as utopian; Belloc insisted that his scheme had been emerging in the Middle Ages, before the Tudor depredations on the Church and small landholders. He had seen the past, and it worked.

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Joseph Sobran

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The Servile State By Hilaire Belloc Liberty Classics, 207 pp., $8; $2 paperbound Hilaire Belloc was a reactionary of a type that hardly dares exist today. The breed was all but extinguished by Vatican II, though the psychology, disguised and displaced as radicalism, survives.

Belloc hated the present (in his case, 1870 to 1953) and made no bones about it. England had been ruined by the Reformation. But the ruins might be repaired, restored: he could hardly say otherwise without calling in question the relevance of his own positive creed. So in The Servile State (1912) he offered his own prescription, which he named distributivism (better known, where known at all, as distributism). It was basically nostalgia, a cozy vision of a nation of yeomen and small craftsmen, each on his own little plot of land. This was not proposed as utopian; Belloc insisted that his scheme had been emerging in the Middle Ages, before the Tudor depredations on the Church and small landholders. He had seen the past, and it worked.