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. The twentieth century saw many socialist experiments and increasing state interventions. Now in 2013, 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).
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.