Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc’s book The Crisis of Civilization (1937) gave a detailed account of the transition from medieval Christendom to what he believed was a modern civilisation in severe decline. He gave many reasons for this, the main ones being the rise of capitalism and the disruption to Christian unity caused by the Reformation. As Belloc puts it:

“The unity of Western Civilization was wrecked by the explosion which we call the Reformation. Slowly, as the dust subsided and we were able to survey the ruins, we could perceive certain consequences emerging. There being no longer any common moral authority nor a common moral tradition sufficiently vigorous to restrain the coming evils, they grow apace and the first of them was the creation of a Proletariat” (p.175).

There had been a proletariat of sorts, unlike their fellows deprived of property and therefore of security of livelihood, in a few commercial centres. This situation immensely worsened with the related phenomena of growing capitalism and the Reformation. As Belloc lamented, in England the “sudden enrichment of a new class which battened on the spoil of all collegiate property – hospitals, and schools as well as monastic establishments and religious endowments of all kinds [created] a Proletariat… even upon the land …this agricultural proletariat was the source, model and breeding ground of the urban proletariat that was to follow “(p. 176).

By the time of the English Civil War, in which large numbers of the old religion were killed off or ruined, the country “had lost her old economic and ethical philosophy which was to produce the modern industrial world”. Most of the old economically free peasants disappeared, forced to be agricultural labourers and wage earners, dependent upon a small class of land owners. Dependency worsened with the expansion of overseas commerce and banking, creating a new monied class with a great deal of power and control. The situation was worsened by the invention of new machinery (such as the steam engine, leading to a factory system) and a communications revolution.

With this change in material conditions went a spiritual and moral decline. People were confused, doubting the certitude of their religion: “The quality of Faith was lost, or rather faded. It grew less and less operative as time went on… With that loss went the loss of the social guarantees which the old religion had bred. Usury and excessive universal competition, for instance, came to be taken for granted throughout our society. Under these conditions it was presumable that small property would decay and wage-slavery take its place whenever the conditions were favourable” (pp.177-178). The pendulum swing of history meant that resistance movements would arise against capitalism. These included gradualist reform movements, such as moderate socialism, Fabianism and Labourism. But there would also arise revolutionary movements such as communism, which Belloc detested as bellicosely atheistic.

In the final part of his book Belloc puts forward the remedy of returning to Christian things. He proposed remedies that had in fact floated around for some time in social reform circles, remedies such as the resurrection of guilds; the creation of self-governing businesses on the cooperative line with members being also owners or shareholders, thus shielding the poor from the effects of unbridled competition; a guarantee of a living wage; and a system of differential taxation that would enable a wholesale redistribution of property. He urged (in fellowship with people like G. K. Chesterton) this theory of “distributism” for the rest of his life. Needless to say, this has not eventuated, and the evils he predicted have in many ways got even worse in our own age.