Spencer Heath Archive

Item 705

Taping by Spencer MacCallum on the occasion of his asking Heath to dictate a review of Hilaire Belloc’s The Restoration of Property.

August 12, 1956

 

White envelope has item 705 & 708.

 

 

This book by Hilaire Belloc, The Restoration of Property, is a strange mixture of sound ideas about real property and the wildest totalitarian notions supposedly looking to the restoration of ideal property in land. He abhors every kind of political dictatorship, while proposing that some power, which he refers to as “we,” must employ the powers of government to establish a complete totalitarian control under direction of his unnamed authority as “we.” He characterizes this supposedly ideal state of affairs with what he calls the “Distributive State,” or “Distributive Society,” looking to the establishment of small peasant proprietorships and small craftsmen and tradesmen having monopoly powers, all presumably under domination by Roman Catholic political authority — which of course he does not mention by name. The book was written primarily about conditions in England before World War II and is full of dire warning against the great increase of taxation even then. Central to his own propositions is his idea of employing taxation not for revenue but to force the redistribution of property in accordance with what he regards as a restoration of Medieval society. It is strange that a mind so brilliant and so creative in arts and letters and many fields could in the public affairs go so far and so paradoxically awry.

 

One of the most brilliant men of his time, and a most trenchant logician — wherever his ineluctable allegiance to hierarchical authority is not directly involved.

His former volume, The Servile State, is a most masterly demonstration that the extension of governmental power must lead eventually into chattel slavery under a servile state. The second half of this volume, however, is only a lamentation for the loss of Churchly power and therewith, supposedly, of human freedom, brought about by the Protestant Reformation.

In The Servile State, he was a perfect Jeremiah, absolutely certain of the evil he denounced. In his present volume, he shows only the weakest confidence, almost none, that his own propositions for the “restoration of property” can be practically applied in a state of affairs where destructive taxation has come to be so widely imposed, even as it was before 1936.

/There is a note to rearrange this material when typing/