ABSTRACT
In his biography of Hilaire Belloc, Joseph Pearce terms his subject's creed "essentially libertarian". Belloc insisted that the critical parts, or cells, of this good society were productive families, secure in their property. The whole objective of his political economy was to break down the corruptions of modern capitalism and socialism, and re-establish families in working homes set on land in freehold tenure. Belloc's project in The Servile State was to analyze how that "gulf" had emerged, what had been the consequences, and how the elements of a good society might be put back together again. It would be in his subsequent The Restoration of Property that Belloc laid out a fairly complete distributist program of reform. While the sweep of Belloc's public-policy agenda would cause mass heart failure at a modern Tea Party Rally, he insisted that his project was properly labeled reactionary.
