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The Party System | 
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Authors: Hilaire Belloc, Cecil Chesterton
Creators: Ron Paul, Sforza Ruspoli
Publisher: Ihs Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $14.73
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 449190
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5
ISBN: 1932528113
Dewey Decimal Number: 324.241
EAN: 9781932528114
ASIN: 1932528113
Publication Date: March 1, 2008
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Condition: IHS Press; Norfolk, VA; 2007; Softcover; -2; -2New; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; We have this book in stock. Ships next day with delivery confirmation.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Pertinent to America, Britain, and other Western democracies, this book explains that what people believe happens in national assemblies and parliaments is radically different from the reality. Instead of being places where debate is intense, passionate, and aimed at the national interest, the fact is most members of these institutions act on behalf of powerful, unelected interests. They know, implicitly, who really runs the country—and their only real task is to decide if they want to try and rock the boat (thereby risking their salary, their reputation, their future), or stay silent for fear or favor. The book demonstrates beyond any doubt that the very nature of the system is hostile to democracy as laypeople understand it.
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| Customer Reviews:
The origin of 'The Servile State'? April 25, 2008
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
"...Votes and elections and representative assemblies are not democracy: they are at best machinery for carrying out democracy. Democracy is government by the general will. Whenever, under whatever forms, such laws as the mass of the people desire are passed, and such laws as they dislike are rejected, there is democracy. Wherever, under whatever forms, the laws passed and rejected have no relation to the desires of the mass, there is no democracy." (Hilaire Belloc)
Hilaire Belloc was a one term Liberal Party Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1910. This book, co-written with G.K. Chesterton's journalist brother, Cecil Chesterton, captures Belloc's thoughts on the party system and democracy, written soon after his departure from Parliament. As a book it is something of an intellectual predecessor to his more famous and deeper book "The Servile State". "The Party System" introduces themes Belloc develops more fully in "The Servile State" and provides some clue to their origin. In "The Servile State" Belloc forecasts a future where politically well connected and untouchable super-rich would be in a position to compulsorily exploit the labour and resources of the general population thanks to their control via a regulatory and 'welfare state' (then still under it's earliest stages of construction) . The Servile State represented a bastardization of capitalism and socialism. Perhaps, as "The Party System" illustrates, his fears may have been emerged from close observation of the revelation of the role Cecil Rhodes and othe South African magnates played in provoking the Boer War and in engineering subsequent immigration legislation to promote their business interests. These revelations, however thorough and well documented, failed to derail these vested interests and no wave of reform followed in the wake of exposure. The front benches of both major British parties closed ranks to protect Rhodes.
Belloc sees our challenge as "to make democracy, democratic". In his analysis the Party System, at least as constituted in Britain at his time, as a major obstacle to genuine democracy. Belloc sees the two major parties dominated by twin interlocked and interconnected, self selected and self recruiting oligarchies. Essentially these oligarchies are the governing class, they dominate parliamentary process, essentially reducing 'elected representatives' to a network of placemen beholden more to their oligarchs than the electorate. Executive dominance over parliament, to Belloc, is the death of democracy. It's independents and independent minded parliamentarians who give vigor to the democratic process. Parliament wasn't always a rubber stamp to a dominant executive, as Belloc reminds us.
"If we take the year 1870 as the pivot year, we shall find that in the forty years that preceded 1870, nine Administrations which could normally command a majority of the Commons were upset by the independent action of members of that House. In the forty years that have passed since 1870 only one instance of this happening can be mentioned - the defeat of Mr Gladstone's Home Rule Bill of 1886. There the circumstances were in many ways exceptional, and even that example is now nearly a quarter of a century old. In the last twenty-four years not a single case of such independent action on the part of the Commons has occurred."
Belloc argues that the 'democratising' effects of the extension of the franchise throughout the 19th century was offset by the counterveiling force of the growth of the Party system, and the "transfer of effective power from the House of Commons to the Ministry, or, to speak more accurately, to the two Front Benches, Government and "Opposition."" His historical discussion in "The Party System" of the Revolution of 1689 feeds his distributist critique of British "capitalism" detailed in "The Servile State" and other volumes.
"The Revolution was made not only by but for a group of wealthy intriguers with an object in the main financial.That group of men and their successors proceeded to enrich themselves at the public expense in every conceivable way. Perhaps the best commentary upon the Revolution of 1689 is to be found in the enclosure during the century and a half which followed the accession of the House of Hanover of more than 6,000,000 acres of common land by the rich landowners and their satellites who had drawn the sword for "civil and religious liberty.""
Belloc knew all political systems, including monarchy, depended on some degree of popular assent. Modern "democracies" pretentiously and tendentiously claim this honour as their's alone. Belloc still wanted "to make democracy democratic". He wanted parliament to live up to it's representative role. He noted the lack of an alternative institution to replace the executive dominated parliament of his day and saw the failure of reform as having consequences in terms of a predicted decline in British power both internationally and economically. This is another of Belloc's predictions to have come true, and indeed, if anything the system is even more executive dominated, and in Belloc's terms, less democratic today. Although Belloc had no illusions about the then young Labour Party, it's rise did have a consequence that Belloc didn't predict. Belloc saw the old Conservative / Liberal oligarchies of his day as too intertwined and inter-related, often by family connections, to represent genuinely competitive alternatives. Indeed he saw the old aristocratic divisions between Tories and Whigs as a more genuine political division and competition. The rise of Labour may have counteracted this tendency of intermarriage and collusion between allegedly rival Front Benches. Or at least it may have provided a temporary respite, today the social and class origins of the respective Front Benches are tending to converge yet again.
In Australia, another parliamentary "democracy", with a system influenced heavily by the British model, a much touted summit, stacked with high profile business and arts 'celebrities' supposedly to generate new ideas for the government of Australia from now to 2020 has recently been finalised. The great brainstorming session only managed to dredge up the same ideas, ...a republic, a bill of rights..., that have been doing the rounds for the last forty years. Yet in "The Party System" Belloc considers radical alternatives such as replacing ministerial responsibility with elective multi-party committees to replace the old Ministers. There is no contest as to whether Belloc or the combined forces of the great thinkfest actually applied the most thought.
Belloc's writing style is not always the easiest to follow and sometimes he seems to take a long time to get to his point. But what a point it is. Recommended for students of Belloc and as a thought provoker for those concerned about modern democracy's undemocracy. It's interesting to note that when Vice President Cheney was recently asked about polls that indicated the American public's opposition to the Iraq War, his reply was one word. "So?" It would be interesting to envision Belloc's reaction were he alive today.
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