Talk:The Servile State

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by AirshipJungleman29 talk 07:33, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

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• Comment or view
• Article history

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Hilaire Belloc in 1910

• ... that in The Servile State, Hilaire Belloc (pictured) criticized socialism for being too similar to capitalism?

• Source: "The [socialist] experiment is thoroughly suited [...] to the Capitalist society which it proposes to replace. It works with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and thinks in the existing terms of Capitalism, appeals to just those appetites which Capitalism has aroused, and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those things in society the memory of which Capitalism has killed among men wherever the blight of it has spread." p. 78 NB that Belloc earlier defines socialism and collectivism as the same thing (p. 7) which is why the source calls it collectivism.

• ALT1: ... that in The Servile State, Hilaire Belloc (pictured) traced the history of capitalism to the Protestant Reformation instead of the Industrial Revolution? Source: For the Reformation claim, see page 25; for the Industrial Revolution being incorrect see pp. 41–42
• ALT2: ... that although it was written in 1912, George Orwell once described The Servile State as "foretell[ing] with remarkable insight" events that occurred from the 1930s onward? Source: "The Servile State is written in a tiresome style, and the remedy it suggests (a return to small-scale peasant ownership) is for many reasons impossible: still, it does foretell with remarkable insight the kind of things that have been happening from about 1930 onwards."
• Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Oen Boen Ing
• Comment: Open to other hooks; this page has plenty of DYK opportunities.

5x expanded by ThaesOfereode (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 5 past nominations.

ThaesOfereode (talk) 23:16, 16 June 2024 (UTC).

• Approving ALT0 and ALT1. Article is long enough and expanded same day as DYK nomination. Article is well-sourced, copyvio-free, and presentable. Hooks are all interesting and sourced; I prefer the first two ALTs because ALT 2 requires prior knowledge of who George Orwell was, and because it just isn't as aesthetically pleasing due to the brackets. QPQ done. Image meets criteria. Overall, great nomination, thank you ThaesOfereode. Kimikel (talk) 20:16, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:The Servile State/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: ThaesOfereode (talk · contribs) 23:22, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Czarking0 (talk · contribs) 03:43, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Taking this one. First pass looks good more to follow

Rate	Attribute	Review Comment
1. Well-written:
	1a. the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience; spelling and grammar are correct.	I think this reads better if you put "Contrasting servile laws with other laws" after its neighboring subsections
	1b. it complies with the Manual of Style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation.	The "part of a series" box is in an odd place on this article. What is up with that?
2. Verifiable with no original research:
	2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.	FN 1 should be separated into the journal articles it represents. I was able to verify the catholic info in this source.
	2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).	"viewing it as a unconcerned with the well-being of the proletariat and becoming frustrated by unreasonable compromise and the reluctance of his colleagues to challenge what he saw as systemic abuse of the working class" - I am not sure this is fully verified by the source. Verified POV that parliamentary processes are not concerned with proletariat and was frustrated with unreasonable compromise; however, it seems like this source supports that his frustrations were with the political system itself and that a frustration with particular colleagues is not verified in the text. "With this, the Catholic social teaching became a central theme for Catholic activists of the era in the wake of Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, which was particularly influential on Belloc." -- verified Is theimaginativeconservative.org really a reliable source? "Belloc is considered, together with his lifelong friend and collaborator G. K. Chesterton, to be one of the founding theorists for the economic theory of distributism." Verified, though I think the Journal of Liberal History source would be better relied upon for several of these claims "While early Christian evangelists did consider the emancipation of a slave laudable" -- verified "The English Reformation and the subsequent..." -- verified
	2c. it contains no original research.	All claims are cited. A little difficult to draw the line between summary of the text and OR at times will make a final call on this with spot checks of how the summaries were done.
	2d. it contains no copyright violations or plagiarism.	copyvivo looks good
3. Broad in its coverage:
	3a. it addresses the main aspects of the topic.	A reader unfamiliar with these works may appreciate another sentence or two about why this is the case: "Later writers have considered The Road to Serfdom to be a "kind of sequel to" The Servile State"
	3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).	This last one struck me, is it really notable?: "The 2012 book Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond compares Belloc's findings to those of American Founding Father Thomas Paine and Scottish Conservative politician Noel Skelton.[136]"
	4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.	I don't think there is any issue here. The article sticks to summary heavily which is justly POV. The response section has good neutrality.
	5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.	No concerns
6. Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
	6a. media are tagged with their copyright statuses, and valid non-free use rationales are provided for non-free content.	The Kenneth Minogue image does not have a license tag?
	6b. media are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions.	Looks good
	7. Overall assessment.	The author is an excellent writer and presented the material wonderfully. My criticism was only related to WP standards and my personal opinion on how thinks look. Great job.

Hi @Czarking0: First, thanks for taking on this monster of a GA; I really appreciate you taking the time to go through this. I intend to get to fixing or responding to your comments tonight, but I wanted to just add really quickly that I'm pretty sure File:Kenneth_Minogue.jpg has a license ("This image was taken from Flickr's The Commons. The uploading organization may have various reasons for determining that no known copyright restrictions exist [...]."). The uploading organization appears to be the British Library of Political and Economic Science. Let me know if you still have concerns about this image. ThaesOfereode (talk) 12:10, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

You are correct. Marked through Czarking0 (talk) 18:13, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Alright, finally getting to the review. I have a few questions, but most of these were easy fixes.

• Re: 1a – I'm not sure what you mean; do you mean moving Contrasting servile laws [...] to the bottom of subsection Critique of contemporary law or something else? I wrote contents in generally the same order as Belloc did in the book, but if you think there's a good rationale for shifting stuff around, I suppose I'm open to it.

• Yes, I think it is odd for the reader to go into a contrastive section without a clear understanding of what is being contrasted. This is outside the GA criteria so it is just my opinion.

• I see. I think this is a just a poor choice of words on my part; it's contrastive ipso facto since it is defining what a servile law is by contrasting it with other known laws. I've changed it to Defining servile laws.

• Did you though? I searched and did not find it.

• Re: 1b – Another user added that while I was in the middle of my massive rewrite. As my draft got longer, I didn't really pay attention to where it was since it was in, contextually, probably the best spot in the article, since Reception contextualizes the book in the context of British conservatism (where a reader might say: "Hey, maybe I'd like to learn about other British conservative writers now that I've read through the summary of this book and see the reception it got."). I don't know if there's really a hard-and-fast rule MOS-wise, but I think moving it up will disrupt the placement of more useful images.

• WP:NAVBOX is the best guideline I could find on this.

1. All articles within a template relate to a single, coherent subject.  Done
2. The subject of the template should be mentioned in every article. - weak but it could count
3. The articles should refer to each other, to a reasonable extent. - only references Chesterton which is weak
4. There should be a Wikipedia article on the subject of the template.  Done
5. If not for the navigation template, an editor would be inclined to link many of these articles in the See also sections of the articles.  Not done

In light of this I think the navbox should either be removed or should be replaced with the catholic social teaching box. If the latter is chosen please update Chesterton's page accordingly.

I'm going to push back a little bit here. For one, I also discuss Hayek, not just Chesterton and he's compared to Burke by Arthur Cleary; I've linked the British Conservative Party as well. I think it's clear that Belloc is referenced as the "conservative element" in many areas of Reception. Still more, were the box not there, I think it would be reasonable for me to link several concepts presented in the box, namely Blue Labour, Red Tory, Liberalism in the United Kingdom, and John Henry Newman at the very least. And I think Henry Edward Manning should be in the box as well, given his influence on both Newman and Belloc. Still more, I think a lot of Belloc's influence was outside of Britain (e.g., Minogue, Day, Lippmann, etc.), so it might make sense to discuss Belloc in the context of British conservatism, but it would be inappropriate to discuss him in wider context of global conservatism, given the relative scope of his influence.

This is good pushback. I'll admit I forgot Hayek became British. I read some of those other articles and I think you made your point.

• Re: 2a – Seems to have been a bit of confusion on my part. [1] served to confirm time in office and party since that is on the linked page without delving into the journals. [2] served to demonstrate that he was one of a small number of serving Catholics, though it also incidentally affirms the party and time in service (and also his French roots).
• Re: 2b
  • Changed to inability of his colleagues
  • The Imaginative Conservative itself is probably mostly suitable for things like WP:BLPSELFPUB and WP:RSOPINION, but I've cited it here since the authors themselves are reputable for the topic at hand. Pearce in particular is a well-known scholar of Belloc (mostly for his biography Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc, which I have not been able to get access to) and Médaille is a fairly well-known distributist and a professor of Catholic theology.

• • I am not sure I buy the "authors themselves" line. Paul Krugman is a reputable economist. His twitter page is BS. This falls somewhere in between. I looked more closely at how you use this source and it is really just to paint more of the picture of how Belloc is seen by modern authors. I think is a reasonable use of this kind of source.

• • Fair enough point, but yes, I agree that in this context it seems reasonable.

• Re: 3a – Hopefully this is clearer now. I've also expanded/added quotes from the sources for readers to examine.
• Re: 3b – I think so since Wiley is a well-known academic publisher and the section in question was written by an Oxford history professor. Maybe I can add something like Oxford historian Ben Jackson wrote [...] to clarify why the piece is worth adding.

• Yes I think that is worth it.

•  Done

Okay, I think I've gotten everything. Let me know what you think and if you think of anything else. ThaesOfereode (talk) 01:48, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

@Czarking0: Courtesy pinging