Reclaiming Freedom

Restoring Civilization As Master, Economics as Servant

We must recognize that a profound inversion has taken root in our collective life over the past four centuries. We’ve been persuaded—systematically seduced—into accepting economics, with its ledgers and metrics of efficiency, as the primary organizing principle for society. This was not a natural evolution, but a quiet yet powerful deception that displaced the older, organic order of our English civilization: a framework forged across more than a millennium to preserve freedom, sovereignty, and human dignity through evolved custom and relation.

In the natural order, economics is properly a servant, not a master. It emerges organically from the voluntary exchanges and mutual provision that sustain the complex web of civilized life. As Herbert Spencer argued in The Man Versus the State, a healthy society evolves spontaneously from the bottom up, like a living organism, with its institutions developing to protect the liberty and property of its members. The Anglo-Saxon villager in the common fields, the guildsman crafting for his community, the merchant trading under common law—these were not actors in a purely economic drama. They were participants in a civilizational order where material life was embedded within, and subordinate to, a richer tapestry of social, familial, and common law supported bonds.

This began to unravel when the servant was exalted to master. Starting in the seventeenth century, with the rise of mercantilist policy, enclosure, and a reductive political economy, the state increasingly allied itself with concentrated commercial interests. Spencer witnessed this same corrupting process in his own Victorian era: the state, ceasing to be a neutral defender of equal rights, transformed into an “over-legislating” engine for administrative coercion and privileged economic control. The necessary corrective is a rigorous reduction of government to its core, legitimate functions: the protection of life, liberty, and property, and the adjudication of disputes according to common law. All else is usurpation, stifling the personal responsibility and local initiative that are the lifeblood of a free society.

This reduction must be matched by a restoration of civic duty—the conscious participation of all citizens in the sustainment of their local communities and our great civilization. This does not mean voting. But active participation in meeting the communal needs of society. Spencer’s vision of a spontaneous social order fails if individuals abdicate their role in maintaining it. Liberty isn’t mere absence of restraint; it’s the active exercise of responsibility within one’s sphere—serving on juries, participating in local governance, defending the community, cultivating the virtues that bind the generations, and holding to account those who abuse their station and position. This daily practice of duty is the sole antidote to the passive dependency fostered by the administrative state.

The consequence of abandoning this framework is a form of enslavement more total and pervasive than any historical tyranny. It’s not embodied in a personal prince, but in an amorphous managerial regime—a coalescence of state bureaucracy and financial power that Spencer identified as the “new Toryism.” This regime operates through diffuse instruments: regulatory capture, debt-based finance, and supranational entities that nullify local sovereignty. It has promulgated the Financialists’ proscription of “Down with Princes,” seeking to erase the very concept of a legitimate, personal sovereign authority embedded within and bound by the civilizational order.

For there are times when only the mutually beneficial and multigenerational bonds between a prince and his people can effectively rally society around and through our civilization to deny the slavers’ attempts to enslave and reenslave. A constitutional prince—whether a historic king, a unifying president, or a governing figurehead—acts as a personal symbol of the whole community, a check on bureaucratic and financial abstraction, and a constitutional rallying-point for the defense of the realm. From Alfred marshalling the fyrd to George III bound by Coronation Oath, this princely function, when rightly ordered, isn’t tyranny but a necessary pillar of a balanced polity.

Who, but the Prince and his people, the King and his princes at the utmost, holds and wields the sword in blood when the State has become the manager of an absolute slaver regime on behalf of its Financialist slave owning masters?

At the heart of our lost order stands English civilization itself—an evolved “immune system,” developed over a thousand years to resist concentration of power. Its pillars, which Spencer himself cherished as products of slow social evolution, are:

• Responsible Individual Sovereignty, where liberty is inseparable from duty and self-reliance;

• Private Property, understood not as a mere asset but as the rightful fruit of labor and an extension of personal domain;

• A Decentralized Balance of Power, designed to prevent any single institution from achieving dominance.

These were not abstract theories but lived realities, etched into our great charters: the Dooms of Alfred, Magna Carta, the 1689 Bill of Rights, and the U.S. Constitution which codified this inheritance. They formed a framework that bound even kings, whose legitimacy derived from upholding the order, not subverting it. Edmund Burke captured this civilizational contract as a partnership in all science, art, and virtue—a concept Spencer echoed in defending organic society against the mechanical, legislated state.

Today, we face erasure through of an insidious kind: infantile politicians, amorphous bureaucrats, captured judiciary, and the merchant-banking elites who own them. As John Locke warned, “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” Our tyranny is one of anonymous edicts, debt peonage, tyranny from the bench, and financialization. To liberate ourselves, we must therefore reject superficial reforms that merely tinker with the economic machinery of our servitude. Following Spencer’s insight, we must oppose the “over-legislation” that stifles spontaneous social cooperation. Our civilization is not a thing of legislation, but of human bonds and commitments.

True liberation requires a fundamental reorganization of society around our civilization, restoring economics to its proper, subordinate role. This entails a great dual project: a reduction of the state to its just bounds, and a restoration of civic duty to its vital place. Practical steps include reviving common-law principles in local governance; fostering mutual-aid economies and community-held assets (restoration of the commons); and educating new generations in the virtues of this heritage. Crucially, it requires rehabilitating the legitimate, civilizational role of princely authority—a personalized, constitutional sovereignty that stands against the faceless power of Financialists and bureaucrats.

Modern tools—decentralized technologies, civic associations, legal frameworks privileging relation over transaction—can adapt these historical safeguards. In this reclamation, we reactivate society’s immune system. We restore the pillars of sovereignty, property, and balance to their primacy, creating a resilient order where, as Spencer envisioned, the industrial type of society—peaceful, cooperative, and voluntary—can flourish. For it is far better to be a humble free man in the world than to be a slave in a debt owned gilded cage.

This isn’t nostalgia, but a summons to destiny. The path to walking once more as free Englishmen, as free Men, lies in a deliberate return to our civilizational framework: a government reduced to its essentials, a citizenry energized by duty, and a restoration of legitimate, constitutional authority that can personally embody and rally the common cause. We must choose between remaining servants to a totalizing economic regime or reclaiming our status as heirs to a liberating, organic heritage. The tyranny of the faceless administration can only be shattered by reinvesting in the ancient, complex partnership that makes a people truly free. The choice, and the responsibility, remain ours.

We must restore our civilization as master. Relegating economics once more to its rightful place as servant. And we must prepare to wield the sword in blood to ensure this is so and that it sustains. Exactly as our ancestors have going back to the beginning, long before us.

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Suggested reading:

• John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689): A foundational English Enlightenment text that defends natural rights, private property as an extension of labor and self, and government as a protector of individual sovereignty. It counters this essay’s “faceless tyrants” by advocating limited authority to prevent enslavement, echoing the civilizational “immune system.”

• David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741–1742): This Scottish collection explores property’s stability, the organic emergence of social norms, and the dangers of arbitrary power. Hume’s emphasis on custom and reciprocity supports my view of economics as an emergent servant, warning against its elevation to master.

• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): Smith’s Scottish masterpiece on sympathy and ethical bonds precedes his economic writings, arguing that human relations—rooted in moral sentiment—should guide self-interest. It critiques the inversion I describe, where unchecked avarice commodifies bonds, relegating civilization to relic.

• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776): The companion to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which really must be read first. Often misread as pure economic doctrine, this Scottish work actually embeds markets within moral and social contexts, cautioning against monopolies and elite manipulations. It aligns with my call to restore economics as servant, highlighting how its mastery leads to alienation.

• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): Burke’s English critique of abstract rationalism defends organic society—partnership in virtue, art, and perfection—against revolutionary upheavals that mirror modern economic abstractions. It bolsters my valorization of princes and kings as guardians of balanced, relational order.

• Herbert Spencer, Man Versus the State (1884): A series of essays and an absolute must read for all. Extending Enlightenment individualism, this work lambasts bureaucratic overreach and state socialism as enslaving forces that undermine personal responsibility and property rights. It directly supports my depiction of amorphous elites, urging a return to civilizational principles over managerial tyranny.