‘Neo-Feudalism’ in America? Conservatism in Relation to European Feudalism

Abstract

This paper reconsiders American conservatism in relation to European feudalism and medievalism. The paper argues and shows that conservatism in America has typically been an American variant or proxy of European feudalism in particular and medievalism in general. Specifically, this is argued and shown for American economic and political conservatism with respect to feudalism in economy and its despotic ramifications in politics, as reciprocally related and reinforcing elements of European medievalism. The paper also identifies other interconnected elements of European medievalism in American economic and political as well as cultural conservatism. It finds that in economic-political terms, conservatism in America, irrespective of its assumed and celebrated lack of a European feudal and medievalist past, has been and continues to be a functional equivalent of feudalism and other medievalism in Europe. The paper concludes that American conservatism, including neo-conservatism, is a sort of European neo-feudalism and neo-medievalism rather than, as it claims and widely supposed, non-feudal and non-medievalist, thus questioning received views in the literature and society.

Notes

1. Lipset and Marks (2000) comment that Alexis de Tocqueville, described as the ‘young Frenchman’, though most US neo-conservatives would rather erase the last word or substitute it with ‘American’ in the style of ‘French to freedom fries’, ‘wrote that the United States, the lone successful democracy of his time, differed from all the European nations in lacking a feudal past and in being more socially egalitarian, more meritocratic, more individualistic, more rights-oriented, and more religious.’

2. Dunn and Woodard (1996:88) observe that ‘traditional conservative beliefs existed before Burke’, thus implying that medievalism, including feudalism, was essentially arch-conservatism. Similarly, Lipset and Marks (2000) clearly define feudalism as traditionalism in somewhat invidiously distinguishing America as an ‘exceptional’ nation, ‘from the more traditional status-bound post-feudal nations of the Old World.’ Also, Lipset and Marks (2000) implicitly define feudalism in conservative terms by defining the first by ‘hereditary privilege’, an ‘ascriptively legitimated upper class and fixed lower classes’ as well as observing that in feudal-rooted 19^th century Europe, a ‘dominant conservatism was wedded to the state’ in contrast to America's ‘all-encompassing liberalism’. As noted, Nisbet (1966):14) more explicitly defines feudalism and medievalism overall as conservatism, and conversely, in stating that conservative ideas ‘never really took root in America’ (sic!) due to its lack of a ‘medieval institutional past’. While Nisbet deplores this conservative omission, Lipset and Marks (2000) celebrate what they describe as the ‘reemergence’ of conservatism in post-war America, notably during the 1980s–2000s. Also, unlike Nisbet, they seem to think that ‘what Americans call conservatism’ is classical liberalism reemerged or renamed, thus conflating the two and overlooking that the latter was originally, as Mannheim (1986) stressed, an ‘immediate’ antagonist to the former and continued, in its modernized form, to be so in Western societies, including America itself, by the 21^st century. While Nisbet implicitly recognizes, Lipset and Marks appear to overlook or deny that ‘classical liberal ideology’ reemerged through modern liberalism (Habermas 2001), rather than (or less so via conservatism, including neo-conservatism despite its laissez-faire rhetoric or policy. In sum, it is recognized and neglected respectively that even in America and a fortiori other Western societies, modern liberalism, not neo-conservatism, is not only by assumption but in reality the prime heir of classical liberal philosophy (Dahrendorf 1979). Notably, such neglect or denial overlooks or denies the main point of the paper that American and other conservatism is a sort of neo-feudalism and neo-medievalism, in contrast to liberalism as anti-feudalism and anti-medievalism.

3. Weber adds that ‘the colony (under Winthrop's leadership) was inclined to permit the settlement of gentlemen in Massachusetts, even an upper house with a hereditary nobility, if only the gentlemen would adhere to the Church. The colony remained closed for the sake of Church discipline.’

4. Lipset and Marks (2000), while consistently claiming that America lacked feudalism, including feudal aristocracy, seem to imply or allow that American religious-political conservatism might be to some degree ‘feudal’, ‘aristocratic’, even repressive and sectarian, as with Protestantism, if not theocratic (Lipset 1996), as does implicitly Nisbet (1966) considering medievalism the conservative model overall. However, this commits a contradiction insofar as religious-political conservatism, in the specific form of Puritan-rooted Protestant sectarianism, has been predominant in American history (Lipset 1996), from 17^th century New England's theocracy to the 21^st century Southern Bible Belt (Bauman 1997; Munch 2001). Simply, if Puritanism was and remains, via Protestant conservatism, what Tocqueville calls the ‘destiny’ and Weber the ‘most fateful force’ of America, then Puritan feudalism and other medievalism inherited and imported from the ‘old world’ historically and sociologically over-determines the ‘new nation’, thus making the latter almost as ‘old’, if not ultimately ‘older’, i.e. more religious, traditionalist, fundamentalist, anti-egalitarian, than post-feudal Europe, as during the early 21^st century (Inglehart 2004). In turn, the failure to identify or acknowledge this Puritan-feudal determination is probably one of the most common, durable, striking or spectacular fallacies of omission in American social science as well as society overall.

5. Dickens sarcastically and perhaps—in light of Enronism or mafia capitalism (Pryor 2002) in America under neo-conservatism—prophetically remarks that ‘the good American is, as a rule, pretty hard on roguery, but he atones for his austerity by an amiable toleration of rogues. His only requirement is that he must personally know the rogues. The American people will be plundered so long as the American character is what it is; so long as it is tolerant of successful knaves [i.e.] so long as they deserved to be plundered’ (cited in Merton 1968:197).

6. For example, anticipating Veblen, J. S. Mill comments that there were hardly any limits to what the ‘ignorant feudal [e.g. Italian] nobility could and would give for the unknown luxuries then first presented to their sight.’

7. Desai (2005):172) suggests that such ‘anecdotal’ cases of corporate malfeasance during the 2000s as Enron, Tyco and even Xerox are ‘representative of larger trends in the deteriorating quality and reliability of corporate profit reports’ or ‘part of a larger dynamic’ in the US economy, especially under neo-conservatism. Specifically, he considers each of these cases to be the ‘paradigmatic example of some kind of abuse: Enron as an example of fraudulently reported earnings, Tyco as an example of managerial theft, and Xerox as an example of subtle manipulations to reach targets’ (Desai 2005:176). Consequently, Desai (2005:186–9) infers that ‘something more widespread is happening with respect to the reliability’ of business profits ‘easily gamed by financial engineers’ in the US economy and even that ‘a secular change in the nature of profit reporting, particularly amongst large firms, is at the center of the degradation of corporate profits, rather than a transitory failure of governance mechanisms.’ Further, he suggests that a conservative-based political-economic system ‘that allows managers to characterize income differently depending on the audience legitimizes earnings manipulation and permits managers a certain license that may mark the onset’ of a slippery slope or cascade, by exploiting advanced information technology systems for their aims a la Machiavelli (Desai 2005:190). This reaffirms that US conservatives or plutocrats typically use, promote and glorify advanced technology for their authoritarian, anti-egalitarian, exclusionary and militant, including militaristic or imperialistic, purposes, thus as a Machiavellian instrument of their domination and human subjugation and eventually destruction, viz. MAD nuclear scenario, rather than, as they claim and most Americans seem to believe, for liberation, prosperity, and democracy. Simply, the above is the picture of a system of ‘high-tech’ fraud, deception, machination and corruption cum financial-accounting engineering, as paradigmatically exemplified and perhaps climaxed, so far, in Enron.

8. Solon (2002):63–4) comments that various comparative studies ‘strongly suggest that Canada and Finland, like Sweden, are more mobile societies than is the United States’ or alternatively that the latter and Great Britain are ‘less mobile’ than are the former. In particular, Solon (2002):65) allows that the ‘contrasts between Sweden and the United States in both inequality and intergenerational mobility may be related’, as suggested by Bjorkland and Janti (1997). Overall, Breen and Jonsson (2005):233–4) conclude, in a review of comparative empirical studies of inter-generational income mobility, that these ‘show the United States to be noticeably more rigid than the countries with which it has been compared (mostly the Nordic countries)’, as indicated by father-to-son correlations (0.45 in America vs. 0.13 in Sweden, 0.28 in Finland, 0.34 in Germany).

9. Bourdieu (1998):35) comments US neo-conservatism tries to restore radical or unfettered capitalism that has ‘no other law than that of maximum profit’ and is ‘without any disguise, but rationalized, pushed to the limit of its economic efficacy by the introduction of modern forms of domination [plus] techniques of manipulation [e.g. advertising].’

10. Also Sismondi observes that even in those countries in which servitude ‘has been gradually abolished’, what he calls ‘mere feudal rights’ remained, citing the tenure by villanage in France and copy-hold in England.

11. Orren (1991) adds that in 19^th century America ‘employee lived in a divided political world. The one world [party politics] was liberal; the other [the court system], at its foundation, medieval.’ In turn, Lynd (1993):1595) in a review of Orren's book, comments that American conservatism (or, in his words, ‘liberalism’) is ‘forever announcing [in the new nation] a new man, a new deal, a new frontier, or a new covenant. But the liberal vision of a commonwealth of equal citizens is pasted over the [conservative] continuing hierarchical [feudal] relation between employer and employee.’

12. Hodgson (1999):206) adds that ‘in English feudalism, serfdom declined rapidly after the 1300s, to be replaced by various types of land tenancy and casual labour. Feudal social relations [involved] principles of inherited divine right and duty based on a hierarchy of land tenure. Rich and powerful, non-aristocratic interest groups [e.g. the merchants and the landed gentry] were eventually to pose a fatal threat to the feudal system’.

13. Cohen (2003):15) adds that ‘in the early days of factory work, schedules and customs remained the same as in the country: people got up early and went to bed late, and children worked.’

14. Sorensen (2000) comments that ‘structural conflict or class conflict should be more prevalent under feudalism than under capitalism, for rents are more permanent under feudalism. No revolution has occurred in an advanced capitalist society.’

15. Kiser (1999):164) identifies the patrimonial ‘mechanisms of control’ used by neo-conservative Ronald Reagan (and also some bizarre ‘liberals’) as governor of California: ‘The personal staff is selected on the basis of personal ties and loyalty; they are usually dependent on the governor, and if all else fails they can be sanctioned severely and arbitrarily—in Weber's terms, the relationship is patrimonial’.

16. Further, Bourdieu (1998):34) comments that this process of involution or regression into a repressive penal state, i.e. ‘what we see happening in America [is] beginning to emerge in Europe’.

17. Bourdieu (1998):42) adds American and other neo-conservatism, with its social neo-Darwinism, especially propagated by the Chicago School of Economics exemplified by Friedman, Becker et al., reproduces some kind of new aristocracy (or nobility), having ‘all the properties of a nobility in the medieval sense [owing] their authority to education [or] intelligence seen as a gift from Heaven’.

18. For instance, during the 2000s Arizona's ultra-conservative state sentenced a teacher to exactly 200 years (with no parole), while the prosecutor requesting no less than 340-year sentence, in prison for possessing indecent (‘pornographic’) images. And, the Supreme Court reportedly refused to even hear the defendant's appeal for overturning the sentence as Draconian cruel and unusual punishment expressing the misfit between violation and sanction, so penal injustice.

19. Beck (2000):112) comments that the ‘universal mission of the free market [is] America's belief in itself [with] side-effects of this far from modern, indeed rather archaic ideology of the free market’ or rather laissez-faire.

20. Bauman (2001):84) suggests that the ‘former civilization centre [is] ever more often in the role of not of pacifying or policing force, but of a supplier of the weapons needed to conduct tribal wars in the innumerable Afghanistans [etc.] of the globe. [This] secondary barbarization best sums up the overall impact of the present-day metropolises on the world periphery.’