“The tyrant feudalism must be declared once and for all deposed and its influence over students of the Middle Ages finally ended” (Elizabeth Brown, 1974)
Interesting. You get the same tedious taxonomical discussions around lots of other topics, fascism and the dark ages come to mind. Every such exercise will produce edge cases and even if the edge cases outnumber the interior ones, the labels must still contain important meaning otherwise they wouldn't stay in currency. For fascism you basically have just 2 bonafide interior cases, and most books on the topic I've read start with a long discursive over definitions that at least as a lay reader I'd rather they just skip. This obviously makes empirical work challenging and prone to p-hacking when you can monkey with the dummy variable by tweeking the definition. The irony is that empirical work should be more concerned with nailing down a functional definition than historiography, but that seems not to be the case. Anyhow. Nice post, bud.
That's the question I always have about these things. As he says above: "we argue that medieval Europe c. 1000-1300 did have a distinctive system of government and it makes sense to call that system of government “feudal”." That makes sense to me. A concept has a name and it is distinctive because it lets us describe something.
What would getting rid of the term get us? What would it let us understand more about the past? What would we learn or gain from saying "well it's a complex relationship of fiefs and vassals, NOT feudalism"? Okay? Where is the predictive power?
It’s strange to me what she says about Marc Bloch: in “Feudal Society” I recall little in there about legal forms but a great deal about how social bonds were made in the act of homage - the human ritual of submission and protection. But then it was a puritanical word even 40 years ago.
Reynolds is quite right when she says that the term "feudalism" can functionally act like a brake on thinking, as when it grants permission to skip over the sometimes crucial details in widely varied medieval social relations. I came away from Reynolds's book, though, thinking that "feudalism" was a fine enough term to use to mean something like "land-based order" of governmental power which is based in military service (either direct or via paid-for replacements). Simon Hornblower even uses it when discussing certain poleis in the classical Greek era, to distinguish them from highly monetized poleis like Athens (The Greek World 479-323 BC The Routledge History of the Ancient World).
It is certainly no worse than terms like "democracy" or "fascism," as used in the popular discourse, which are quite imprecise things (and as Brett Stephens's squatter has already pointed out in the comments here).
It would certainly be annoying, as an historian, to see people jump to wild conclusions about, say, "feudal" Transylvania in the 13th century based on notions about what "feudal" means that originate in Arthurian legend and have been filtered through modern day fantasy novels. At the same time, most people are just clueless about a lot of things—history just happens to be one of those subjects they still opine about, based on hazy memories from long-forgotten classes and snatches of movies they remember.
In 2025, it is also sometimes hard to remember what a live force Marx was still in the 60s and 70s. The Soviet Union and Mao's China still had pretenses to global hegemony. People still actually read Capital and thought about history through Marx's teleological framework.
"Feudalism" has been tainted by its position in a progressive, teleological framework (something that Marx and liberalism both share). Within such a framework, it is just a marker for a primitive form of social organization; that which came between the Ancients (i.e. Rome, Christianity) and Modernity. It symbolizes all that is pre-modern, all that is past and done and dead. In other words, its almost 1000 years of homogenized mush that has little to teach us beyond how bad it was in the past and how we are no longer like that, because we are modern. But we can dream about going back sometimes because knights had great heroes' journeys.
For me, the term still makes sense, in a variety of contexts, not just the medieval, as long as one keeps in mind that the concept is kind of nebulous, having snaking trails of smoke that lead very different places. When I hear someone declare that "feudalism" is meaningless, and never happened, and that I should start with Susan Reynolds to understand this, I get kind of annoyed. Are you just repeating historians' shibboleths? Are you objecting to *this* particular use of feudalism out of habit or because you think it obscures something important?
But then again, if I talk to a know-nothing, I sometimes feel quite tempted to just say, "you know that feudalism isn't real, right?"
Western Europe diverged because Emperors didn't bring in nomadic light cavalry and so there was an armoured heavy cavalry instead. This meant that the nomadic mercenaries didn't turn themselves into Sultans. For three or four generations these dynasties or clans had esprit de corps. Then polygamy, the intrigue of eunuchs, and fratricide turned not just Imperial Courts but every other Satrap's fortress into a den of intrigue. Good people turned to Sufism which was less into paideia of a conventional sort than the Catholic Church.
In West Europe, poorer Kings- like Henry the Navigator- looked to the sea. The debauched Sultans, fearing only their brothers or sons, were least bothered with increasing their revenue by raising productivity or establishing new trade routes. The great divergence was between the Christian culture of monogamy, the younger brother supporting the elder brother rather than trying to kill him, and the Church teaching useful stuff. After the Church, it was the turn of the Inns of Court and then even Parliament turned out not to be useless.
Ultimately it was the working people of Western Europe who showed a genuine work ethic and desire to raise 'general purpose productivity'. In the 'Orient', there were always particular patches of territory which were similar but then they too would succumb to the general malaise of mysticism/debauchery as global trade routes and markets reconfigured. Still, Mexican silver did create a degree of enterprise and affluence in India and China etc. But the rotten habitus of the ruling class would always kill off enterprise and such productivity gains as had been made.
Interesting. You get the same tedious taxonomical discussions around lots of other topics, fascism and the dark ages come to mind. Every such exercise will produce edge cases and even if the edge cases outnumber the interior ones, the labels must still contain important meaning otherwise they wouldn't stay in currency. For fascism you basically have just 2 bonafide interior cases, and most books on the topic I've read start with a long discursive over definitions that at least as a lay reader I'd rather they just skip. This obviously makes empirical work challenging and prone to p-hacking when you can monkey with the dummy variable by tweeking the definition. The irony is that empirical work should be more concerned with nailing down a functional definition than historiography, but that seems not to be the case. Anyhow. Nice post, bud.
That's the question I always have about these things. As he says above: "we argue that medieval Europe c. 1000-1300 did have a distinctive system of government and it makes sense to call that system of government “feudal”." That makes sense to me. A concept has a name and it is distinctive because it lets us describe something.
What would getting rid of the term get us? What would it let us understand more about the past? What would we learn or gain from saying "well it's a complex relationship of fiefs and vassals, NOT feudalism"? Okay? Where is the predictive power?
"Why Lords Went for Luxuries: A Riff on Adam Smith and David Hume, 500–1600"
(a 20 minute scholarly YouTube video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBrQJL70i58
It’s strange to me what she says about Marc Bloch: in “Feudal Society” I recall little in there about legal forms but a great deal about how social bonds were made in the act of homage - the human ritual of submission and protection. But then it was a puritanical word even 40 years ago.
Reynolds is quite right when she says that the term "feudalism" can functionally act like a brake on thinking, as when it grants permission to skip over the sometimes crucial details in widely varied medieval social relations. I came away from Reynolds's book, though, thinking that "feudalism" was a fine enough term to use to mean something like "land-based order" of governmental power which is based in military service (either direct or via paid-for replacements). Simon Hornblower even uses it when discussing certain poleis in the classical Greek era, to distinguish them from highly monetized poleis like Athens (The Greek World 479-323 BC The Routledge History of the Ancient World).
It is certainly no worse than terms like "democracy" or "fascism," as used in the popular discourse, which are quite imprecise things (and as Brett Stephens's squatter has already pointed out in the comments here).
It would certainly be annoying, as an historian, to see people jump to wild conclusions about, say, "feudal" Transylvania in the 13th century based on notions about what "feudal" means that originate in Arthurian legend and have been filtered through modern day fantasy novels. At the same time, most people are just clueless about a lot of things—history just happens to be one of those subjects they still opine about, based on hazy memories from long-forgotten classes and snatches of movies they remember.
In 2025, it is also sometimes hard to remember what a live force Marx was still in the 60s and 70s. The Soviet Union and Mao's China still had pretenses to global hegemony. People still actually read Capital and thought about history through Marx's teleological framework.
"Feudalism" has been tainted by its position in a progressive, teleological framework (something that Marx and liberalism both share). Within such a framework, it is just a marker for a primitive form of social organization; that which came between the Ancients (i.e. Rome, Christianity) and Modernity. It symbolizes all that is pre-modern, all that is past and done and dead. In other words, its almost 1000 years of homogenized mush that has little to teach us beyond how bad it was in the past and how we are no longer like that, because we are modern. But we can dream about going back sometimes because knights had great heroes' journeys.
For me, the term still makes sense, in a variety of contexts, not just the medieval, as long as one keeps in mind that the concept is kind of nebulous, having snaking trails of smoke that lead very different places. When I hear someone declare that "feudalism" is meaningless, and never happened, and that I should start with Susan Reynolds to understand this, I get kind of annoyed. Are you just repeating historians' shibboleths? Are you objecting to *this* particular use of feudalism out of habit or because you think it obscures something important?
But then again, if I talk to a know-nothing, I sometimes feel quite tempted to just say, "you know that feudalism isn't real, right?"
Western Europe diverged because Emperors didn't bring in nomadic light cavalry and so there was an armoured heavy cavalry instead. This meant that the nomadic mercenaries didn't turn themselves into Sultans. For three or four generations these dynasties or clans had esprit de corps. Then polygamy, the intrigue of eunuchs, and fratricide turned not just Imperial Courts but every other Satrap's fortress into a den of intrigue. Good people turned to Sufism which was less into paideia of a conventional sort than the Catholic Church.
In West Europe, poorer Kings- like Henry the Navigator- looked to the sea. The debauched Sultans, fearing only their brothers or sons, were least bothered with increasing their revenue by raising productivity or establishing new trade routes. The great divergence was between the Christian culture of monogamy, the younger brother supporting the elder brother rather than trying to kill him, and the Church teaching useful stuff. After the Church, it was the turn of the Inns of Court and then even Parliament turned out not to be useless.
Ultimately it was the working people of Western Europe who showed a genuine work ethic and desire to raise 'general purpose productivity'. In the 'Orient', there were always particular patches of territory which were similar but then they too would succumb to the general malaise of mysticism/debauchery as global trade routes and markets reconfigured. Still, Mexican silver did create a degree of enterprise and affluence in India and China etc. But the rotten habitus of the ruling class would always kill off enterprise and such productivity gains as had been made.