American Feudalism

Introduction

There had been much feudalism. If a person would make an exception of the Marxist-Leninist conception of feudalism as that set of production relations preceding capitalism, the core referent of the term is the predominant political structure of Western Europe during the Middle Ages, to such an extent that for non-specialists, feudal is practically synonymous with medieval. Historians also use the term to describe periods of Japanese and Chinese history (Thomas, pp. 36-156). Sociologists, political philosophers, and op-ed journalists routinely apply it to such a bewildering variety of relationships that the term has lost almost all explanatory power. In this ...