Feudal America

Feudal America PDF Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271075023
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Do Americans live in a liberal capitalist society, where evenhanded competition rules the day, or a society in which big money, private security, and personal relations determine key social outcomes? Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods argue that the answer to these questions cannot be found among the conventional models used to describe the nation. Offering a new analytical tool, the authors present a provocative explanation of the nature of contemporary society by comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies. Their feudal model emphasizes five elements: the weakness of the state and its inability to protect its territory, guarantee the security of its citizens, and enforce laws; conflicts and collusions between and within organizations that involve corruption and other forms of illegal or semilegal actions; the dominance of personal relations in political and economic life; the prevalence of an elitist ideology; and the use of private agents and organizations for the provision of safety and security. Feudal America urges readers to suspend their forward-thinking and futurist orientations, question linear notions of social and historical progression, and look for explanations of contemporary social problems in medieval European history.

Feudal America

Feudal America PDF Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271075023
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Get Book

Book Description
Do Americans live in a liberal capitalist society, where evenhanded competition rules the day, or a society in which big money, private security, and personal relations determine key social outcomes? Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods argue that the answer to these questions cannot be found among the conventional models used to describe the nation. Offering a new analytical tool, the authors present a provocative explanation of the nature of contemporary society by comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies. Their feudal model emphasizes five elements: the weakness of the state and its inability to protect its territory, guarantee the security of its citizens, and enforce laws; conflicts and collusions between and within organizations that involve corruption and other forms of illegal or semilegal actions; the dominance of personal relations in political and economic life; the prevalence of an elitist ideology; and the use of private agents and organizations for the provision of safety and security. Feudal America urges readers to suspend their forward-thinking and futurist orientations, question linear notions of social and historical progression, and look for explanations of contemporary social problems in medieval European history.

Feudal America

Feudal America PDF Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271075023
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Get Book

Book Description
Do Americans live in a liberal capitalist society, where evenhanded competition rules the day, or a society in which big money, private security, and personal relations determine key social outcomes? Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods argue that the answer to these questions cannot be found among the conventional models used to describe the nation. Offering a new analytical tool, the authors present a provocative explanation of the nature of contemporary society by comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies. Their feudal model emphasizes five elements: the weakness of the state and its inability to protect its territory, guarantee the security of its citizens, and enforce laws; conflicts and collusions between and within organizations that involve corruption and other forms of illegal or semilegal actions; the dominance of personal relations in political and economic life; the prevalence of an elitist ideology; and the use of private agents and organizations for the provision of safety and security. Feudal America urges readers to suspend their forward-thinking and futurist orientations, question linear notions of social and historical progression, and look for explanations of contemporary social problems in medieval European history.

Medieval America

Medieval America PDF Author: Robert Yusef Rabiee
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820358371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Medieval America analyzes literary, legal, and historical archives that help tell a new story about the formation of American culture. Against Cold War–era studies of U.S. culture that argued, following political scientist Louis Hartz’s “liberal consensus” model, that the United States emerged from the Revolutionary era free from Europe’s feudal institutions and uninterested in the production of its medieval culture productions, Robert Yusef Rabiee contends that feudal law and medieval literature were structural components of the American cultural imaginary in the nineteenth century. The racial, gender, and class formations that emerged in the first era of U.S. nation building were deeply indebted to medieval social, political, and religious thought—an observation that challenges the liberal consensus model and allows us to better grasp how American social roles developed. Far from casting off feudal tradition, the early United States folded feudalism into its emerging liberal order, creating a knotted system of values and practices that continue to structure the American experience. Sometimes, the feudal residuum contradicted the liberal values of the Unites States. Other times, the feudal residuum bolstered those values, revealing deep sympathies between so-called “modern” and “premodern” political thought. Medieval America thus aims to reorient our discussions about American cultural and political development in terms of the long arc of European history.

Medievalism in North America

Medievalism in North America PDF Author: Kathleen Verduin
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859914178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Studies on the influence of the middle ages, and in particular the Arthurian legends, on the culture of North America. Fifteen essays trace North America's enthusiastic engagement with the middle ages from the Revolution to Disney. There are eight studies of the American reception of Arthur: in art (Abbey, Rosenthal), literature (Canadian writers, John Ciardi), scholarship (R.S. Loomis), politics (JFK), and popular culture (Arthurian youth groups, Disneyland, the Excalibur Casino). Other topics include Tom Paine, Elbertus Hubbard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C.B. DeMille, popular treatments of Villon, the roots of the New Mexican cuento, and the rhetoric of the Gulf War. Contributors: ROGER WOOD, KYMBERLEY N. PINDER, ERICA E. HIRSHLER, ALAN LUPACK, CHARLOTTE OBERG, RAYMOND H. THOMPSON, STAN GALLOWAY, ROBIN BLAETZ, ROBERT D. PECKHAM, JEFF RIDER, KLAUS P. JANKOFSKY, MARY MORSE, PAMELA S. MORGAN, SUSAN ARONSTEIN, NANCY COINER, JONATHAN M. ELUKIN

Belated Feudalism

Belated Feudalism PDF Author: Karen Orren
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521422543
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Traditional theories of American political development depict the American state as a thoroughly liberal state from its very inception. In this book, first published in 1992, Karen Orren challenges that account by arguing that a remnant of ancient feudalism was, in fact, embedded in the American governmental system, in the form of the law of master and servant, and persisted until well into the twentieth century. The law of master and servant was, she reveals, incorporated in the US Constitution and administered from democratic politics. The fully legislative polity that defines the modern liberal state was achieved in America, Orren argues, only through the initiatives of the labor movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was finally ushered in as part of the processes of collective bargaining instituted by the New Deal. This book represents a fundamental reinterpretation of constitutional change in the United States and of the role of American organized labor, which is shown to be a creator of liberalism, rather than a spoiler of socialism.

Expansions

Expansions PDF Author: Axel Kristinsson
Publisher: ReykjavíkurAkademían
ISBN: 9979992212
Category : Civilization, Western
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description


America in Civilization

America in Civilization PDF Author: Ralph Turner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sociology
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description


The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered

The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered PDF Author: Mark Hulliung
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Eight prominent scholars consider whether Louis Hartz's interpretation of liberalism in his classic 1955 book should be repudiated or updated, and whether a study of America as a "liberal society" is still a rewarding undertaking.

American Dark Age

American Dark Age PDF Author: Keidrick Roy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069125236X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"American Dark Age contends that life in early and antebellum America for Black people resembles what Keidrick Roy calls "racial feudalism," a race-based system of social stratification in the U.S. that operates as an extension of medieval ideas and customs. Accordingly, this project does not read Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence against the backdrop of the European and American Enlightenment traditions, as virtually all modern scholars have done. Instead, it seeks to understand Jefferson as a product of the same feudal frameworks he claimed to supersede. Jefferson's attachment to feudalism is most evident in his approbation of two new aristocracies during the Age of Enlightenment: (1) the aristocracy of the mind, which he calls a "natural aristocracy," and (2) the aristocracy of the skin, what abolitionist Frederick Douglass later dubs, with emphasis, "skin-aristocracy." After tracing the lineaments of racial feudalism, Roy shows how four African Americans-James McCune Smith, William Wells Brown, Francis Harper, and Harriet Jacobs-present distinctive but interconnected visions for overcoming its effects in the mid-nineteenth century by upending the antecedent feudal architecture of American liberalism, a broad tradition whose unifying strands otherwise emphasize individual liberties, egalitarianism, moral universalism, and meliorism (the belief in the possibility for social and political progress). Ultimately, Roy argues, McCune Smith, Wells Brown, Harper, and Jacobs maintained a spirit of cautious optimism against the retrogressive forces of plantation slavery in the South and what McCune Smith calls "caste-slavery in the North." Their quest to destroy racial feudalism and reformulate American liberalism established the conditions for initiating new ways of being "American.""--

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism PDF Author: Joel Kotkin
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1641772859
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.