Author: Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271037814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
"Uses a feudal model to analyze contemporary American society, comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies"--Provided by publisher.
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.
Author: Carl Stephenson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801490132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
Gives a clear and concise account of the feudal system, from its origin and growth to its decay. Also covers the principles of feudal tenure, chivalry, the military life of the nobility, and the workings of the feudal government.
Author: Andre Gunder Frank
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0853450935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Originally published: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
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.
Author: Joel Kotkin
Publisher: All Points Books
ISBN: 9781250184481
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Author: Sidney Painter
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421433141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
Originally published in 1943. Sidney Painter explores the Angevin and Plantagenet baronage by surveying the methods that barons used to increase their prestige. Studies in the History of the English Feudal Barony challenges the traditional view of the Hundred Years' War as pivotal to the transition from twelfth-century lords and vassals to the nobility of the fifteenth century; from Painter's perspective, the feudal structure of the military had dissipated by the thirteenth century.
Author: Louis Hartz
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547971095
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The pioneering political scientist presents his “fragment theory” of class, culture and ideology in post-colonial societies around the world. In his groundbreaking work, The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz demonstrated that beneath America’s history of political conflict was an enduring consensus around Lockean liberal principles. In The Founding of New Societies, Hartz continues his examination of ideology and national identity with a study of five societies established by European migration and colonization. The diverse political and cultural traditions of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia share little in common. Yet, as Hartz demonstrates, they each represent a cultural fragment of the European countries from which they sprang. Each new society retains the ideology that had been dominant at home at the time of their founding. Extraordinarily influential when it was first published in 1964, The Founding of New Societies is a classic work of political science. Hartz’s fragment theory continues to offer powerful insight into today’s political landscape.
Author: Karen Orren
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521422543
Category : History
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.
Author: Philip D. Curtin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521629430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Over a period of several centuries, Europeans developed an intricate system of plantation agriculture overseas that was quite different from the agricultural system used at home. Though the plantation complex centered on the American tropics, its influence was much wider. Much more than an economic order for the Americas, the plantation complex had an important place in world history. These essays concentrate on the intercontinental impact.
