Rearview Mirror

In the Shadow of Feudalism

What follows is not an effort to deploy a historical analogy, but a brief reflection on the politics of historiographical interpretation. In 1939 the eminent medieval historian Marc Bloch published his great two-volume analysis of the structure of medieval Western Europe: La Société Féodale. in the notable French interwar series L’Evolution de Humanité, edited by Henri Berr. An English translation, Feudal Society followed quickly a year later 1940 (trans. by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1940. (It’s now available as a Hein online or University of Chicago Press online edition.) Also in 1939 the Austro-German medievalist Otto Brunner published his own major work, Land und Herrschaft, to be translated more than fifty years later as Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992 and now Project Muse online). Brunner’s work followed in a tradition of Volksgeschichte, which unsurprisingly enjoyed a high reputation in German-speaking Europe in the 1930ss, 1940s, and into the 1950s. He was awarded the Verdun Prize in 1941, and the later wartime edition featured a preface that he proudly signed as engaged “in military service.” In 1944 Marc Bloch was arrested for involvement with a Resistance cell in Lyon and executed as a hostage on June 16, ten days after the Allies had landed in Normandy. Put perhaps tendentiously, the political bearers of the tradition Brunner identified with in 1944 executed the political bearers of the tradition Bloch identified with.

Brunner did not escape unscathed; given his enthusiasms, the Allied Occupation authorities suspended him from university teaching until the early 1950s. Nonetheless, the tradition he identified with came to prosper again and, it must be admitted, produced important historical work in the postwar decades. Its most significant contribution perhaps was what might be translated as the history of political concepts, represented by the eight-volume work Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Fundamental Historical Concepts), that Brunner, now in from the cold, co-edited with Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck beween 1972 and 1997 -- a collective effort that might be seen as providing a German fulfillment of Quentin Skinner’s program.

The editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe shared Koselleck’s notion that political language exerted a formative influence on political realities --Koselleck’s major stand-alone history explored the contradictions inherent between the Prussian effort at legal and bureaucratic reform between 1791 and 1848 and early economic and social development of a dynamic capitalist society. (Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution: Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Bewegung von 1891 bis 1848 [Stuttgart. Klett-Cotta, 1981].) But Brunner’s work focused on the formation of feudalism and then on the aristocratic values of the seventeenth century. Those discussing his work have differed on his implications -- some claiming that his work aligns him with Carl Schmitt on the centrality of conflict as the basis of politics, others writing that his stress on the organic community that feudal leadership required was incompatible with Schmitt. This seems a rather forced interpretation.

Brunner’s Land and Lordship presupposes enmity, in specific the “feud,” which is the underlying condition that drives the feudal leader to recruit and support a body of loyal warrior adherents. They in turn have a vital interest in perpetuating warfare. Feudal government arises from the highly personalized organization of private armies. The contemporary reader may well be led to think of the Mexican or Central American “cartels,” with their codes of violence and reprisal. Extend their power over two centuries and perhaps they might become the basis for a future aristocracy. But the Mexican cartels build their influcnce within territories that already have a legitimate state; for Brunner, the cartels become the state.

For Bloch, in contrast, feudalism provided the basis for jurisdictions and emerging states not through conflict but expanding structures of reciprocal loyalties. It is the exchange of obligations that characterizes feudalism. At its heart is the exchange of personal loyalty between lord and vassal, expressed by the vassal placing his hands between those of his lord and receiving a kiss (and as increasingly formalized, an office or fief). The structures could become cross-cutting and complex; elaborate networks of graded reciprocity that generated loyalties and usages, and certainly loyalties. Of course, this system grew within the dispersion of legal authority that we think after the collapse of Roman power; of course, too, it entailed long centuries of dispersed violence. Bloch begins his narrative with the specter of violent outsiders, the Norsemen, ravaging the communities along the French rivers. But for Bloch at least feudalism pointed to the development of exchange and reciprocity as a normative horizon.

It is worth pondering these underlying mentalities. We find Brunner’s analogues today among those who take pride in a warrior ethos, brandish the rhetoric of unlimited destruction, and envisage continued violence as the underlying way of the world. There is no preponderance of evidence to say they are wrong. Bloch did not survive the war; Brunner did. But Bloch’s principles survived and Brunner’s did not although no victory is ever guaranteed. Historians should not choose their narrative by political preferences. But neither must they write off alternative outcomes. When the historical material can allow multiple interpretations perhaps it is licit, even incumbent to emphasize the possibilities for hope.