a “capitalist feudalism,” where relations between employer and worker would regain the mutuality believed to have existed in pre-industrial times.16 Alternatively, a concept of “feudal socialism” would became known, in less provocative terms, as Tory Democracy.17
In Russia, where a liberal system never truly emerged, romantics like Tolstoy, as well as right-wing Slavophiles and social revolutionaries, rejected the liberal capitalism of the West and instead evoked a return to the mir, a form of community ownership left over from the days of serfdom. “Light and salvation will come from below,” wrote Dostoyevsky. The key to social reform would be the muzhik, the devout, ill-educated, impoverished peasant—not the sophisticated, Europeanized intellectuals and rising capitalists of the big cities.18
Many powerful right-wing movements of the early twentieth century—National Socialism, Fascism, and their imitators elsewhere—also expressed a nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The Italian poet and futurist Gabriele D’Annunzio epoused a “socialist romanticism” that helped lay the foundations of the Fascist corporate state.19 In France, the leaders of Action Française sought to bring about a “counter-Renaissance” and reimpose the hierarchical corporative structure of the ancien régime.20 In England, Fascist sympathizers like Oswald Mosley lamented the passing of “Merrie old England,” swept away by the competitive reality of ethnically mixed modern cities. Even today, some on the European far right see in the Middle Ages an affirmation of traditional Christian values, and find inspiration in the Crusader response to assaults from Islamic aggression.22
Contemporary Neo-medievalism
In ways that few could have expected three decades ago, a reaction against liberal ideals has been gaining force in many countries. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has found inspiration in its czarist past, a time of vigorous imperial expansion. Perhaps more remarkably, the Russian Orthodox Church, which was marginalized and often persecuted by the Soviet authorities, has gained moral authority under Vladimir Putin. The Russian regime has even harked back to the period of Mongol domination as a way of tying the state to Central and East Asia.23
China’s Communist leaders, while officially genuflecting to Maoist ideology, are finding something of value in folk religion and even Confucianism—so reviled by the founders of the People’s Republic. It turns out that old virtues like honesty, filial obedience, and respect for hierarchy have their uses in the modern age.24 Singapore’s longtime premier, Lee Kwan Yew, has urged the Chinese regime to adopt Confucianism as a defining feature of Asian capitalism.25
Even in the West, the values that drove the development of the modern world—such as confidence in progress and the benefits of economic growth for the general well-being—have come under challenge. In the 1960s, the environmental movement expressed a growing, and understandable, concern over the devastation of the natural world by the modern industrial economy. An ideal of low or even negative economic and demographic growth was popularized by E. F. Schumacher, with his “small is beautiful” philosophy, which would prove particularly consequential in California in the 1970s.26
As in the nineteenth-century reactions against industrialization, environmental concerns raise nostalgia for a bygone age. Like a medieval millenarian, Prince Charles of Britain asserts that we are running out of time to save the world. Charles has emerged as perhaps the premier “feudal critic of capitalism,” as one socialist publication put it. He views free-market capitalism as a scourge upon the earth, and promotes a new kind of noblesse oblige centered on concern for the natural world and for social harmony.27
Environmentalism has even led to a revival of the notion of poverty as a virtue. In the Middle Ages, poverty was regarded as the inescapable condition of life for most people, while monks adopted voluntary poverty as beneficial to spiritual growth; today, poverty sometimes appears to be considered good for the environment. Even the swelling slums of the developing world have been viewed as something to celebrate more than a cause for alarm, in large part because of the slum-dwellers’ low consumption of energy and other resources. Michael Kimmelman, an urbanist writing for the New York Times, called slums “not just a blight but a potential template for organic urbanism.”28
Many intellectuals, architects, and planners have promoted values reminiscent of the medieval past as being in better harmony with human nature.29 Some conservative thinkers, such as the late Roger Scruton, have been critical of the disorderly modern urban world and especially of the suburban culture created by liberal capitalism. Scruton favored a return to a geography of densely populated cities surrounded by a protected countryside, without the middle landscape of suburbs—the places where the property-owning middle classes overwhelmingly live today. Likewise, some leading architects, including Britain’s Richard Rogers, seek a return to something like the medieval city with its public market squares, which they consider a more livable alternative to the modern suburban sprawl.30
Such backward-looking ideas have been offered as remedies for the weaknesses and failings of modern society. But they might also provide a rationale to discourage upward mobility for the many and to concentrate property in fewer hands.
CHAPTER 3
The Rise and Decline of Liberal Capitalism
Liberal capitalism weakened and dissolved the feudal order, allowing a robust middle class to rise. More efficient agricultural practices brought growth into the static economies that had mostly benefited rentiers and inheritors, gradually lifting small property owners such as the English yeomanry. Commercial growth empowered the innovative, aggressive, risk-taking entrepreneurs. New technology, expanding trade, new ideas, and developing institutions transformed feudal society beyond recognition. Where class privilege remained in place over a shifting base, particularly in France, the Third Estate rose up in a violent assault on the last vestiges of feudalism.1
The entrepreneurs who chipped away at the feudal order did not generally come from the nobility, who in some cases were prohibited or socially discouraged from engaging in commerce.2 Aristocratic elites did sometimes give valuable funding and sponsorship to entrepreneurs, many of whom were from groups that had long been persecuted, including itinerant workers and dissenting Protestants, as well as Jews.3 These commercial risk takers played a major part in creating our modern world, as their technological improvements, opening of trade routes, and building of cities ushered in an era of unprecedented economic growth.4
Liberal capitalism laid the basis for Western economic hegemony. In the year 1000, the gross product of China and of India each easily exceeded that of all western Europe combined, and the same was true of the Islamic empire. China remained ahead of Europe in technology until around 1450, according to Joseph Needham. For example, Chinese junks were the world’s most advanced ships in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, spreading the Middle Kingdom’s influence throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. As late as the seventeenth century, India and China were not only more populous than Europe but enjoyed an industrial infrastructure that was equal, at the very least.5
The rise of liberal capitalism first in Europe and then in North America dramatically altered the picture. From 1500 to 1913, Europe’s share of global GDP rose from 17.8 to 33 percent, while China’s share dropped from 25 to 8 percent. By 1913, Western Europe’s per capita GDP was roughly seven times that of China or India, while the per capita GDP of the United States surpassed that of these large and venerable nations by a factor of nine.6 In the later twentieth century, the benefits of liberal capitalism spread to East Asia as well, fueling the success of Japan and South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
