Enjoy your Servitude!

We are over a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, and feudalism has returned. In the stupor and shock of the hangover weeks after the Brexit vote in June 2016, segments of the digital vox populi howled with glee at the rejection of the neo-feudal European Union. It was the first peasants’ revolt since 1381, a Daily Telegraph writer tweeted; giddy bloggers lauded the fall of the neo-feudal bankers; an Italian financial journalist riled up his audience on television by excitedly denouncing the neo-feudal authority and control of the European Union. For some, the Brexit vote broke the chains of the descendant of an economic, social, and political system whose name is used synonymously with injustice, inequality, and unfairness: feudalism.

Neo-feudalism, or new feudalism—the terms are often used interchangeably to denote the return of feudalist society—appropriates the Middle Ages in an alternate form of dark medievalism. Thus far, this book has to a large degree explored the right's deployments of the medieval, but neo-feudalism is a primarily (though not exclusively) leftist model of the premodern past. If the far right and traditionalist conservatism laud a static idealized medieval, writers positing a global neo-feudalism fear a static anxiety-inducing medieval. Neo-feudalism as well as new medievalism, addressed later in this chapter, engage in dark medievalism by consistently and broadly painting the medieval as politically and socially primitive. As a term that emerged only in the nineteenth century to describe all of medieval European society, feudalism is a vexing and highly problematic concept used as shorthand for cataloguing and simplifying historical complexity. Neo-feudalism, then, is built upon very unstable foundations. The medieval is located as the site of injustice, inequality, and inhumanity, constantly threatening to invade and replace modern values. But the very concept of feudalism is itself a postmedieval idea, constructed to represent life before individual liberty and social justice.

Utilized to represent deep, inherent fractures in the framework of corporate capitalism, neo-feudalism is a free-ranging term. It is regularly dropped in mainstream media articles with titles such as “Slouching Towards Neofeudalism” and “America: Home of the Bewildered Serf and Land of the Feudal Lords,” both published at the Huffington Post.