Feudal America

Author : Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271075023
Total Pages : 171 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Feudal America written by Vladimir Shlapentokh and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271075023
Total Pages : 171 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Feudal America written by Vladimir Shlapentokh and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Robert Yusef Rabiee
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820358371
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medieval America written by Robert Yusef Rabiee and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Karen Orren
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521422543
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.4X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Belated Feudalism written by Karen Orren and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Kathleen Verduin
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 9780859914178
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medievalism in North America written by Kathleen Verduin and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 1994 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Axel Kristinsson
Publisher : ReykjavíkurAkademían
ISBN 13 : 9979992212
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Expansions written by Axel Kristinsson and published by ReykjavíkurAkademían. This book was released on 2010 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Ralph Turner
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 444 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book America in Civilization written by Ralph Turner and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Keidrick Roy
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 069125236X
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Dark Age written by Keidrick Roy and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.""--

Author : Mark Hulliung
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered written by Mark Hulliung and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Joel Kotkin
Publisher : Encounter Books
ISBN 13 : 1641772859
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism written by Joel Kotkin and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.