Slaves without Masters: The Feudal Imagination and the Critique of Impersonal Domination

Abstract

A signal ambition of the liberal political project is the abolition of the arbitrary, capricious rule of man, and the establishment in its place of the impartial, rational rule of law. This dissertation is a study of a complaint that emerges in response to the triumph of this liberal vision of politics. Constitutional government and the market economy do away with the juridical inequality and personal hierarchy associated with medieval feudalism. Instead of delivering emancipation, however, this triumph of liberalism is accused of establishing new forms of depersonalized domination. No longer at the mercy of arbitrary lords or tyrants, modern subjects are said to be oppressed or constrained by systems and structures beyond the will of any recognizable rulers or elites. Liberal subjects, the argument goes, have become slaves without masters.

To better understand the origins and nature of this critique, my dissertation turns to a surprising historical tradition: the reinterpretation of medieval feudalism in the hands of nineteenth-century critics of liberal political economy. Feudalism constituted a perfect foil for the new constitutional state and market system. Where liberal societies separate the private from the public, feudalism entailed a unity of political and economic authority. The Middle Ages—long taken by republican and liberal thinkers to be synonymous with the tyrannical rule of man—came to serve as a means of diagnosing the anarchic and impersonal nature of liberal societies. I document how widespread this reinterpretation of feudalism was in the nineteenth century among conservative reactionaries, liberal romantics, and radical socialists. For those attempting to diagnose the new servitude, appeals to feudalism served as a common vessel for wildly divergent moral, economic, and political programs.

Chapter one of this dissertation provides an overview of the many uses to which feudal nostalgia was put in the decades following the French Revolution. I trace how English and continental romantics, conservatives, and radicals invoked idealized accounts of feudalism to critique the cold, atomistic, and spiritless nature of modern politics. Chapter two takes up Thomas Carlyle’s critique of the anarchic “age of mechanism” and his turn to the “most perfect feudal ages” as an inspiration for a new form of mastery. Chapter three turns to the young Marx and his enigmatic description of medieval feudalism as the “democracy of unfreedom.” Attending to Marx’s account of the integrated spirit of the Middle Ages helps to clarify what he terms “human emancipation” and “true democracy.” Chapter four takes up Alexis de Tocqueville’s contrast between the personal, master-servant relations characteristic of aristocratic feudalism and the impersonal, tutelary servitude he fears will arise in democracies. Chapter five offers a critical, conceptual study of the three divergent programs that flow from Carlyle, Marx, and Tocqueville’s superficially similar interpretations of medieval feudalism. Chapter six connects this intellectual history with a debate in contemporary political theory concerning the nature of “depoliticization.” By critically evaluating rival understandings of that term, I argue that the most philosophically potent meaning of depoliticization is an extension of the slaves-without-masters critique. A liberal demand to minimize the role of arbitrary will and rule and to elevate institutionalized forms of impartial reason leads to an objectionable offloading of responsibility to the market economy and to non-political sites of governance like the bureaucracy and judiciary.