Hardwick and Lister: Vikings and the Vikings

Paul Hardwick and Kate Lister, eds., Vikings and the Vikings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019.

Reviewed by: Simon Trafford (simon.trafford@sas.ac.uk)

The History Channel’s Vikings TV series is a remarkable phenomenon. Although it has never had quite the budget, viewing figures or fame enjoyed by Game of Thrones, it has been a notable critical and commercial success worldwide, not only encouraging distinctly similar sprawling medieval epics (the BBC’s The Last Kingdom) but even spawning a successful parody (Norsemen, created by the Norwegian television company NRK). Nevertheless, Vikings stands as merely the latest in a long and extremely colourful tradition of cinematic and televisual evocations of the vikings (a tradition recently explored in Kevin Harty’s splendid edited volume The Vikings on Film). Where it differs from all its predecessors, though, is in the sheer scale of its engagement with its subject: when its sixth and final season concludes later this year, we shall have seen 89 episodes – nearly 70 hours – of the adventures of Ragnar Lothbrok, his heirs and associates. There has never been such a whole-hearted commitment to re-creating the world of early medieval Scandinavia on screen, lending a depth and scope to its vision that, whether or not we agree with all the decisions taken by the show’s creator, David Hirst, can only be commended. Some of the ideas, sources and inspirations that went into the making of the immersive world of Vikings have previously been discussed in brief by the programme’s historical adviser, Justin Pollard, in a glossy popular publication produced by the History Channel, but such a large-scale imaginative engagement with the past merits full, serious and critical scholarly attention.

In this book, edited by Paul Hardwick and Kate Lister, Vikings receives the friendly but rigorous hearing it deserves. After a foreword by Pollard, and the editors’ introduction, this collection comprises eleven chapters, bringing together historians, archaeologists, and specialists in cultural studies and medieval reception: a formidable array of scholarship is brought to bear, although the collection might have been strengthened still further with a contribution by a saga specialist. Nevertheless, with such a disciplinary spread the book incorporates a very satisfying diversity of perspectives and ranges widely across the ample material provided for consideration by the series.

The first three chapters explore various aspects of the source materials for the story of the (semi-) historical Ragnar Loðbrók, their transmission and their re-imagining in the hands of the series creators. Before Vikings, it is reasonable to say that Ragnar was not an especially prominent figure in the non-specialist imagination, but this has not always been the case: the opening chapter, by Stephen Basdeo, explores the birth of modern enthusiasm for the romantic Northern past in Georgian Britain, demonstrating the currency of English translations of the thirteenth-century Latin poem The Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok in the founding works of this tradition. As a figure in both British and broader northern European history, Ragnar served a useful purpose for scholars attempting to propound an English identity with a significant Scandinavian component, and he enjoyed – if only temporarily – a wider familiarity with the reading public.

The next chapter, by Donna Heddle, goes back to the medieval sources, not just for Ragnar but for the vikings more widely, illustrating the free and, Heddle believes, successful play made with them by the creators of the series in a tripartite conversation between the evidence of saga and other medieval sources, strongly-entrenched pre-existing popular conceptions of vikings, and the messages that the series writers were attempting to convey. This analysis of the relationship between historical ‘truth’ and the dramatic vision conjured by Vikings continues in a fascinating chapter, ‘Fantasizing history’, by Eleanor Chadwick, which unpacks ideas of ‘authenticity’ and ‘anachronism’. Chadwick takes the reader through an examination of the tensions in producing an exciting drama that must to some extent deliver on gory audience expectations fostered by two centuries of romanticised stirring viking narratives, while still respecting the sources on which – correctly or incorrectly – its claims to realism are supposed to depend. These problems come into particular focus as the show engages in the difficult trick of providing the violent, rapacious, barbaric vikings of popular legend at the same time as allowing for more ‘enlightened’ heroic figures such as Ragnar, with whom a modern audience can identify. Considering such themes in the series as its depiction of the blood-eagle ritual (the historical truth of which has been debated at length), Chadwick shows how its makers have emphasized the telling of meaningful stories over accuracy to an alleged but specious ‘original’, and in so doing have echoed what the saga-writers themselves did, an authenticity of form rather than of content.

The central section of the book is dedicated to four chapters that consider different aspects of the depiction of gender in the series. Katherine Lewis examines masculinity, once again placing the series in dialogue with the sagas and comparing how male identities are constructed and performed in each. Acts of raiding and fighting are crucial in both cases, although Lewis notes how the series repeatedly shows that the performative nature of maleness among the vikings both engenders anxiety in the old or incapacitated and also offers opportunities for its female characters – and especially Ragnar’s first wife Lagertha – to occupy stereotypically male positions. In so doing, this subverts traditional popular images of the vikings as, in Lewis’s words, the ‘poster boys of toxic masculinity’. In the next chapter, Shane McLeod tackles the show’s ‘shield-maidens’ directly, noting their popularity: Lagertha, in particular, is one of the show’s most celebrated characters and an online favourite, the heroine of any number of memes and GIFs. McLeod’s question is what evidence, if any, there might be for warrior women in the historical and archaeological record. This became, of course, a question of considerable contention and debate in 2017, when a group of scholars re-interpreted one of the burials accompanied by weapons at the Viking age site of Birka in Sweden as that of a high-status female warrior. The identification remains contested, and Lagertha fans will perhaps be disappointed that McLeod, whilst allowing that female viking warriors remain ‘a tantalising possibility’, is clearly swayed by the large-scale absence of any mention in the written record of their appearance on battlefields.

For all that fighting and battle are central to the action in Vikings, one of the strengths of creative engagement with the early medieval world on this scale is the attention that has been paid to questions that, while manifestly important in themselves, have received scarcely any notice in most other televisual and cinematic encounters with the vikings. In her chapter, Lillian Céspedes González brings a welcome turning-aside from violence to explore the portrayal of motherhood in Vikings. Mothering in Viking-age Scandinavia is neither especially well evidenced nor well understood, but, as Céspedes González shows, it is nevertheless a recurring and significant theme in the show, as the writers and producers take advantage of their imagined medieval to think through ideas that are relevant to contemporary society, not least the challenges facing the harassed and over-stretched working mother.

The next chapter, written jointly by the editors, Kate Lister and Paul Hardwick, tackles sexual violence, a subject which – perhaps unsurprisingly – also appears in a number of the other contributions. Rape has regularly been portrayed among the staple behaviours of hypermasculine vikings in pop culture, although the poverty and character of the medieval records render sexual violence in the Viking age almost entirely opaque and outside our knowledge. It is notable that, of all the book’s chapters, this is the one that most brings forward Vikings not just as a response to the early medieval past, but also as an intertextual dialogue with all the other representations of the vikings as an artefact of popular culture in print, on screen and online. The handling of sexual violence in the series is certainly one of the most pointed and divisive test-cases of the Vikings production team’s delicate efforts at balancing pre-existing expectations of viking behaviour with contemporary sensibilities; in this case the rejection of rape culture. While Lister and Hardwick find plenty to praise in the show’s nuanced approach to gender, they note that it remains firmly enmeshed ‘in a popular cultural milieu in which sexualized violence and coercive sex are a given norm’.

Crucial to creating the convincing character of Vikings are the sets, landscapes and material culture that immerse the viewer in a world that seems lived-in and has depth. It is thus entirely appropriate to see three contributions devoted to the characters’ interactions with their physical environment. Howard Williams and Alison Klevnäs explore relationships between the living and the dead: Vikings, they note, is strangely lacking in the funerary monuments that were and are a characteristic feature of the landscape of Scandinavia. Instead the dead become a presence through the handling and display of bones, be it the animal and human charnel displayed in and around dwellings or the skull of Jarl Borg’s long-dead first wife, carried and consulted by the Jarl in a number of episodes, including, crucially, just before his blood-eagling at the hands of Ragnar. The chapter on ‘Nature and supernature’, by Aleks Pluskowski, continues the investigation of the richly associative imaginative world in which the action of Vikings is situated but turns the focus towards human relations with animals, the natural environment and the wilderness. This reveals the show’s rather simplistic dichotomy of the civilized/Christian on the one hand and the barbarian/pagan on the other playing out through an environmental metaphor. The viking characters in the series, Pluskowski suggests, are positioned (following a familiar cinematic trope) as more instinctively in tune with the natural world by virtue of their barbarousness; Anglo-Saxons, Franks and other ‘civilised’ characters are, by contrast, distanced physically, emotionally and spiritually from the nonhuman environment. The last of the archaeologically-focused chapters sees Alex Sanmark and Howard Williams (in his second contribution to the collection) discussing the treatment of judicial practice in Vikings, concentrating in particular on the ceremonial spaces in which such business is transacted, the thing-sites. Although the Viking-age thing (ON: þing) has long been celebrated as a supposed proto-democratic assembly, their sites and operations have only rarely been represented in previous dramatisations of the early medieval Scandinavian world. In Vikings they are thoughtfully handled, building upon what is known historically and archaeologically but also applying intelligent conjecture to create a convincing visual spectacle. Sanmark and Williams particularly applaud the fact that in repeated presentations of assemblies across the course of its successive seasons, the show depicts them not as static and given but as changing and adaptive performances that reflect the growth of centralised power and aspiration. As the profits from raiding roll in it is evident that for Ragnar and his successors, þings can only get better.

The book concludes on a sombre, but extremely important note, with Richard Ford Burley’s contribution on the appropriation of ‘viking’ identities by white nationalists (specifically in North America, although it is obviously a broader problem). Ford Burley asks what the series can do to avoid complicity, making a number of suggestions for active rejection of co-option by right-wing extremists.

All-in-all, this is a rounded, well-conceived and very welcome volume that will not only enhance enjoyment and understanding of Vikings itself, but in its wide-ranging exploration of issues of portrayal and reception of violent and problematic pasts also holds a great deal of invaluable insight for studies of medievalism more generally. Given the attention lavished on the look of the series, it is perhaps a shame that there are no photographs or stills included in Vikings and the Vikings; presumably there were licensing complications. However, this is a relatively minor issue that does little to detract from this significant and thoroughly enjoyable addition to study of the televisual consumption of the Middle Ages.

Simon Trafford

Institute of Historical Research

Carpegna Falconieri: The Militant Middle Ages

Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, The Militant Middle Ages: Contemporary Politics between New Barbarians and Modern Crusaders, trans. Andrew M. Hiltzik. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 281pp.

Reviewed by Matthias D. Berger (matthias.berger@ens.unibe.ch)

The Middle Ages, Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri argues in his 2011 book newly translated into English, hold an ambiguous yet privileged position in our time: “There is, perhaps, no other historical epoch that provides our contemporary world with so much nourishment for our own imaginations” (1). Carpegna Falconieri’s wide-ranging book proceeds from the observation that the medieval has the unique ability to cater to statements of identity at all levels of society, from the local to the national to the mega-identity of “Western culture” (6). The book focuses on the politics of these (in a wider sense) “identitarian Middle Ages” (74). Highlighting the strong connection between medievalism and public action and hence the potential for “militancy” which medievalism harbours, it sets out to offer a panorama of Western, mainly European, medievalism in recent decades.

This English translation by Andrew M. Hiltzik is the latest instalment in Brill’s “National Cultivation of Culture” series. Edited by Joep Leerssen, the series covers (mainly but not exclusively) the many forms of cultural nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century, for example in language politics, philology, folklore studies, historical fiction, and so forth. The English edition of Carpegna Falconieri’s book follows earlier Spanish and French editions (both from 2015), which lightly updated the contents of the original. The context of this latest translation is, as Carpegna Falconieri acknowledges in a preface, one of “a new awareness of the fundamental importance of medievalism in the cultural and political life in the West.” He sensibly refrains from updating the chronology even further for this edition but adds an epilogue that refers to more recent events. The book also includes some additional references to seminal research from the intervening years in the footnotes.

The “contemporary” in the title is conceived broadly: in a spirit of aetiology, the book frequently reaches back into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the late 1960s – the time when, Carpegna Falconieri argues, the Middle Ages returned to prominence after a period of relative abeyance (10). The “politics” in the title, too, is conceived more broadly than in most comparable studies on “political medievalism.” Carpegna Falconieri discusses not only such obvious instances of political medievalism as those that sprang up in the course of the so-called War on Terror (36) or the medievalism-fuelled irredentist movements of several “Celtic” countries (148-152) but also things like the rise of medievalist fantasy fiction in the sixties (71) and the “medieval” festivals that currently litter the European – and especially, as I have learned from this book, the Italian – landscape (78). While the political dimension is never entirely absent, of course, this wide net means the book also is a panorama of contemporary medievalism more broadly, with its greater chronological range ensuring it contributes some suggestive partial answers to the question of how and why the Middle Ages are made to matter to Western societies as much as they do in the twenty-first century.

There are twelve chapters plus a prologue, an introduction and an epilogue. The chapters are organised around a series of “macro-interpretations of the idea of the Middle Ages” (10). Not all of these are equally clear-cut, and some come with significant thematic overlap (nationalism being, unsurprisingly, a prominently shared theme). In the first two chapters, the Middle Ages figure as the predominantly negative Other to modernity. This is mostly familiar ground, where discourses of the “Neo-Medieval West” raise the spectre of catastrophe and a post-national dissolution of world order (chapter 1), and Huntingtonesque clash-of-civilizations ideology engenders the notion of a Western civilization besieged by barbarians on the one hand and the Islamists’ anti-Western propaganda against new crusaders on the other (chapter 2).

The subsequent chapters are devoted to appropriations of the Middle Ages that rely more strongly on a sense of cultural kinship. The third chapter is concerned with the fantastical strain in medievalism, recounting the emergence of medievalism as an “overarching cultural framework” in the nineteenth century and its lasting impact on both the emergent popular and children’s literature (53) and nationalist ideology (59). This otherwise excellent chapter is somewhat complicated by the strict distinction Carpegna Falconieri makes between medievalism and medieval studies: “Medievalism is a cultural, social, and political phenomenon that responds to a different set of needs and is structured in a completely different manner from the academic study of the Middle Ages” (64). I believe this distinction is ultimately untenable – compare this, for instance, with Leslie Workman’s famously broad definition of medievalism as “the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages” (Preface to Medievalism in Europe II 1). A rigid distinction runs the risk of concealing the academy’s own ideological biases and implication in politics (both amply represented in history) and fails to account for the ease with which representations of the Middle Ages can transition, and often have transitioned, from medieval studies to (more obvious forms of) medievalism, as David Matthews reminded us some years ago (“Chaucer’s American Accent” 760).

In the fourth chapter, Carpegna Falconieri sets up the chapters that follow by turning fully to the ways in which medievalism can be made to underpin collective – and political – identities. He offers a very useful chronology of political medievalism since the late 1960s, when the Middle Ages began to “color movements across the political spectrum, often youth movements, which […] attacked the system, from left and right, from anarchy and libertarianism” (73). The fifth chapter comments astutely on the current vogue for medievalist practices aimed at strengthening civic identity, most notably in the form of festivals and holidays. According to Carpegna Falconieri, this burgeoning comes on the back of a sense of social tradition lost stemming from the 1970s. It also comes with some marked ironies: strongly entangled in economic-touristic motives as they are, medievalist rebuttals of consumerist homogeneity themselves offer a homogenised Middle Ages that “is modular, repetitive, exportable, and precisely for this reason […] cherished by those who come to visit” (87).

Chapter six discusses the “Anarchist and Leftist Middle Ages” and is perhaps the most original, and fascinating, in the book. Noting the current preponderance of right-wing appropriations of the Middle Ages, Carpegna Falconieri shows how left-leaning intellectuals and artists turned to the Middle Ages for inspiration from the mid-1960s to the late 70s (89). Among the examples he cites are Italian greats such as Fabrizio De André, Dario Fo, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the last of whom in particular viewed the turn to the deep past not as reactionary but revolutionary (99). Carpegna Falconieri is surely right to observe that “[t]oday this mode of representing the Middle Ages is hard to find” (102), but progressive medievalism is an area of research that has lately been picking up steam, bringing to light medievalisms that buck this trend – and this chapter will be a valuable resource for that kind of research. Carpegna Falconieri deals with the more familiar medievalism of right-wing “tradition” in the subsequent chapter, including such examples as that of the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik and his indebtedness to SS medievalisms and Templarism (117ff.). However, Carpegna Falconieri rightly insists that a broader sense of tradition – really, “historicised” myths that stand outside of historical time (124) – equally underlies less extreme forms of right-wing thought. This is the oft-noted Middle Ages of reaction and nostalgia for a putative golden age that is meant to make up for a disappointing present.

The eighth and ninth chapters form a pair, discussing Nordic and Celtic themes respectively. Carpegna Falconieri offers an informative summary of the way the Nordic world has been involved in totalising theories of ethnogenesis and racist thought. He traces the ongoing “Nordic revival” to the 1980s (136) and points out the spectrum of thought now associated with it, from self-declared neo-Nazism to a largely apolitical neo-paganism (139). Celticism, he argues, contributes more strongly to the “contemporary political imaginary of the Middle Ages” (142), which it is able to do not least thanks to its bagginess as a concept: “In Celticism we find everything we need: tradition, mystery, mysticism, fairy tales, magic, the Grail” (145). This allows the Celtic Middle Ages to both provide much of the lexicon of medievalisms aimed at children (145f.) and inspire political agitation, as in the case of the Italian Lega del Nord’s irredentism (152).

The tenth chapter addresses the “Catholic Middle Ages” and comments on such phenomena as the nationalist politics behind post-1989 canonisations of medieval saints in Eastern European countries (168f.). Carpegna Falconieri points out the unlikely links between Catholic traditionalism and US Protestant neo-conservatism (163): this “syncretism between generally unrelated political traditions” (164) is, again, due to ideas of a “clash of civilisations” (162) between the West and the rest. In the eleventh chapter, Carpegna Falconieri tackles head-on what I believe is one of the most important developments in medievalism since the 1990s: the resurgence of the Middle Ages of nations. I do not entirely agree with his view that such national medievalism is the near-exclusive province of Eastern European countries and that in Western Europe the Middle Ages “is now a metaphor for the non-state” (178) – the cases of the UK and Switzerland, with which I am familiar, clearly resist this trend. Nonetheless, the chapter gives a convincing account of the scale of this resurgence and a compelling critique of its symbiotic relationship with both ideas of supposed “ethno-cultural continuities” (184) and a separatist and isolationist politics. The final chapter deals with the reverse process to this nationalisation: medievalism produced to unite the people of Europe. Talk of the shared “roots of Europe” (194) is not currently matched, the author wryly notes, by a very lush forest. Nevertheless, the transnational figure of Charlemagne and the notion of a “Christian Europe” in particular have inspired pro-Union attempts at presenting Europe as united historically. Carpegna Falconieri concludes by countering the imagery of European roots with the more hopeful metaphor of European roads. He evokes a medieval past of “sharing, exchange, and openness,” with “no need to invent elements of cohesion: when they [the roads] were there, they were there” (213f.).

As can probably be deduced from this outline alone, the book’s scope is broad and its range nothing if not ambitious. It comes together in a coherent whole thanks to Carpegna Falconieri’s impressive command of a wealth of primary material in several European languages. The Militant Middle Ages is a compelling piece of synthesis and original scholarship. It takes a welcome continental (southern) European perspective, which makes it a valuable complement and partial corrective to the international Anglophone conversation about medievalism studies. And while Carpegna Falconieri’s epilogue makes it clear that he himself sees the uses of medievalism in separatist politics as having waned in the time since the original publication (221), I am not so sure. He mentions the example of Brexit, in the context of which he saw hardly any enthusiastic use of medievalism (222) – an impression I do not quite share. Leading Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage, and particularly Eurosceptic ideologue-in-chief Daniel Hannan repeatedly invoked the English Middle Ages, variously highlighting constitutional heritage in a kind of Neo-Whiggism, denouncing a new Norman Yoke, and warning of post-Brexit economic “vassalage” to the EU. In any event, the book as a whole certainly maintains its relevance in light of the ongoing wealth of medievalisms that aim to make and remake collective identities. Credit is due to the author, then, for the way his work in this fast-moving field does not feel outdated nearly a decade after its original publication.

Finally, a note on presentation: Hiltzik’s translation is for the most part perfectly serviceable, but I wonder if the book might not have benefited from greater assimilation to current stylistic practice in English-language medieval studies. As it is, the translation occasionally comes across as overly literal and stilted in ways the Italian original does not. The translation of the generic “uomini” as “men” is a particularly unfortunate decision, and the impersonal style and use of the academic “we” also translates badly into English, creating an impression of bombast where there is none in the Italian. There were some misses by the copy-editing department, too, especially in the form of typos (e.g. “Freidrich Engels,” 58; “It does, however, Dean [sic!] […] that…,” 119f.) and copy-paste errors (e.g. “to which we alluded to,” 165; “this is the beautiful thing thing”, 215). These are unforced formal errors, but they do not derogate from what is an informative, authoritative book about the modern Middle Ages of identity, which of course concerns virtually all scholars of medievalism in one way or other.

Matthias D. Berger

University of Bern

Kotkin, Neo-Feudalism

Joel Kotkin. The Coming of Neo-Feudalism:  A Warning to the Global Middle Class. New York: Encounter Books, 2020. 274 pp.

David A. Kopp (davekopp@dakopp.com)

In today’s parlance, Feudal is the pejorative term of choice when deprecating a modern economic or political situation by analogizing it with an oppressive and stratified society of the medieval past.   In his recent book, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, Joel Kotkin adopts the term to describe what he sees as a disturbing concentration of wealth in the high-tech economy that has created a modern serfdom “with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population.”   If left unchecked, argues Kotkin, this new feudalism threatens Democracy and Liberal Capitalism.   

Kotkin defines medieval feudal structure using Marc Bloch as his guide: “a strongly hierarchical ordering of society, a web of personal obligations tying subordinates to superiors, the persistence of closed classes or ‘castes,’ and a permanent serflike status for the vast majority of the population.”   Kotkin’s new feudalism looks different (“no knights in shining armor, or vassals doing homage to their lords”) but has produced the same economic result.   Today’s nobility are the tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft which control more and more of the job opportunities in the modern technology and “data landscape” much as the nobility of the medieval past controlled the agricultural means and land of the enfeoffed peasant laborers.  Collectively, these tech companies represent our modern First Estate, and like their medieval parallels, they work to control cultural messaging to their advantage through their manipulation of media content.   In this effort, they are aided by the new Second Estate – the modern clerical class.   

Kotkin borrows from S. T. Coleridge for an updated term for the medieval clergy – in modern times they are the “clerisy” of intellectuals.   Their numbers include university professors, scientists, public intellectuals, and heads of charitable foundations.   Kotkin calls them the “cognitive elite” and “legitimizers” of the agenda of the new nobility.   Like their medieval counterparts, they issue the “correct” worldview and can “excommunicate” those who hold a heterodox opinion.   New faiths replace old.  In the Middle Ages, Christianity was the accepted ethos with its emphasis on the afterlife and the Last Judgment warning of the grave consequences for those who sinned.  Now there is the “green faith” predicting the impending doom of the planet caused by human activity.  It is literally a new apocalypse.   Like St. Norbert in the twelfth century who predicted the end of the world in his lifetime, “the environmental movement – whether religious, scientific, or leftist—routinely traces a direct line from human materialism to looming catastrophe.”   Kotkin believes that the burden of this new green orthodoxy to be borne principally by the working and middle classes.   Much like the wealthy prince bishops of the Middle Ages who lived in luxury while preaching austerity, the modern clerisy “urge everyone else to cut back on consumption, while the ‘green rich’ buy a modern version of indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices.   This allows them to save the planet in style.”

The clerical elite and the nobility shared power in the medieval feudal era, just as the nexus between the modern clerisy and the tech oligarchy share the power in today’s Neo-Feudalism.   They attend the same schools.   “On the whole, they share a common worldview and are allies on most issues.”  Their joint mission as the First and Second Estates is to secure the submission of the Third Estate – the middle and working classes.   This they do by causing an erosion in the faith of Liberal Capitalism or Liberal Democracy.  “They seek to replace the bourgeois values of self-determination, family, community, and nation with ‘progressive’ ideas about globalism, environmental sustainability, redefined gender-roles and the authority of experts.”   An ensuing pessimism within the Third Estate is the result of this effort, and, argues Kotkin, it can be found in advanced economies worldwide.

According to Kotkin, wealth stratification over the last ten years has accelerated exponentially in nearly all the developed economies of the world – U.S., Europe, Japan, China, and India.   It is undoing the centuries of gains made by the middle class (who Kotkin calls the new Yeomanry) when they emerged as the merchant and artisan guilds “to challenge the aristocracy and even the clergy to drive democratic reform.”  Homeownership rates are down among younger generations across the globe, particularly in high population densities, where more and more middle-class and working-class residents now live in tiny rental spaces, in some cases created for them by the tech companies who want to keep their employees on campus as the medieval peasants were kept on the demesne of their overlords.  The “green faith” helps cultivate this “rental generation” by preaching against the “material trap of suburban living and work that ensnared their parents.”  Loss of data ownership is another sign of the encroaching new feudalism.  By handing over large amounts of personal information to the big tech firms in exchange for free services, the Yeomanry are becoming “digital serfs” living and working in a world of data without any assets of their own.   

The working class (the “New Serfs”) is also suffering in Kotkin’s Neo-Feudal dystopic vision. The original high-tech pioneers – Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and IBM – who were praised for the treatment of their lower-level workers have been replaced by a newer generation of feudal tech giants like Amazon which have turned the proletariat  into the “precariat” with limited control over their working hours, forcing them to live on barely subsistence wages.   Kotkin sees in the working class a simmering revolt as the bulwarks of their life are eroded by the new left of the clerisy who care more about immigrations, globalization, and green-house gases than the plight of the working class.  Deteriorating family values, the influx of migrant workers, lower education achievement of children, decline of unionization, and lack of upward mobility are all contributing to a modern rebellion.  In a chapter titled “Peasant Rebellions,” Kotkin links the current times with those that led up to the noteworthy uprisings of the Middle Ages.  “Democratic capitalist societies need to offer the prospect of a brighter future for the majority   Without this belief, more demands for a populist strongman or radical redistribution of wealth seem inevitable.”

Throughout his book, Joel Kotkin brings evidence from global sources to support his claim that the entire civilized world is facing the same threat.   The breadth of his undertaking is impressive and his knowledge of the history of class struggles in China, Japan, India, South America and Europe helps to support his belief that wealth stratification caused by super powers in the tech economy is reshaping the global workforce.   It is an interesting and well-annotated read (there are end-notes for each chapter) for the student of medievalism as applied to the modern social and economic landscape.  The primary weakness in the book is what appears to be a confusion by the author as to whether he believes Feudalism to have been a one-time historical occurrence that is now “revived” or a continuum of practice that persisted in various forms after the end of the Middle Ages.  Though he posits at the start, “Feudalism is making a comeback, long after it was believed to have been deposited into the historical dustbin;” he also acknowledges “the persistence of feudal attitudes” in the Modern Era which continue to undermine democracy and freedom.   In this, he seems to agree with Voltaire that “Feudalism is not an event; but rather a very old form which, with differences in its working, subsists in three-quarters of our hemisphere.”    

David A. Kopp, Drew University