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 

Cecire: Re-Enchanted

Maria Sachiko Cecire, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Reviewed by: Laura Dull (lauradull@delta.edu)

Maria Sachiko Cecire’s Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century accomplishes a great deal of critical work in less than 300 pages, starting with poking a finger directly into the soft underbelly of medieval studies and the specter of its ties to white supremacist groups in the twenty-first century.  In her conclusion, Cecire confesses her love for medievalist children’s fantasy (also reflected in her curriculum vitae) and her belief in its value despite its “shortcomings,” which seems a light charge for what she argues earlier in the book.  Cecire argues that children’s medievalist fantasy, particularly that coming out of the Oxford School started by J. R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, successfully shaped children in a masculinist, white, Northern European vision of selfhood that used the medieval past to critique modernity and project an alternative present.  Because they and their followers published children’s fantasy, their project flew under the critical radar of literary and cultural scholars until the overwhelming breakthrough popularity of such fantasy with adult audiences (as seen, for example, in the adult audiences for the Harry Potter books and movies and the adult fantasy Game of Thrones franchise).  Cecire calls upon readers to acknowledge the dangers of the Oxford School’s project while recognizing the cultural power its members harnessed.  She encourages us to embrace and explore new ways of expanding the scope of the tropes of children’s fantasy to become more inclusive in the ways it reaches into the past to find magic in a difficult contemporary world.  Cecire’s work is thoroughly medievalist in analyzing the way children’s (and later adult) fantasy has been used to understand the past in response to the present with an eye to shaping the future.

After a powerful introduction in which Cecire delivers a series of analytical blows at the sacred cow of children’s fantasy (provoking a response that she later analyzes in chapter 4), Re-Enchanted settles into a set of chapters that divide roughly into an analysis of the circumstances that created the Oxford School (chapters 1 and 2) and a set of analyses of how the principles and tropes established by the school are expressed in twenty-first western culture. 

Cecire’s first, and perhaps most powerful chapter for a reader outside the field of children’s literature, follows the creation of the Oxford School’s medievalist fantasy, which used a heroic Northern European past to critique the feminizing secularizing modernism that was gaining ground in twentieth-century academic circles.  Cecire traces the ways in which the twentieth-century understanding of the medieval world, and particularly medieval literature, was suited to children’s literature with its dependence on hierarchy and clear-cut moral lessons.  The Oxford School’s use of children’s fantasy to argue for the value of the medieval Christian past, Cecire argues, was a strategy for resisting modernist scholarly attention that was becoming the “serious” mode of scholarship in the wake of the World Wars.  She traces nineteenth-century literary influences on Tolkien and Lewis (as they identified in various writings) and notes the realist mode complete with mock scholarly apparatus present in several of these works, tools Tolkien later employed in his Lord of the Rings (LOTR) cycle.  Such a combination of genres gave weight to an otherwise light genre of fantasy and is a strategy Cecire herself seems to perform in later chapters when her analysis seems most to stray from traditional academic boundaries.  She argues that Tolkien and Lewis saw magic as an allegorical way to return to timeless truths (for them Christian) as long as the reader was willing to think like white Christians.  She offers close readings of tales from the works of each, the most engaging of which is that of Eustace Stubbs, who exemplifies the ills of modernity in Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Chapter two traces the academic rivalry between Tolkien and Lewis at Oxford and the modernist scholars at Cambridge that resulted in the creation at Oxford of a curriculum that foregrounded medieval literature and languages in opposition to the modernist focus elsewhere and that sought to make the study of English literature masculine and weighty enough to compete with the Greek and Latin requirements of a Classics degree.  Cecire traces the history of English studies and its focus on moral education, starting with the theoretical underpinnings of Adam Smith, and follows its reception by colonial educators as a means of teaching morals without overt reference to Christian education.  English studies became a powerful vehicle for legitimizing colonial hierarchies, a vehicle Tolkien and Lewis embraced as England’s political footprint diminished.  While Cambridge’s T.H. White wrote about the young King Arthur (Wart) in his Sword in the Stone with plenty of tongue-in-cheek, Tolkien and Lewis’s curriculum taught a reverence for the medieval past and magic seen in the work of students such as Susan Cooper and her The Dark is Rising trilogy through to Philip Pullman in the His Dark Materials series.

The first two chapters are the most straightforward as Cecire builds the academic and intellectual genealogies of the Oxford School and argues for its impact and areas of success.  Chapters three through five read like case studies that attempt to demonstrate the influence of the medievalist fantasy promoted by the Oxford School on modern popular culture.  Chapter three makes a connection between the work of children’s fantasy literature and the cultural narrative of Christmas with their focus on enchantment and timeless rituals.  Cecire makes a textual connection between the Oxford School and Christmas with the setting at Christmas of a key scene in Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and in a staple of the Oxford School’s curriculum, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (upon which Cooper’s scene is modeled).  Here Cecire takes the odd step of using the original Middle English quotes from Sir Gawain with modern English translations provided in parentheses. Her use of the original text here disrupts the flow of her argument (as demonstrated graphically by the need for the parenthetical translations).  While what Cecire argues in this chapter is interesting, its connection to chapters one and two remains loose.  In considering the chapters as individual parts, one could imagine this chapter as the original spark that prompted the entire project, now nestled in the middle of the monograph, buttressed by the surrounding chapters as well as an appeal to scholarly apparatus not dissimilar from the strategy of the nineteenth-century fantasy authors who influenced Tolkien and his use of such apparatus to give weight to a genre considered intellectually light by the broader culture.  The chapter offers key analytical arguments—that children’s fantasy rehearses the Christian story of a child savior who alone can save the world and that childhood rather than children is vital because children become adults who lose access to enchantment.  Cecire’s analysis of Christmas packs in a wealth of analytical work that gets lost in its abundance and in the jumping back and forth between the narrative and rituals of Christmas and their contemporary work for adults and the analysis of Christmas scenes in various works of children’s fantasy.  This chapter is clearly central to the monograph’s arguments and is the chapter that reads as the least polished and least tightly structured.  Due to its rich arguments and its structural choices, it is the chapter this reviewer found herself most wanting to be able to discuss with Cecire.

Chapter four tackles the racial implications of the Oxford School’s premises and the success of the works of its members on the canon of children’s literature and its ability to recolonize imagined spaces as the physical British Empire shrank.  Cecire demonstrates the success of these works in communicating a white masculine supremacy through the sometimes violent responses of fans when faced with critiques of their beloved characters and tales.  She points to the creation of childhood, innocence, and whiteness and its impact on school discipline and policing that disproportionately treats children of color as more culpable than their white counterparts.  She could have added the sexualization of children of color and its implications for sexual assault and sex trafficking.  Cecire, of course, traces the trope of the monstrous Saracen in medieval literature and its influence on the Oxford School, most notably in Lewis’ The Horse and his Boy.  She attempts, with less success, a neomedievalist reading of the Harry Potter series that seems less neomedieval (which she defines as the theory that a possible future world organization might be a secular version of medieval political structures-205) than simply informed by post-Cold War fears of unseen enemies and new manifestations of fascism.

The last chapter turns to the influence of the success of children’s fantasy on adult fantasy.  Cecire analyzes Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Lev Grossman’s Magician series through the lens of the post-ironic turn, which admits that life is terrible, but also open to enchantment through self-actualization.  She argues that the rise of self-help literature in the late twentieth century provided a context in which fantasy could turn from religious hierarchy towards individual choice and fulfillment.  She traces a concomitant break away from the masculinist tradition by creating heroines who find themselves through a heroic love.  While she acknowledges this tradition goes back to classics such as Pride and Prejudice, rather than analyzing why the writers have not broken from its gendered confines, she connects it to a modern trend to focus on individual problems and solutions over systemic ones.  She introduces Neil Gaiman as a popular adult fantasy author to demonstrate the turn to achieving inner happiness, but does not engage how his work aligns him in many ways with the Oxford School, including his use of British folklore and history.  She cites examples of his works, but does not include his modern translation of Norse mythology (2017), despite referencing the Disney television series Once Upon a Time and its run through 2018.  In fact, further exploration of Gaiman’s work would better fit her overall arguments than the paragraph of reference to Disney’s foray into adult fantasy, which only demonstrates that adult medievalist fantasy is profitable and ubiquitous (which references to LOTR and Harry Potter, with their huge film franchises, already accomplish).  The most interesting analysis in this chapter is of the ways in which the Stark children (and foster sons) in the Game of Thrones books and HBO series upend the major rules of medievalist children’s fantasy established by the Oxford School.  This and an analysis of Grossman’s Magician series demonstrate the chapter’s argument that adult fantasy’s disruption is to critique the lies of childhood fantasy that require reconciliation in order to become successful adults.  She notes that while these works critique and acknowledge the dangers in children’s fantasy as shaped by the Oxford School, they conclude that the feelings evoked by them still matter and that they provide access to an enchantment that allows us to change the world.  While I applaud the feeling behind this salvific argument and its ringing rhetoric in the closing lines of the chapter, it obscures the fate of the only non-white character analyzed, the death of Oscar Wao as he sacrifices himself to discover beauty (discussed at the beginning of the chapter).  

Cecire continues her project to save children’s fantasy in her conclusion by pointing to three ways in which non-white/male/heterosexual readers have responded to the genre—fan fiction, disidentification, and published revisionist fantasy.  She concludes with her hope (and one shared by this reviewer) that criticism of the genre will lead to more productive ways to re-enchant the world through its stories.   In a perfect world, I would wish for a tighter connection between the chapters, but Cecire has offered a wealth of analytical suggestions for scholars and fantasy authors to consider and explore further.

Laura Dull

Delta College

Mittman and Hensel: Demonstrare. Classic Readings on Monster Theory / Primary Sources on Monsters

Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel, eds. Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume 1 and Primary Sources on Monsters: Demonstrare, Volume 2. Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2018.

Reviewed by Melissa Ridley Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu)

Monsters and scholarship on monsters have received robust attention in the modern university, with courses centered on or at least featuring teratological subjects appearing in literature, language, Classics, History, Art History, archaeology, and film, media, and cultural studies curricula, among others. And of course, monsters have always been a source of interest and fascination for the general popular culture audience in any given society. One of the challenges of putting together such a course, or of entering into monster studies as an independent researcher or enthusiast looking to know more, has been gathering and collecting resources to teach and learn with; in the absence of any single book devoted both to critical and scholarly materials and also to primary sources such as literary texts and images, professors have historically been required to develop their own “monster studies” coursepacks and pedagogical materials, and students and enthusiasts, their own reading/looking/watching lists, tasks made even more daunting by the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the subject. In today’s university, where the majority of professors are untenured and teaching increasing courseloads, the time and effort required to pull together such materials can detain and derail efforts to offer more coursework on monsters and monstrosity, even as their importance and interest as subjects of critical study continue to increase. In today’s society, where Googling “Monster” results in “About 1,120,000,000 results” as of the writing of this review, it’s difficult to know where to start as an independent learner or where to continue as an aficionado. Enter Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel with this two-volume set: Classic Readings on Monster Theory/ Demonstrare Volume 1, and Primary sources on Monsters/ Demonstrare, Volume 2.

If J.R.R. Tolkien and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen are the originators of the critical field (and they are widely credited as so being) Asa Simon Mittman is the Mensch of Monster Studies. Over nearly two decades of work he has collaborated with countless other scholars on edited collections, museum exhibits, conference programs and sessions, special issues of journals, and through his role as co-founder and President of MEARCSTAPA, an international and interdisciplinary society devoted to the study of monsters, offering undergraduate and graduate students, emerging and junior scholars, and senior scholars, alike, rich opportunities to enter into and make their own contributions to the field. Mentor as much as master of the subject, Mittman’s career goal of broadening the field (“total world monster studies domination,” if you will) seems closer than ever to fruition with the appearance of these books, designed as a set but readily employable as standalone volumes as well. An Art History professor, Mittman has teamed up with Marcus Hensel, an expert in Old English monsters and monstrosity, and an international roster of scholars in Classics, languages and literatures, and history ranging in career levels from graduate student to professor emeritus, to deliver a thoughtfully collated and brilliantly conceived, inclusive, and interdisciplinary resource that both communicates the history of the field and provides ample room to explore and discover new avenues of study within the selected primary sources, offering a generative reading experience geared towards promoting a robust future.

The first book, Classic Readings on Monster Theory, provides a curated set of five critical studies specifically focused on theorizing monsters and monstrosity, and four studies from “allied theories” that have helped to shape the direction of monster studies through intersectional and interdisciplinary avenues. The “Classic” in the title is apt, as the essays and excerpts in this book are from older studies that represent the foundational critical framework for the field. The monster theory section leads off with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Monsters and the Critics,” the 1936 lecture-turned-essay that opened up the idea of examining the monsters in Old English literature as subjects of scholarly interest in their own right. This essay is followed by excerpts from John Block Friedman’s 1981 The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought and Noël Carroll’s 1990 The Philosophy of Horror. Rounding out this section are two watershed works from 1996: Michael Camille’s important (and too-often overlooked beyond Art Historical circles) “Rethinking the Canon: Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters” and the insta-classic “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” written by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. The “allied theories” section includes excerpts from Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism, a foundational work in postcolonial studies; feminist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theory of “abjection” from her 1980 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection; the introduction to J. Halberstan’s 1995 queer examination of “Gothic Monstrosity” in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and the introduction to Rosemary Garland Thomson’s 1996 Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, an influential work in disability studies. Each text is preceded by a page of notes including a critical introduction, reading questions, and further reading, all intended as orientation and guide for students and those new to the field.

I have a few minor complaints about this first volume overall: there are a number of typos and small-word omissions scattered throughout and the citation practices are inconsistent (this is, of course, due to the fact that these essays were originally published in different venues, but even within individual essays at times there are inconsistencies which the editors might silently amend); there is an inconsistent employment of cross-referencing (bold-printing names that appear in more than one essay) that doesn’t really work as it is presented (maybe offering a footnote or side note with the cross-referenced page(s) would be more helpful?) and finally, and somewhat disappointingly, the reading questions at times are leading in nature rather than designed to promote open-ended inquiry; for example, the first two questions for the Kristeva piece are: “Why did Kristeva choose to write in such a prickly, difficult style?” and “How does this affect your reading process and ultimate understanding of the text?” Although surely not intentional, as worded these questions paint the essay in a negative light for the target audience and direct readers to offer a critique grounded in its “prickly” and “difficult” tone rather than in its contents (and frankly, as I have experienced in my own classes, Tolkien’s essay is likely to be viewed by current students as just as difficult, if not more so, to understand.) All of these concerns could easily be remedied in future editions of the volume and do not detract from its overall pedagogical importance and usefulness.

The second volume is a collection of primary texts representing literary and visual monsters from ancient Babylon’s Epic of Gilgamesh to the 2009 creation of Slender Man. These have been selected to provide something of a historical overview of monster stories and figures, with a fairly even distribution between premodern, early modern, and modern works. The emphasis is on the Western literary and visual canon, with most texts either classics taught in Western Civ and literary survey courses or British, American, or Canadian in origin. This is intentional and specific, as per the back cover copy one of the aims of these books is to demonstrate “the consistent, multi-millennium strategies the West has articulated, weaponized, and deployed to exclude, disempower, and dehumanize a range of groups and individuals within and without its porous boundaries.” Longer texts are excerpted to emphasize the scenes featuring monsters and monstrous figures. All texts from the premodern period appear in translation, many of these commissioned specifically for the volume and providing lively and engaging, student-friendly renditions. The volume editors have further normalized and modernized the language of Renaissance texts, so that the entire volume’s contents are accessible to readers whether they have exposure to earlier forms of English or not. There are multiple texts included which provide cross- and comparative reading of particular monster figures in different eras and cultures: for example, the Old English Beowulf (here, excerpted with permission from Roy Liuzza’s absolutely splendid translation for Broadview Press) and John Gardner’s modern retelling from the monster’s point of view, Grendel. There are also texts that challenge an easy understanding of monsters as such, like Edgar Allan Poe’s doppelgänger tale, “William Wilson,” and Theodore Sturgeon’s plant-monster horror story, “It.”

Together, these volumes comprise an insta-course in monsters and monstrosity, providing a syllabus of primary and critical secondary sources that is readily customizable for any variety of undergraduate literature, critical theory, or general ed. courses in civilization or culture; with further enhancement from a knowledgeable professor they could also be used in graduate courses, especially at the Master’s level for a special topics course on monsters or as a general topical survey. The first volume could also be assigned, in part or whole, as a theoretical framework in Art History, film and media, introductory theory, and similar types of courses. Experienced monster scholars may not find much in these volumes that they don’t already know, know of, or have in their libraries, but the books are a convenient repository of commonly-consulted materials and worth the purchase as such. They are also an outstanding resource for students, independent study, and for enthusiasts and aficionados of monsters and monster studies and (in the paperback format) reasonably priced for the student and general audience. Taken in whole or in part, separately or together, these books seem destined to spur a new generation of readers to appreciate the many ways that monsters are good to think with, and to rise to the challenge of listening and responding to what they have to tell us.

Melissa Ridley Elmes

Lindenwood University