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I just don’t know about this one. Molyneux’s usually great, but I don’t see what he’s driving at. Maybe it’s too subtle for me, or maybe I’m too hung up on terms.
Well yes, I’m aware that there were some quasi-anarchistic developments taking place in the High-to-Late Middle Ages, particularly the proliferation of urban communes composed of ex-serfs, the rebirth of commerce and the polycentric commercial codes and arbitration services of the Lex Mercatoria, and of course the guild system. But these were islands of exception in an otherwise hostile sea. A general reference to “Feudal Europe”, both as an historical period and a geographic region, seems to imply that he’s talking about more widespread institutions than those.
Specifically, I think he means to suggest that the feudal system was an example of quasi-private protection, provided by voluntarily-funded landlord armies that protected the employer’s property and dependents.
I don’t find this example either believable or embarrassing, because feudalism depended so much on original and ongoing coercion that it’s pretty easy to separate the trace amounts of anarchy from the statist context.
The titles of the landlords in question all originate in conquest that superimposed their manufactured title over the original title holders. Not only did this give them exclusive control of all presently occupied land , but it was reinforced by laws prohibiting the new homesteading of unoccupied land within the lord’s fiefdom (which serfs were not free to leave anyway). Thus it was truly monopoly landlordism, not merely large scale land ownership.
(It’s also interesting how property owners in the U.S. are in a similar situation, in which the State preempts access to “public” land and levies property taxes on everyone living within it’s borders. So we’re all really just tenants to the Great Big Monopoly Landlord in the Sky).
Legally, the serfs’ relationship to their lord was anything but free and contractual. For one thing, they were legally bound to the land; trying to leave incurred death or mutilation. Once violently trapped in that local monopoly, were saddled with all sorts of tithes and taxes for “services” they didn’t want or need. That’s not surprising since, with the exception of the Lex Mercatoria and the English Common Law),law was created and enforced by lords.
(I should note, however, that medieval law were still primarily civil laws. They had no concept of crimes against the state, and treated most things as disputes between between people, legal privilege not withstanding.)
Given that European feudalism was based on conquest and the coercive imposition of a lord’s extortionist rules, even beyond the inhabited farmland that neither he nor his ancestors ever touched or purchased voluntarily, it’s easy to see how his claims to ownership amount to nothing more than statism, and the rent nothing more than taxation.
Feudal Europe? Really?
Kropotkin’s descriptions of the guild system.
I don’t think it helps to show voluntary, noncoercive, enforcement of contracts [i]to rob or imprison or kill other people[/i].
I just don’t know about this one. Molyneux’s usually great, but I don’t see what he’s driving at. Maybe it’s too subtle for me, or maybe I’m too hung up on terms.
Well yes, I’m aware that there were some quasi-anarchistic developments taking place in the High-to-Late Middle Ages, particularly the proliferation of urban communes composed of ex-serfs, the rebirth of commerce and the polycentric commercial codes and arbitration services of the Lex Mercatoria, and of course the guild system. But these were islands of exception in an otherwise hostile sea. A general reference to “Feudal Europe”, both as an historical period and a geographic region, seems to imply that he’s talking about more widespread institutions than those.
Specifically, I think he means to suggest that the feudal system was an example of quasi-private protection, provided by voluntarily-funded landlord armies that protected the employer’s property and dependents.
I don’t find this example either believable or embarrassing, because feudalism depended so much on original and ongoing coercion that it’s pretty easy to separate the trace amounts of anarchy from the statist context.
The titles of the landlords in question all originate in conquest that superimposed their manufactured title over the original title holders. Not only did this give them exclusive control of all presently occupied land , but it was reinforced by laws prohibiting the new homesteading of unoccupied land within the lord’s fiefdom (which serfs were not free to leave anyway). Thus it was truly monopoly landlordism, not merely large scale land ownership.
(It’s also interesting how property owners in the U.S. are in a similar situation, in which the State preempts access to “public” land and levies property taxes on everyone living within it’s borders. So we’re all really just tenants to the Great Big Monopoly Landlord in the Sky).
Legally, the serfs’ relationship to their lord was anything but free and contractual. For one thing, they were legally bound to the land; trying to leave incurred death or mutilation. Once violently trapped in that local monopoly, were saddled with all sorts of tithes and taxes for “services” they didn’t want or need. That’s not surprising since, with the exception of the Lex Mercatoria and the English Common Law),law was created and enforced by lords.
(I should note, however, that medieval law were still primarily civil laws. They had no concept of crimes against the state, and treated most things as disputes between between people, legal privilege not withstanding.)
Given that European feudalism was based on conquest and the coercive imposition of a lord’s extortionist rules, even beyond the inhabited farmland that neither he nor his ancestors ever touched or purchased voluntarily, it’s easy to see how his claims to ownership amount to nothing more than statism, and the rent nothing more than taxation.