Feudal Institutions Research Articles

Producing the subaltern

ABSTRACT This article examines the epistemic violence enacted onto the Malay left (represented broadly by the Malay Nationalist Party, MNP), through the collaboration between the Malay aristocracy, represented by its political vehicle the United Malay National Organisation (UMNO), and the British colonial state. It traces this epistemic violence through British re-colonisation in 1945 leading up to the independence of Malaya in 1957. This article argues that this collaboration has resulted in persistent constructions of the ‘Malay’ image as a discursive tool by marginalising those that deviate from this image into subalternity. This discursive control is salient not only in ensuring the fulfilment of the material interests of the colonial state (in re-colonisation), and the Malay aristocracy (in the consolidation of feudal institutions), during the period but is also a persistent narrative used in the current day as a form of legitimacy for the post-colonial state.

FRENCH REVOLUTION

This work has as objective, to verify as the French society thought the French Revolution, in the century XVIII. The used methodology was of specific bibliographies on the subject. The French society of the century XVIII was estratified and nested, divided in clergy, nobility and bourgeoisie. The French Revolution was the most important event of the Modern Era, marking the beginning of the Contemporary Time. The French Revolution had felt own, manifested in the taking of the power by the bourgeoisie, in the peasants’ active participation and artisans, in the surpass of the feudal institutions of the Old Regime and in the preparation of France for the walk in direction to the industrial capitalism. The politics in the France prérevolutionary showed the signs of absolute other Reis’ accumulated decadence, mainly a chronic deficit in the reign Luís XVI, that arose to the throne in 1774.

Private Law in Transylvania as Part of the Habsburg Monarchy

In the course of our following study, we present the transformation of feudal institutions of private law in force in Transylvania in the early modern period and their modernization during the time when this historical region was under the control of the Habsburg Monarchy both in its absolutist (imperial) and dualist forms. We show that the sources of private law in this period were initially those enacted during the Middle Ages, which were gradually updated by the enlightened absolutist Habsburg rulers, resulting in norms fit for the bourgeois period of capitalist development at the end of the 19th century. We observe that law applicable to legal capacity and its exercise by natural persons and to families gradually developed to undo the feudal bonds and incapacities prevalent during the Middle Ages. The same was true for property law, as well as the law which governed inheritance. Also, a previously less significant field of law, commercial law, evolved spectacularly in this era, creating the framework for modern economic exchange, vibrant trade, and security of credit. The perspectives of Romanian legal history literature regarding this era are also presented.

Cultural Foundations and Mythological Nature of Human Rights

The author claims that the concept of human rights arose on European soil as a result ofcertain cultural, political, and economic factors. Its primary base is formed by Christianideas, secularized with the dissolution of feudalism and the spread of capitalism. Inparticular, this concept synthesized the Christian ideas of God’s likeness of man and theomnipresence of God: being god-like, man, like God, may be present in all things, thoughnot in all at once. The main beneficiary was the bourgeoisie, who used personal rights todestroy feudal institutions, political rights to establish control over the state, and economicand social rights to mitigate class contradictions and distract their opponents. The religiousorigin of rights is the key to understanding their important features such as the absence oflogical basis for human rights; helplessness of the law in front of acts that undermine thefoundations of order and are marked as acts of self-realization; extraordinary diversity ofrights, etc. There are several directions of human rights criticism (conservative, moderateliberal, Marxist and Christian). All of them assume that human rights neither adequatelyreflect human nature, nor take into account some of its aspects. Indeed, man is not only anindividual seeking to choose, but also a member of a collective who needs a recognition(conservatism); a being alienated from labor and racial life (Marxism); a believer seekingto avoid sin (early Christianity) and obedient to divine will (Islam); a being who suffersfrom constant suffering and seeks to be saved from it (Buddhism); a victim of civilization,oppressed by the flow of information and the need for constant choice This inadequacyentails a destructive effect: the concept of rights creates a monochrome picture, on which,the human existence is reduced to act of will; gives rise to logical contradictions; destroysreality, monopolizing the axiological basis of cooperation; is used as a tool of submission and domination; creates an absolute justa causa; alienates from existence and formsthe basis for other levels of the mythological structure. The history of human rights is notcomplete: It seems that today humanity is on the eve of fundamental transformations,whose content and final result are difficult to predict.

The Origin of the Institution of the State Representative in the Territory of Moldova

After obtaining independence, the process of building a new system of public administration had started in the Republic of Moldova. A special role in this process was given to the institutionalization of the territorial state administration. Since the adoption of the normative framework in November 1998, which created the prefect institution, and until now, in the desire to reform the local public administration and to consolidate the deconcentrated administration, several models of state representation in the territory were attempted. We consider it important to mention that our country, in its historical evolution, has established certain traditions regarding the representation of the state in the territory, which could be taken over and adapted to the construction of the present system of public administration. For these reasons, we intend to analyze the exponents of local administration in Moldova and its functional components.
 The administration of the Romanian feudal states had a pronounced centralizing character, determined by the need to strengthen the unity and state integrity. All the feudal institutions in the Romanian states were inextricably linked to the ruler, the person and his functions. The Ruler not only held all the functions of the state but also exercised them directly or through delegates, thus assuring the unit of leadership and participating, together with the representatives of the dominant class, directly, in the creation and organization of the judiciary, military, tax structures. The principle of delegation of power involved the transfer of competence and responsibility from the center to certain local agents of state power acting in the name and authority of the Ruler.
 The superior position was held by the pârcălab, one of the oldest and most important dignitaries in the Romanian countries. Pârcălabul represented the ruler and ensured the implementation of the king's decisions within the country, which is why he enjoys great authority in the country, being at the top of the administrative hierarchy of the local governors. Because of this, the pârcălab and the staroste were named by the ruler of the great boyars.
 Therefore, the institution of the state representative in the territory has rich historical traditions and dates back to the Moldovan state. The pârcălab had important legal, military, fiscal functions, and alongside with other royal servants, was the mechanism of land administration. During its evolution, this institution has undergone changes, but the essence remains stable, to represent central power locally.
 Keywords: Moldova, administration reform, ruler, representative in the territory

The Feudal Revolution and Europe's Rise: Political Divergence of the Christian West and the Muslim World before 1500 CE

We document a divergence in the duration of rule for monarchs in Western Europe and the Islamic world beginning in the medieval period. While leadership tenures in the two regions were similar in the 8th century, Christian kings became increasingly long lived compared to Muslim sultans. We argue that forms of executive constraint that emerged under feudal institutions in Western Europe were associated with increased political stability and find empirical support for this argument. While feudal institutions served as the basis for military recruitment by European monarchs, Muslim sultans relied on mamlukism—or the use of military slaves imported from non-Muslim lands. Dependence on mamluk armies limited the bargaining strength of local notablesvis-à-visthe sultan, hindering the development of a productively adversarial relationship between ruler and local elites. We argue that Muslim societies’ reliance on mamluks, rather than local elites, as the basis for military leadership, may explain why the Glorious Revolution occurred in England, not Egypt.

Mary Hays and the Forms of Life

THE 1790'S RADICAL WRITER MARY HAYS, BEST KNOWN FOR HER BY TURNS painfully earnest and, to some, utterly scandalous 1796 fictional autobiography The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, found it impossible to avoid weighing in on the infamous Caroline of 1820. Precipitated by the Queen's return to Britain after many years in exile, having been unceremoniously dismissed by the Prince Regent in favor of his preferred mistress, the divorce trial galvanized public opinion in Britain and became a particular cause celebre of political radicals. (1) Discussing Queen Caroline in her 1821 Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated, Hays invokes Edmund Burke's famous lament for the passing of the age of chivalry in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Describing the collective response to the Queen's ostensibly shabby treatment, Hays writes: Burke, had he now lived, would have retracted his assertion, that the age of chivalry had passed away; it revived, in all its impassioned fervour, amidst the soberest and gravest people in the civilized world. Every manly mind shrank from the idea of driving, by protracted and endless persecutions, a desolate unprotected female from her family, her rank, from society and from the world. Woman considered it as a common cause against the despotism and tyranny of man.... With the fell the childish privileges and paid to the sex; and to equity not gallantry do they now prefer their claim. Oppression and proscription, it is true, still linger, but appear to be passing away; and, in another century probably, should the progress of knowledge bear any proportion to its accelerated march during the latter half of the past, all will become new. (2) This is a stunning series of claims coming, as they do, from the same writer who twenty years earlier published her novel The Victim of Prejudice (1799), often referred to as a female version of William Godwin's 1796 Caleb Williams. Whereas the Hays of 1799 would have argued in stark contrast to that chivalry was alive and well in the form of barbarous prejudice and the victimizations wrought by distinctions of rank, here she argues from the other side, insisting that a reformed chivalry is happily robust. (3) By 1820, the feudal institutions appear to have fallen away, as has the degrading homage paid to women. Particularly striking is the Whiggish stance captured by her claim that old appear to be passing away and in another century all will become new, especially given that she writes this in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, after which point it must have felt to many radicals and reformers as though old would never pass away. Compared to her texts from the 1790's such as The Victim of Prejudice, moreover, which is so decidedly deterministic about the possibility of change because of the sheer tenacity of things as they are, as Godwin puts it, Hays's lauding of a reconstituted chivalry in her treatment of the Caroline Affair is without question a long way from what she implies about chivalry in her earlier novel. (4) In the polarized political climate of 1790's Britain, chivalry either rendered one and vulnerable, or, in contrast, clothed and protected, depending on one's point of view. Burke's memorable defense of chivalry in Reflections is inseparable from his attack on the rights of man; the latter, for Burke, reduces humankind to its naked shivering nature, whereas chivalry covers and protects. (5) In his figuration of the rights of as a kind of stripping naked, anticipates Hannah Arendt's twentieth-century critique of what she calls the perplexities of the rights of man. In an oft-cited passage from The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt observes that her own arguments about the incommensurable relationship between man and citizen offer ironical, bitter, and belated confirmation of the ones with which Burke opposed the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man. …

Pol Pot, alias Brother Number One: Leaders as instruments of history

Pol Pot is one twentieth century leader with a specific place in history as the orchestrator of one of that century's many significant genocides. As the commander of the deadly Khmer Rouge, he orchestrated the genocide perpetrated in Cambodia between 1974 and 1979, in which 1.7 million people, or 21% of the country's population, died (UN figure). Explanations of how the genocide occurred often stress it as an unanticipated consequence of implementing a utopian vision. That vision was one of a classless society of peasants freed from the shackles of both feudalism and capitalism, in which all dominant feudal and bourgeois institutions had been eliminated in order to ‘free’ the people. The unfolding of utopian projects in which leaders assume the role of instruments of history reveals dimensions of the leadership process that tend to go unnoticed and under-researched in the management and organisational literature.

“Fanciful Devotion”: Ritualization in Scott’s Old Mortality

RITUALS AND RITUALISTIC BEHAVIORS PERVADE OLD MORTALITY, THOUGH curiously for a novel depicting religious strife, few have an explicit or official sacramental purpose. From Old Mortality's endless restoring Covenanter gravestones to Alison Wilson's ritualized care of Milnewood after Henry Morton's presumed death, most of rituals in Old Mortality are symbolic actions operating in a culture struggling over symbols. Many of these rituals have received critical attention individually as examples of Scott's ironic distancing between ritual performance and real conditions in face of historical change or of subtle ways in which Scott's ostensibly evenhanded treatment favors Royalists (and Claverhouse) over superstitious Whigs. (1) But along with sharpening his satiric treatment of Whig and Royalist extremes and registering his present anxieties about radical Presbyterians, Scott's employment of ritual complicates his depiction of historical change. The most obvious rituals include those performed privately by comic or grotesque figures, such as Lady Margaret's devoted re-enactment of Charles II's breakfast at Tillietudlum, and public spectacles staged by Privy Council, such as wappen-schaw and triumphal procession that follows Whig defeat. Even Morton's seemingly natural behavior, however, has ritual elements. All can be seen as strategies for resisting--or appropriating--historical change. As Scott presents it, conflict leading to Whig uprising of 1679 involves more than obvious religious and political differences. It also encompasses the opposition of ancient manners to those which are gradually subduing them, as he described cultural change in his introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel. (2) But it is not simply a matter of one stage of development succeeding another, even though Morton's fictional party of moderates may represent future. It is a struggle, rather, between different responses to modernity. Historically, neither Whigs nor Royalists had much use for traditional rituals--the Calvinist Whigs despised High Church and Catholic rituals, and court of Charles II at times openly mocked secular rituals of state. Scott presents both camps as using reinvented or ad hoc rituals as ways of negotiating rather than simply resisting historical change; his individual characters use them less self-consciously as a way of appropriating a place in a changing order. Scott's anthropological imagination is less concerned with accurately depicting Whig and Royalist rituals than with showing how ritualization separates insiders from outsiders, high from low, and sacred from profane. Scott's own invention of tradition in staging a Highland fantasy for George IV's state visit to Edinburgh is well known and suggests even less concern for accurate recreation. (3) But improvised rituals and invented traditions of Old Mortality are more than fantasy: despite their lack of historicity, they express historical change. 1 Two rituals structure Scott's opening chapters and establish patterns for private and public rituals that follow. In first chapter, framing narrative of Old Mortality's pilgrimage to graves of martyred Covenanters appears private, but it also connects isolated members of a dispersed community. In second chapter, Scott opens narrative proper with wappen-schaw, which he describes as a Stuart attempt to revive feudal institutions, (4) and while it fails as revival, it provides a rite of initiation for Morton. In both cases, ritual's manifest purpose differs from its practical effect. Old Mortality's is not purely religious, nor is wappen-schaw wholly secular. By restoring obscure graves as monuments to martyrs, Old Mortality also memorializes their social and political opposition. His efforts may be recognized only by a few, but he links them as members of a community who set themselves apart from world both spiritually and politically. …

The Liberation of the Object and the Interrogation of Modernity

This article, a reflection on the author's tetralogy The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, focuses on three sets of antithetical concepts—empire and nation-state, rational bureaucracy ( junxian zhi) and feudal system ( fengjian zhi), rites/music and institutions—“continuity and rupture” in history and the idea of the trend of the times ( shishi); and the question of scientific outlook and national knowledge. It argues the importance of liberating the historical world of thought from the position as an object for our observation and transforming it into a perspective from which we can reflect on and observe the modern world of ours.

Free trade, feudal remnants and international equilibrium in Gaetano Filangieri's Science of Legislation

In his main work, The Science of Legislation (1780–1783), the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri proposed a set of extensive political and cultural reforms. These reforms were necessary to free eighteenth-century societies from the remnants of feudal institutions that obstructed international peace and economic growth. Filangieri's ideas were shaped by the international political climate between the seven Years’ War and the eve of the French Revolution. Reinterpreting Montesquieu and Genovesi through the influences of French radical and Enlightenment thought (Helvétius, Raynal, l’ Encyclopédie), as well as the economics of Hume, Verri and the Physiocrats, he concluded that European modernity was inherently contradictory. From this perspective Filangieri set out to force a clean break between the technical horizons of mercantilism and enlightened absolutism and a society based on civil rights, a fair distribution of wealth and resources, and free trade. Proper ‘scientific’ knowledge of the rules and principles of legislation would allow governments to balance out the natural and cultural factors that characterise individual states, and to identify the appropriate model for social and economic development. If all states acted on their proper interest, international free trade and peaceful competition between states would emerge and the potential for general economic growth be materialised. Thus, the natural equilibrium and ‘universal consensus’ among nations could be restored.

Human rights, religion, and the cosmopolitan sensibility

Human rights arose in conjunction with the notion of civil liberty during the early phases of the European Enlightenment. Both ideas are, however, irreducible to the historical context in which they were initially articulated. Again it is useful to emphasize: not only were they embraced by a tentative minority but they were opposed by an intellectual counter-revolution, feudal institutions, and pre-modern classes like the aristocracy and the peasantry. The liberal state was soon enough seen as a protector of rights and as a precondition for their free exercise. Once satisfied with economic power following the Revolutions of 1848, however, the new bourgeoisie of Europe would soon retreat from its once radical beliefs in democracy and support the nationalist and imperialist policies of authoritarian regimes. It took a few hundred years for the idea of"rights" to enter into the mainstream western discourse and, mutates mutandis, the same political battle over "human rights" is now taking place in non-western societies. Advocates of the Enlightenment are still battling with religious institutions and provincial attitudes rooted in the Counter-Enlightenment. The straggle over "rights" is thus a political struggle defined by two very different ideological frameworks. Old habits die hard. The idea of human rights only gained currency after Auschwitz and Hiroshima and, in fact, it only became popular in the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Once again, using the famous phrase of Hegel, the Owl of Minerva spread its wings only at dusk: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 came too late to help the victims of classical totalitarianism. With the past in mind, however, others have benefited from what is gradually becoming a consensual belief among nations. Human rights no less than liberal values are still, admittedly, usually spoken about more than they are practiced. But they continue to inspire resistance because they challenge what--politically, economically, and socially-constrains the will to know, the ability to learn, the autonomy of the individual, and the accountability of institutions. It does not matter whether the cultural context of the society is Christian, Islamic, or Jewish, these profoundly secular ideals have taken on an increasingly universal character because the political conflicts in non-Western societies increasingly are being waged over the prospect of establishing a liberal democratic state. The truth is that:

Villein rents in thirteenth–century England: an analysis of the Hundred Rolls of 1279–1280

What factors played the principal role in determining the level of villein rents in thirteenth–century England? Historians have assumed three factors: economic and demographic forces, seigneurial power, and custom. This analysis of the Hundred Rolls of 1279–80 for Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire indicates that community custom was the most important factor. It is only on ecclesiastical estates in Huntingdonshire that seigneurial power had a decisive influence in imposing heavy labour services on villeins. Furthermore, since villeins were protected by custom, the level of their rents was usually lower than that of competitive freehold rents, which reflected market forces.

The Black Death and Property Rights

Abstract The Black Death visited unprecedented mortality rates on Europe, realigning relative values of factors of production, and in consequence the costs and benefits of defining and enforcing property rights. Our model refines the conceptual range of shared claims that exist between open access and private property, improving analysis of the postplague pattern and timing of abandonments and privatizations. Because of title enforcement costs, the decreased marginal value of nonhuman assets induced a lapse of some private claims, although communities continued to exploit a part of those resources informally as a commons. In contrast, the marginal value of labor and human capital rose, which placed insupportable stress on feudal institutions. The predictable evolution of workers' rights to their own labor accelerated the erosion of serfdom. The Black Death thus illustrates demographic change inducing evolutionary institutional change.

Feudal institutions and small business governance: an exploration and comparison

Decision‐making institutions evident in today’s small businesses display remarkable similarities to medieval feudalism. This paper presents: (1) the institutions of feudalism as applied to small business, (2) a theoretical framework as a foundation for explaining obvious parallels, and (3) propositions that furnish a basis for further research.

Robin Hood: The Many Faces of that Celebrated English Outlaw/Die Vielen Gesichter des edlen Räubers (review)

Short Notices Carpenter, Kevin, ed., Robin Hood: The Many Faces of that Celebrated English Outlaw/Die Vielen Gesichter des edlen Rdubers, Oldenburg, Bibtiotheks und Informationssytem der Universitat Oldenburg, 1995; paper; pp. 303; over 200 illustrations; R.R.P. not known. This book was produced as an accompaniment to an exhibition on the subject of Robin Hood, which toured six European countries between 1995 and 1997. It aims to provide readers of either German or English with a comprehensive survey of the many incarnations of the character and the legend, in a collection of scholarly articles, personal accounts by popular writers, ideas on presenting Robin Hood in the classroom, Robin Hood in film, and more. The second half of the three-hundred page book is a catalogue of the exhibits, a couple of hundred Ulustrations and artefacts of every imaginable kind which are no doubt of interest to viewers of the exhibition, but of limited use otherwise. The book concludes with lists of secondary reading and film material on the subject of Robin Hood. While the book contains some useful and interesting material on the Robin Hood legend and its past and present uses, notably in the articles by writers such as James C. Holt, Stephen Knight and others, i t P A R E R G O N ns 15.1 (July 1997) Short Notices 277 is difficult to escape the feeling that the mix of the material is a real problem. The book interweaves serious and scholarly writing with the tight and personal, but even more strikingly, it juxtaposes material with a very short sheU-tife with articles that serve the more enduring requirements of academic research. This mix creates a disjunction which is intensified by the editor's decision to use both English and German in the first part of the book. M u c h of the material is thus presented twice, and each of the essays is introduced and summarised in the alternate language. One has to question the wisdom of this bilingual approach, especially as it has apparently not been considered necessary in the second part. W h e n combined with variations in type for each of the languages, it is an irritating editorial feature. O n the positive side, the book is generously and interestingly Illustrated with prints, etchings and photographs from all kinds of sources, and in terms of scope and comprehensibitity it should be of value to students of Robin Hood. Philippa Beckerling Department of English University of Western Australia Ganshof, F. L., Feudalism (Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 34), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1996; paper; pp. xviii, 176; R.R.P. US$13.95. 'What is feudalism?' has been the starting-point for m a n y an undergraduate course in medieval European history, and sttil is in many cases today. The two seminal works which always appear on the reading-list for this topic are Marc Bloch's Feudal Society and Francois Ganshof's Feudalism. They are very different books. Bloch offers a marvellously rich and wide-ranging account of feudal institutions and the society in which they were embedded, though his discursive and detailed approach must appear formidable to the n e w undergraduate! Ganshof, in contrast, provides a masterpiece of compression, clearly and succinctly set out, and incorporating extensive evidence with a remarkably light touch. H e is very careful ...

North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms

ABSTRACTThe identity of eighteenth-century North Britons needs to be disaggregated: there were significant variations in North British attitudes to the Anglo-Scottish relationship in areas such as politics, economics, language, religion and manners. In the first-order spheres of politics and economics North Britons generally subscribed to an Anglo-British identity and tended to welcome anglicization of Scotland's feudal institutions and laws as an acceleration along the pathway of modernization. Although this crucial aspect of North British identity became widespread only from the 1730s its roots can be traced back to the sophisticated debates which hadprecededScottish agreement to incorporating Union. This adherence to an Anglo-British form of patriotism was a common feature of political discourse in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. North British patriotism also shared another prominent characteristic with Anglo-Irish and American identities. The aspiration to share English liberties to the full, when thwarted, could trigger anglophobic responses, as occurred in America in the 1760s and 70s, and in the Irish constitutional revolution of 1780–2. Among North Britons, a coherent Anglo-British ideology of improvement co-existed with a traditional Scottish chauvinism, which was normally dormant, but whose occasional eruptions tended to be provoked by perceived exclusions of North Britons from the liberties of Englishmen.

Heldris de Cornuälle's Roman de Silence and the Feudal Politics of Lineage

The thirteenth-century French text Le roman de Silence is the story of a count's daughter, Silence, brought up as a boy because the king has prohibited female inheritance. Whereas previous readings emphasize the gender politics of the heroine's success as a male and the explicit thematization of issues of textuality, I focus instead on the work's representation of the feudal institutions of marriage, lineage, and the transmission of property. Under the cover of Silence's cross-dressing and refeminization, the text renegotiates the way bodies mattered in the thirteenth-century imaginary, redefining the function of the medieval nobility as genealogical reproduction rather than military service. While the story of the protagonist's parents euphemizes this politics of lineage, by the end of the tale the king's only recourse is Silence.

UMNO Leaders and Malay Rulers: The Erosion of a Special Relationship

IN JANUARY 1993, the Malaysian parliament stripped the Malay rulers of their legal immunity.' Meanwhile, UMNO Baru, the backbone of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, withdrew all privileges not provided for under the constitution and considered removing the prefix from the titles of state institutions. These actions appeared to be in response to public outcry over royal transgression of the law. Yet, the campaign against royalty is all the more interesting given the fact that most of the rulers had close personal ties with the UMNO leadership and had helped entrench the latter's dominance over the Malaysian political process. Why then did the UMNO elites move against the sultans when they had all along tolerated royal misdemeanours? This article will argue that the declining relevance of feudal institutions in UMNO Baru's strategy of political dominance and its elites' perception of the rulers as potential contenders for executive power culminated in the revision of the position of the rulers in Malaysian politics. However, the process of redefinition itself was constrained by other factors that were beyond the control of the ruling regime.

Thorstein Veblen and contemporary civilization

Veblen's central point in The Theory of the Leisure Class is that the same compulsive pursuit of wealth and status through ownership, display, waste, and war that shaped the contours of past social orders also deter? mines the direction of industrial civilization. Relying on ethnographic por? traits and other histories for his description of primitive, ancient, feudal and modern leisure class institutions, Veblen repeatedly pointed out the connections between ownership, the subjection of woman, the denigration of productive labor and the affirmation of conspicuous consumption, waste and war. This extensive cross cultural journey through varieties of prein dustrial societies provided Veblen with a social psychological basis for his description and explanation of emerging industrialism. Veblen's leisure class social psychology and portrait of a 19th and early 20th century indus? trial capitalism that anticipated the contours of late 20th century civilization poses for students of the contemporary world the disturbing enigma that not much has changed. As it becomes more apparent that we now live in a Veblenesque world, the author of this intellectual prophecy is becoming increasingly relevant. This essay will apply Veblen's leisure class social psy? chology, which is illustrated in his portrait of business civilization in Amer? ica, to an analysis of some of the deepening irrationalities in the contemporary global political economy.