Feudal Lord Quotes

The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord.

I found an inner strength to fight for myself. It was clear that nobody else would.

The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth. All things are for all. Here is an immense stock of tools and implements; here are all those iron slaves which we call machines, which saw and plane, spin and weave for us, unmaking and remaking, working up raw matter to produce the marvels of our time. But nobody has the right to seize a single one of these machines and say, "This is mine; if you want to use it you must pay me a tax on each of your products," any more than the feudal lord of medieval times had the right to say to the peasant, "This hill, this meadow belong to me, and you must pay me a tax on every sheaf of corn you reap, on every rick you build." All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The Right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!

In every male languishes the soul of a feudal lord, a male chauvinist, which must be destroyed.

During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism doesn't work" is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

There will be a great imbalance in our strengths if we fight, because I am prepared to die and you are desperate to live.

If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn't capitalism...In many ways, it resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers.

For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice.

The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist

The lesson was clear and I learned it well: blind acquiescence was necessary to gain approval; being yourself only earned condemnation.

He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord.

Looking back, I realized that we were being raised to be schizophrenic; an appearance of perfection was more important than genuine feelings

-I got the conch!" --Piggy (in Lord of the Flies), attempting Democracy

I obeyed, but my crime was that I did not look obedient.

It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.

In the old days, privilege came with obligations—except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases, the state. You want to be a feudal lord—you will be first to die. You want war? First in battle. Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief. Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal were on the battlefield—the last, according to Livy, was first-in, last-out of combat zones. George Washington, too, went to battle, unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who played video games while threatening the lives of others.

We are the gods of poverty, but why should we be ashamed in front of those gods of good fortune? We and they, all of us, have our own fates. Not only that, but while they are on friendly terms with emperors, aristocrats, feudal lords, the privileged class and, yes, wealthy townspeople, and provide them with different kinds of luxury and splendor, they’re not intimate with men of virtue at all.

The capitalist of our day, who is the social, economic and political successor of the feudal lord of the Middle Ages, and the patrician master of the ancient world, holds the great mass of the people in bondage, not by owning them under the law, nor by having sole proprietorship of the land, but by virtue of his ownership of industry, the tools and machinery with which work is done and wealth produced. In a word, the capitalist owns the tools and the jobs of the workers, and they are his economic dependents.

While I have the floor, here's a question that's been bothering me for some time. Why do so few writers of heroic or epic fantasy ever deal with the fundamental quandary of their novels . . . that so many of them take place in cultures that are rigid, hierarchical, stratified, and in essence oppressive? What is so appealing about feudalism, that so many free citizens of an educated commonwealth like ours love reading about and picturing life under hereditary lords? Why should the deposed prince or princess in every clichéd tale be chosen to lead the quest against the Dark Lord? Why not elect a new leader by merit, instead of clinging to the inbred scions of a failed royal line? Why not ask the pompous, patronizing, "good" wizard for something useful, such as flush toilets, movable type, or electricity for every home in the kingdom? Given half a chance, the sons and daughters of peasants would rather not grow up to be servants. It seems bizarre for modern folk to pine for a way of life our ancestors rightfully fought desperately to escape.

My mind became a sanctuary for secret thoughts of escaping from this household.

Princess Anlei to the newly knighted Lord Knight Corann: "A princess does not need to rush into the fray like some …starving creature, but moves deliberately, with a purpose. I did not think for a moment that this gathering would end without you speaking to me at some point.

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists.

In the old days, privilege came with obligations—except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases, the state. You want to be a feudal lord—you will be first to die. You want war? First in battle. Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief. Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal were on the battlefield—the last, according to Livy, was first-in, last-out of combat zones. George Washington, too, went to battle, unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who played video games while threatening the lives of others.

Our relationship with many of the Internet companies we rely on is not a traditional company–customer relationship. That’s primarily because we’re not customers. We’re products those companies sell to their real customers. The relationship is more feudal than commercial. The companies are analogous to feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and—on a bad day—serfs. We are tenant farmers for these companies, working on their land by producing data that they in turn sell for profit.

When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker, a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart of goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar ma; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding other. - pg 3

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die or hunger. The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.

Each of the conquered kingdoms had its own laws and traditions. King Aegon did little to interfere with those. He allowed his lords to continue to rule much as they always had, with all the same powers and prerogatives. The laws of inheritance and succession remained unchanged, the existing feudal structures were confirmed, lords both great and small retained the power of pit and gallows on their own land, and the privilege of the first night wherever that custom had formerly prevailed.

Capitalism differs from other social forms because producers depend on the market for access to the means of production (unlike, for instance, peasants, who remain in direct, non-market possession of land); while appropriators cannot rely on 'extra-economic' powers of appropriation by means of direct coercion - such as the military, political and judicial powers that enable feudal lords to extract surplus labour from peasants - but must depend on the purely 'economic' mechanisms of the market. This distinct system of market dependence means that the requirements of competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental roles of life. Because of these rules, capitalism is a system uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labour by technical means. Above all, it is a system in which the bulk of society's work is done by propertyless labourers who are obliged to sell their labour-power in exchange for a wage in order to gain access to the means of life and of labour itself.

In such mysticism of prayer, the relationship of domination between God and humans has been transformed into one of love. That is precisely the mystical transformation that happens to prayer of supplication. The feudalistic patriarchal understanding of supplication often starts from the assumption that human beings have to go and knock on God's door and awaken "him" in order to present their petitions. The feudal lord then answers or refuses. If "he" has refused often enough even the most necessary things, the supplicant will go away and perhaps look elsewhere for salvation . . . Mystics have rarely cultivated the prayer of supplication; they have worked at a relationship based on mutuality.

This arrangement, in which users take advantage of services and the company gains all the upside of the data they generate, may sound novel, but it is actually very old. Prior to the rise of capitalism, feudal labor arrangements worked similarly. Lords insulated their serfs from fluctuations in markets and guaranteed them safety and traditional rights to use the land and to keep enough of their crop to survive. In exchange, lords took all the upside of the market return on serfs’ agricultural output. Similarly, today, siren servers provide useful and enjoyable information services, while taking the market value of the data we produce in exchange. We thus refer to this contemporary system as “technofeudalism.

I am not yet come of age, my lord. How can I be queen?” asked Constance fearfully.

For Sehra who broke the silence of hypocrisy, that Allah consistently says he hates; in the dictionary meaning of Satan out of 3 – 1 is hypocrisy – So – while many misguided people around the world will condemn you – Allah will love you for following his command. I am very proud of you and can assure you that from here on you will find yourself transformed for a greater purpose. My love and prayers.

If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager's power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world. And just as the retinues of a feudal lord might include servants whose only role was to polish his horses' armor or tweeze his mustache before tournaments or pageants, so many present-day executives keep employees whose sole purpose is to prepare their PowerPoint presentations or craft the maps, cartoons, photographs, or illustrations that accompany their reports. Many of these reports are nothing more than props in a Kabuki-like corporate theater—no one actually reads them all the way through.

To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history. State

Vampires operate under a form of pyramid scheme,” Bones explained. “Each line is ranked by the strength of its head, or the Master, and every person the Master sires is under the Master’s rule. Feudalism would be another example of it. There you had the lord of the manor, and they were responsible for the welfare of all those on their lands, but in return, their people owed them loyalty and part of their income. Such is the way with vampires, with a few more variations.” This was news to me, and it sounded barbaric. “So. In other words, vampire society is like Amway and a cult rolled into one.

From Hobbes to the slaveholders to the neoconservatives, the right has grown increasingly aware that any successful defense of the old regime must incorporate the lower orders in some capacity other than underlings or starstruck fans. The masses must either be able to locate themselves symbolically in the ruling class or be provided with real opportunities to become faux aristocrats themselves in the family, the factory, and the field. The former path makes for an upside-down populism, in which the lowest of the low see themselves projected in the highest of the high; the latter makes for a democratic feudalism, in which the husband or supervisor plays the part of a lord. The former path was pioneered by Hobbes, Maistre, and various prophets of racism and nationalism, the latter by Southern slaveholders, European imperialists, and Gilded Age apologists. (And neo–Gilded Age apologists: “There is no single elite in America,” writes David Brooks. “Everyone can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus.” 105) Occasionally, as in the writing of Werner Sombart, the two paths converge: ordinary people get to see themselves in the ruling class by virtue of belonging to a great nation among nations, and they also get to govern lesser beings through the exercise of imperial rule.

Mencius’ strategy for social reform was to change the language of profit, self-interest, wealth, and power into a moral discourse with emphasis on rightness, public-spiritedness, welfare, and exemplary authority. Mencius was not arguing against profit. Rather, he implored the feudal lords to opt for the great benefit that would sustain their own profit, self-interest, wealth, and power from a long-term perspective. He urged them to look beyond the horizon of their palaces and to cultivate a common bond with their ministers, officers, clerks, and the seemingly undifferentiated masses. Only then, he contended, would they be able to sustain their rulership or even maintain their livelihood for years to come.

A person who sets goals is a hopeful person, whereas a person whom fails to achieve their goals might despair. Why do both hope and despair fill my inner world? Who cannot despair when inducted into a world filled with cruelty? Who cannot despair when serving as the serf in a seigneur’s regime that bestows legal and economic power, financial rewards, social status, and related societal prizes upon feudal lords who exhibit the ravenous instinct for power and accumulation of wealth? Who cannot despair when stranded alone with their personal thoughts, unable to imagine a better earthly life, and flooded with uncertainty of a redemptive afterlife? Why would not any person despair his or her failure to etch a mindset that serves to alleviate their present-day suffering?

All over England, fields and pastures once used in common by local villagers were seized by feudal lords, enclosed with walls, fences, and hedgerows, and incorporated into large private farms and sheep ranches. This “enclosure movement” turned feudal lords into landed aristocrats and turned millions of self-sufficient farmers into landless paupers. Rural English life was increasingly perilous as a result. Without land, peasants could no longer raise livestock, meaning they could no longer produce their own milk, cheese, wool, or meat. Since they had to pay cash rents to their landlords to use their fields and live in their cottages, most were forced to hire themselves and their children out as laborers. For the typical peasant family, this represented a huge loss in real income;

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger. The

The conservative does not defend the Old Regime; he speaks on behalf of old regimes—in the family, the factory, the field. There, ordinary men, and sometimes women, get to play the part of little lords and ladies, supervising their underlings as if they all belong to a feudal estate . . . The task of this type of conservatism---democratic feudalism—-becomes clear: surround these old regimes with fences and gates, protect them from meddlesome intruders like the state or a social movement, while descanting on mobility and innovation, freedom and the future.

The general idea was for the boy to satisfy his sexual needs with the maid, so he wouldn’t “go too far” with a girl of his own social class; and after all, a maid was safer than a prostitute. In rural areas there was a local version of the Spanish derecho a pernada, which in feudal times allowed the lord to bed any bride on the night of her wedding. In Chile, the tradition was never that organized: the patron just went to bed with anyone and at any time he pleased. So the landowners sowed their lands with bastards, and even today there are regions where nearly everyone has the same last name.

As I pointed out, feudalism is essentially a redistributive system. Peasants and craftsmen produce things to a large extent autonomously; lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions ("direct-juro-political extraction" is the technical phrase I learned in college), and then go about portioning out shares of the loot to their own staff, flunkies, warriors, retainers - and to a lesser extent, by sponsoring feasts and festivals and by occasional gifts and favours, giving some of it back to the craftsmen and peasants once again. In such an arrangement, it makes little sense to speak of separate spheres of "politics" and "the economy" because the goods are extracted through political means and distributed for political purposes.

And spend they did. Money circulated faster and spread wider through its communities of use than at any other time in economic history.8 Workers labored fewer days and at higher wages than before or since; people ate four meals a day; women were taller in Europe than at any time until the 1970s; and the highest percentage on record of business profits went to preventative maintenance on equipment. It was a period of tremendous growth and wealth. Meanwhile, with no way of storing or growing value with this form of money over the long term, people made massive investments in architecture, particularly cathedrals, which they knew would attract pilgrims and tourists for years to come. This was their way of investing in the future, and the pre-Renaissance era of affluence became known as the Age of Cathedrals. The beauty of a flow-based economy is that it favors those who actively create value. The problem is that it disfavors those who are used to reaping passive rewards. Aristocratic landowning families had stayed rich for centuries simply by being rich in the first place. Peasants all worked the land in return for enough of their own harvest on which to subsist. Feudal lords did not participate in the peer-to-peer economy facilitated by local currencies, and by 1100 or so, most or the aristocracy’s wealth and power was receding. They were threatened by the rise of the merchant middle class and the growing bourgeois population, and had little way of participating in all the sideways trade. The wealthy needed a way to make money simply by having money. So, one by one, each of the early monarchies of Europe outlawed the kingdom’s local currencies and replaced them with a single central currency. Instead of growing their money in the fields, people would have to borrow money from the king’s treasury—at interest. If they wanted a medium through which to transact at the local marketplace, it meant becoming indebted to the aristocracy.

Capitalism runs on investment, and lawlessness puts investment at risk. No one wants to buy new machinery or more land to plant with commercial crops when there is a strong risk that those machines or crops will be stolen or vandalized by competitors. When it supplanted feudalism, the modern state was supposed to establish a monopoly on violence, on the power to wage war and punish criminals. When the modern state monopolizes violence in this way, it helps create the conditions in which commerce can flourish. The barons’ ramshackle, unruly private militias were scheduled to disappear. Franchetti argued that the key to the development of the mafia in Sicily was that the state had fallen catastrophically short of this ideal. It was untrustworthy because, after 1812, it failed to establish its monopoly on the use of violence. The barons’ power on the ground was such that the central state’s courts and policemen could be pressurized into doing what the local lord wanted. Worse still, it was now no longer only the barons who felt they had the right to use force. Violence became ‘democratized’,

In respect to the employment of troops, ground may be classified as dispersive, frontier, key, communicating, focal, serious, difficult, encircled, and death. When a feudal lord fights in his own territory, he is in dispersive ground. Here officers and men long to return to their nearby homes. When he makes but a shallow penetration into enemy territory he is in frontier ground. Ground equally advantageous for the enemy or me to occupy is key ground. Ground equally accessible to both the enemy and me is communicating. This is level and extensive ground in which one may come and go, sufficient in extent for battle and to erect opposing fortifications. When a state is enclosed by three other states its territory is focal. He who first gets control of it will gain the support of All-under-Heaven. When the army has penetrated deep into hostile territory, leaving far behind many enemy cities and towns, it is in serious ground. When the army traverses mountains, forests, precipitous country, or marches through defiles, marshlands, or swamps, or any place where the going is hard, it is in difficult ground. Ground to which access is constricted, where the way out is tortuous, and where a small enemy force can strike my larger one is called 'encircled.' Ground in which the army survives only if it fights with the courage of desperation is called 'death.' Therefore, do not fight in dispersive ground; do not stop in the frontier borderlands. Do not attack an enemy who occupies key ground; in communicating ground do not allow your formations to become separated. In focal ground, ally with neighboring states; in deep ground, plunder. In difficult ground, press on; in encircled ground, devise stratagems; in death ground, fight. In dispersive ground I would unify the determination of the army. In frontier ground I would keep my forces closely linked. In key ground I would hasten up my rear elements. In communicating ground I would pay strict attention to my defenses. In focal ground I would strengthen my alliances. I reward my prospective allies with valuables and silks and bind them with solemn covenants. I abide firmly by the treaties and then my allies will certainly aid me. In serious ground I would ensure a continuous flow of provisions. In difficult ground I would press on over the roads. In encircled ground I would block the points of access and egress. It is military doctrine that an encircling force must leave a gap to show the surrounded troops there is a way out, so that they will not be determined to fight to the death. Then, taking advantage of this, strike. Now, if I am in encircled ground, and the enemy opens a road in order to tempt my troops to take it, I close this means of escape so that my officers and men will have a mind to fight to the death. In death ground I could make it evident that there is no chance of survival. For it is the nature of soldiers to resist when surrounded; to fight to the death when there is no alternative, and when desperate to follow commands implicitly.

Much like feudal lords in Europe at the time, the ruling class lived off the labor of the peasants, collecting vast wealth that accompanied them as they went, mummified, into the next life.

Feudal Anarchy This period was characterized by what’s now called ‘feudal anarchy’, a situation where real power lay not with kings but with local lords. Because kings had not effectively centralized power yet, and the concept of nations was still vague, if you had a castle and a private army there wasn’t much anyone could do to stop you. There was private justice and war against all—generally speaking not the best time to be alive, and much more violent than the later medieval period by which time a local lord couldn’t just hang anyone who annoyed him.

Once upon a time the great mass of English people were unfree. They could not live where they chose, nor work for whom they pleased. Society in those feudal days was mainly divided into lords and peasants. The lords held the land from the king, and the peasants or villeins were looked upon as part of the soil, and had to cultivate it to support themselves and their masters.

Europe has gotten on very well indeed with all the local feudal lords who agreed to serve, woven a villainous complicity with them, rendered their tyranny more effective and more efficient, and that it has actually tended to prolong artificially the survival of local pasts in their most pernicious aspects.

Feudal societies conferred benefits on their subordinate populations that contemporary societies cannot provide. In return for their labour, serfs were promised protection by lords. Twenty-first-century serfs are abandoned to anarchy and despair

In some respects all this was a sudden acceleration of the drift toward the manorial system, a process which had already gone a long way in Anglo-Saxon England, and certainly in Wessex. But even in Wessex the idea still persisted that the tie of lord and man was primarily personal, so that a free man could go from one lord to another and transfer his land with him. The essence of Norman feudalism, on the other hand, was that the land remained under the lord, whatever the man might do. Thus the landed pyramid rose up tier by tier to the King, until every acre in the country could be registered as held of somebody by some form of service. But besides the services which the man owed to the lord in arms there was the service of attending the courts of the hundred and the county, which were, apart from exemptions, courts of the King, administering old customary law.

The relationship between Christianity and Christ is the prototype of the feudal relationship. Lord who gives his life for his faithful. Vassals faithful to the Lord until martyrdom. Christianity is a mystical vassalage.

We recall that for Hutcheson, human happiness had been about personal liberty, the capacity to live one’s life as one saw fit without harming others. For Kames, it had been about owning property, which gave us our sense of “propriety” and identity as human beings. Now Smith put the two together. By entering and competing in the great interactive dynamic network of modern society, at once impersonal but also indispensable to happiness, we become fully free and human. Independence in this sense becomes the hallmark of modern society, just as dependence on others or “servility” becomes the hallmark of primitive societies and institutions. “Nobody but a beggar,” Smith admonished, “chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.” Yet this has been the essential fate of the vast majority of humankind through most of history, as slaves toiling for their masters, as peasants handing over the harvest to their feudal lords, or as members of the tribe or clan dependent on their chieftains’ command for life or death—hapless creatures whose quality of life rests entirely on whether their chief is “gentle Lochiel” or a brute like Coll MacDonnell. Capitalism breaks that cycle, and offers the conditions under which we forge our own happiness: independence, material affluence, and cooperation with others. Today, more than two hundred years later, three great myths still surround Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations.

To try to govern the world by doubling the number of sages would merely double the profits of the great robbers. If you create pounds and ounces to measure them with, they’ll steal the pounds and ounces and use them to rob you further. If you make scales and balances to regulate them with, they’ll steal the scales and balances and use them to rob you more. If you create tallies and seals to enforce their reliability, they’ll steal the tallies and seals and use them to rob you too. If you create ideals of humankindness and responsible conduct to regulate them with, why, they’ll just steal humankindness and responsible conduct and use them to rob you all the more. How do I know this is so? He who steals a belt buckle is executed, but he who steals a state becomes a feudal lord.

To try to govern the world by doubling the number of sages would merely double the profits of the great robbers. If you create pounds and ounces to measure them with, they’ll steal the pounds and ounces and use them to rob you further. If you make scales and balances to regulate them with, they’ll steal the scales and balances and use them to rob you more. If you create ideals of humankindness and responsible conduct to regulate them with, why, they’ll just steal humankindness and responsible conduct and use them to rob you all the more. How do I know this is so? He who steals a belt buckle is executed, but he who steals a state becomes a feudal lord.

As I pointed out, feudalism is essentially a redistributive system. Peasants and craftsmen produce things to a large extent autonomously; lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions ("direct-juro-political extraction" is the technical phrase I learned in college), and then go about portioning out shared of the loot to their own staff, flunkies, warriors, retainers - and to a lesser extent, by sponsoring feasts and festivals and by occasional gifts and favours, giving some of it back to the craftsmen and peasants once again. In such an arrangement, it makes little sense to speak of separate spheres of "politics" and "the economy" because the goods are extracted through political means and distributed for political purposes.

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger.

My masters at Melk had often told me that it is very difficult for a Northerner to form any clear idea of the religious and political vicissitudes of Italy. The peninsula, where more than in any other country the clergy made a display of power and wealth, for at least two centuries had generated movements of men bent on a poorer life, in protest against the corrupt priests, from whom they even refused the sacraments. They gathered in independent communities, hated equally by the feudal lords, the empire, and the city magistrates. Finally Saint Francis had appeared, spreading a love of poverty that did not contradict the precepts of the church; and after his efforts the church had accepted the summons to severe behavior of those older movements and had purified them of the elements of disruption that lurked in them. There should have followed a period of meekness and holiness, but as the Franciscan order grew and attracted the finest men, it became too powerful, too bound to earthly matters, and many Franciscans wanted to restore it to its early purity. A very difficult matter for an order that at the time when I was at the abbey already numbered more than thirty thousand members scattered throughout the whole world. But so it was, and many of those monks of Saint Francis were opposed to the Rule that the order had established, and they said the order had by now assumed the character of those ecclesiastical institutions it had come into the world to reform. And this, they said, had already happened in the days when Saint Francis was alive, and his words and his aims had been betrayed. Many of them rediscovered then a book written at the beginning of the twelfth century of our era, by a Cistercian monk named Joachim, to whom the spirit of prophecy was attributed. He had foreseen the advent of a new age, in which the spirit of Christ, long corrupted through the actions of his false apostles, would again be achieved on earth. And it had seemed clear to all that, unawares, he was speaking of the Franciscan order.

In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

He who steals a belt buckle is executed, but he who steals a state becomes a feudal lord.

As the historian Marc Bloch showed, the “manorial” system, as this feudal arrangement was known, ordered every aspect of medieval communities. The chieftain ruled over his peasants, economically, politically, and socially. Over time, however, the lord of the manor increasingly had to bow, in turn, to the king. The story of the end of feudalism and the triumph of modernization in Europe is in part a story of the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of strong monarchs. These royals cemented their power by breaking up old feudal estates and granting

Japanese tragedy illustrates this aspect of the Trinity better than Greek tragedy, Kitamori taught, because it is based on the feeling expressed by the word tsurasa. This is the peculiar pain felt when someone dies in behalf of another. yet the term implies neither bitterness nor sadness. Nor is tsurasa burdened with the dialectical tension in the struggle with fate that is emphasized in Greek drama, since dialectic is a concept foreign to Japan. Tsurasa is pain with resignation and acceptance. Kitamori called our attention to a Kabuki play, The Village School. The feudal lord of a retainer named Matsuo is defeated in battle and forced into exile. Matsuo feigns allegiance to the victor but remains loyal to his vanquished lord. When he learns that his lord's son and heir, Kan Shusai, has been traced to a village school and marked for execution, Matsuo resolves to save the boy's life. The only way to do this, he realizes, is to substitute a look-alike who can pass for Kan Shusai and be mistakenly killed in his place. Only one substitute will likely pass: Matsuo's own son. So when the enemy lord orders the schoolmaster to produce the head of Kan Shusai, Matsuo's son consents to be beheaded instead. The plot succeeds: the enemy is convinced that the proffered head is that of Kan Shusai. Afterwards, in a deeply emotional scene, the schoolmaster tells Matsuo and his wife that their son died like a true samurai to save the life of the other boy. The parents burst into tears of tsurasa. 'Rejoice my dear,' Matsuo says consolingly to his wife. 'Our son has been of service to our lord.' Tsurasa is also expressed in a Noh drama, The Valley Rite. A fatherless boy named Matsuwaka is befriended by the leader of a band of ascetics, who invites him to accompany the band on a pilgrimage up a sacred mountain. On the way, tragically, Matsuwaka falls ill. According to an ancient and inflexible rule of the ascetics, anyone who falls ill on a pilgrimage must be put to death. The band's leader is stricken with sorrow; he cannot bear to sacrifice the boy he has come to love as his own son. He wishes that 'he could die and the boy live.' But the ascetics follow the rule. They hurl the boy into a ravine, then fling stones and clods of dirt to bury him. The distressed leader then asks to be thrown into the ravine after the boy. His plea so moves the ascetics that they pray for Matsuwaka to be restored to life. Their prayer is answered, and mourning turns to celebration. So it was with God's sacrifice of his Son. The Son's obedience to the Father, the Father's pain in the suffering and death of the Son, the Father's joy in the resurrection - these expressions of a deep personal relationship enrich our understanding of the triune God. Indeed, the God of dynamic relationships within himself is also involved with us his creatures. No impassive God, he interacts with the society of persons he has made in his own image. He expresses his love to us. He shares in our joys and sorrows. This is true of the Holy Spirit as well as the Father and Son... Unity, mystery, relationship - these are the principles of Noh that inform our understanding of the on God as Father, Son, and Spirit; or as Parent, Child, and Spirit; or as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier...this amazing doctrine inspires warm adoration, not cold analysis. It calls for doxology, not definition.

In the early 1970s the regime dropped a very clear official hint that a close relative would become Kim Il-sung’s successor. The 1970 edition of North Korea’s Dictionary of Political Terminologies had included this critical definition: Hereditary succession is a reactionary custom of exploitative societies whereby certain positions or riches may be legally inherited. Originally a product of slave societies, it was later adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule. The definition failed to appear in the 1972 edition of the dictionary.

She told him of a poem that described the three most prominent shoguns in feudal Japan and their methods of dealing with a bird that refused to sing. If it doesn’t sing, kill it, the first said. If it doesn’t sing, make it sing, was the second’s philosophy. The third, and most successful shogun, Lord Tokugawa had said: If it doesn’t sing, wait for it. It will.

When one-third of the population of the erstwhile Confederacy had consisted of the much-maligned Sons of Ham, the blacks had really been of economic, social and psychological value to the section. Not only had they done the dirty work and laid the foundation of its wealth, but they had served as a convenient red herring for the upper classes when the white proletariat grew restive under exploitation. .... The deep concern of the Southern Caucasians with chivalry, the protection of white womanhood, the exaggerated development of race pride and the studied arroVance of even the poorest half-starved white peon, were all due to the presence of the black man. Booted and starved by their industrial and agricultural feudal lords, the white masses derived their only consolation and happiness from the fact that they were the same color as their oppressors and consequently better than the mudsill blacks.

She was a figure from that distant feudal past in which great ladies had kept and defended lands while their lords went off to slay dragons. This was her island

We cry out against the feudal barons who did not permit anyone to settle on the land otherwise than on payment of one quarter of the crops to the lord of the manor; but we continue to do as they did―we extend their system. The forms have changed, but the essence has remained the same. And the workman is compelled to accept the feudal conditions which we call "free contract," because nowhere will he find better conditions. Everything has been appropriated by somebody; he must accept the bargain, or starve.

The noise of his zip was like the drag of a fingernail down her spine, and Juliet moaned, helpless to stop, as he pushed first his jeans, then his underwear, down and off. He stood tall and proud in front of her, his abs taut, his shoulders back, his stare still fixed between her legs, dark and hooded and intense. His nudity was breathtaking, his cock jutting out thick and hard as he shoved his hands on his hips. It was a thoroughly arrogant pose. Like a prince. Or a feudal Lord. And her body responded in kind, waiting with baited breath for his next royal command, his next move. Knowing she’d do just about anything for him in this moment with the wild beat of her pulse echoing though her ears and her gut and the slick heat at her heart. Open her mouth. Roll over. Get on all fours. Beg.

What a curious man you are!’ she said. ‘Why should you disbelieve the history?’ ‘I disbelieve the history because it isn’t history,’ answered Father Brown. ‘To anybody who happens to know a little about the Middle Ages, the whole story was about as probable as Gladstone offering Queen Victoria a cigar. But does anybody know anything about the Middle Ages? Do you know what a Guild was? Have you ever heard of salvo managio suo? Do you know what sort of people were Servi Regis? ‘No, of course I don’t,’ said the lady, rather crossly. ‘What a lot of Latin words!’ ‘No, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘If it had been Tutankhamen and a set of dried-up Africans preserved, Heaven knows why, at the other end of the world; if it had been Babylonia or China; if it had been some race as remote and mysterious as the Man in the Moon, your newspapers would have told you all about it, down to the last discovery of a tooth-brush or a collar-stud. But the men who built your own parish churches, and gave the names to your own towns and trades, and the very roads you walk on — it has never occurred to you to know anything about them. I don’t claim to know a lot myself; but I know enough to see that story is stuff and nonsense from beginning to end. It was illegal for a money-lender to distrain on a man’s shop and tools. It’s exceedingly unlikely that the Guild would not have saved a man from such utter ruin, especially if he were ruined by a Jew. Those people had vices and tragedies of their own; they sometimes tortured and burned people. But that idea of a man, without God or hope in the world, crawling away to die because nobody cared whether he lived — that isn’t a medieval idea. That’s a product of our economic science and progress. The Jew wouldn’t have been a vassal of the feudal lord. The Jews normally had a special position as servants of the King. Above all, the Jew couldn’t possibly have been burned for his religion.’ ‘The

If she’s lucky, she’ll grow up to be a decent person instead of the wife of a feudal lord.

It was good, she reflected, to be among the proud Gaels. There was no formality among men here, where a man's pride of race stood him with the most noble company and gave him the air of a gentleman no matter how low his rank or birth. Even his grooms called the MacHugh by the familiar "Alex"; he was Chief of Clan MacHugh, but no feudal lord, and his clan was his family to the last rude scullion lad. Elspeth thought it incredibly heart-warming that men might keep such faith with one another, assuming respect for themselves and giving respect in return; she had lived too long in England, where pride of name and self-respect were matters reserved for only a few.

and debris, and her husband and I settled back, sucking on toothpicks like a pair of feudal lords. This may sound sexist and insensitive and politically incorrect—and it is—but I had long since

What a woman! After her husband’s death, she didn’t compromise her dignity and sell herself in a brothel, as Madlen had so often seen in these cases. She refused to become despondent over the obvious injustice meted out to her by the feudal lord. Rather, she’d looked to the future and made the best of a terrible situation. Her stories gave Madlen hope.

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

I ask you this. If the Everyman will sing this Song, then why shouldn’t the Everyman make our videos, too?” Yes, of course! Why shouldn’t the Everyman make our videos too? Kanish was describing the business model of Big Tech. Get the user base to create content, which generates eyeballs, which advertisers pay to reach. In exchange, Big Tech shares just enough of the ad revenue with their largest content providers to make it appear as though it’s a viable business model for the rest of us. This is nothing new, mind you. It’s really just a modern spin on Feudalism—the Lord of the Manor exploits us lowly Serfs to work the land in exchange for our own meager sustenance. It sounds so terrible when I put it that way, doesn’t it?

As with communism in general, so with communist morality one can only guess at its detailed content. Communism would differ from all previous societies in that there would be no false consciousness. False consciousness involves failing to see things as they really are. It comes about because a society’s superstructure can conceal the real basis of the society – as the legal freedom of the worker to sell his labour to whomever he likes on whatever terms he likes conceals the fact that he is really no more able to avoid exploitation by capitalists than the feudal serf is free to avoid working on the land of his lord.

This victory over the nobility marked another break with the West that would prove important in the centuries to come. In those decentralized, shifting kingdoms, there was no one to stand against the encroaching power of the aristocracy, and the gains of strong individual kings vanished as soon as they vacated the stage. The great landowning nobility sapped the strength of numerous kings over the centuries, drowning any potential unity in a sea of petty squabbles. Caught between the warring sides as always were the poor, crushed in the grip of feudal lords and bound ever more tightly to their land. Constantinople, by contrast, to its great benefit, managed largely to keep its aristocracy in check, ensuring a surprising degree of social and economic mobility for its citizens that added immeasurably to the prosperity and strength of the empire.

Should we take seriously the statement about the handmill giving us feudal lords, and the steam mill capitalists? Surely Marx must have realized that the invention of steam power itself depends on human ideas, and those ideas, as much as the steam mill itself, have produced capitalism. Isn’t Marx making a deliberately exaggerated statement of his own position in order to display its novelty?

The vastly greater development of productive forces that takes place under capitalism provides the means, Marx believes, to reduce the domination of nature over us to insignificant proportions and increase human freedom proportionately; but this cannot take place under capitalism, because the forced labour of the serf for the feudal lord still exists as the forced labour of the worker for the capitalist.

Confucius has been more a symbol than an actual man, for both his supporters and his enemies. He has been an icon of China’s cultural heritage, a totem of imperial government, the archetypal human being, the face of oppression, the voice of transformation, the patron of learning, a tool for public relations, a spiritual guide, and the emblem of everything grand and everything bad about China. He has been both a reactionary and a revolutionary, a dictator and a democrat, a feudal lord and a capitalist, a brilliant scholar and a simple fraud, a xenophobe and a globalist, a pillar of authority and a dangerous dissident,

Feudalism is a total organization of society. It specifies the status of the individual and his relations with his superiors and inferiors. It includes an economic system based on land; in general a man’s rights to land correspond with his social rights. It is a scheme of political organization, legally based, overlapping the social and economic organization. In medieval feudalism the overlord was, in theory, socially, economically, and politically supreme. He granted some part of his rights to his vassals, noble companions and servants. The granted rights took the form of rule over a unit of land, a fief. An implicit bargain was struck: The lord offered maintenance and protection; the vassal promised military aid to his lord. Feudalism was, then, a military, political, social, economic, and legal system emerging from the breakup of Carolingian society.

Some of the feudal services were peculiar. A Kentishman was required to “hold the king’s head in the boat” when he should cross the Channel. Even more peculiar was the case of a certain vassal obliged every Christmas to make before his lord unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum (“a leap, whistle, and an audible gaseous expulsion”).

All that I've had is like this high and diversely identical sky, tatters of nothing tinged by a distant light, fragments of pseudo-life gilded by death from afar with its sad smile of whole truth. All I've had has amounted to my not knowing how to search, like a feudal lord of swamps at twilight, solitary prince of a city of empty tombs.

The trick isn’t to fight the aristocracy, it’s to find one who isn’t too terrible, who has his hands on the reins of power, and make friends. Make yourself useful. The quid pro quo in feudalism is the protection of the lord from the marauders sent forth by the other lords.

the feudal domains were re-designated as prefectures, which were similar to English counties and US states, and the daimyō lords who ruled these fiefdoms were replaced by governors sent from Tokyo.

The loss of so many ancient books could be blamed on something more than the apathy of feudal lords and the negligence and greed of unscrupulous monks. It could be blamed, too, on circumstances beyond the inevitable and indiscriminate destruction of floods and fires, or the pernicious appetites of mice, warble flies, and bookworms. All these things played their part, but there was another reason so few texts survived, and that was technology: how books were made.

have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others. The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily. The Negro farmer sometimes thinks he is badly treated in the South. Not infrequently he has to pay high rates of interest upon his "advances" and sometimes, on account of his ignorance, he is not fairly treated in his yearly settlements. But there is this great difference between the Negro farmer in the South and the Italian farmer in Sicily: In Sicily a few capitalists and descendants of the old feudal lords own practically all the soil and, under the crude and expensive system of agriculture which they

Chemistry From the middle Dutch boele, which means lover, bully was a term of endearment in the sixteenth century, which meant that a feudal lord could take the hand of his love under the apple trees in spring and exclaim: my bully, feeling adrenaline flood his body as his heart rate tripled and his palms began to release water mixed with urea, ammonia, salt. Essentially, he could feel what I felt over four centuries later when Ian Starkey called me a fag. I was fourteen, and the next day he kicked me twice, spat in my face, took my glasses and wouldn't give them back. And the whole time sweat glands were developing in our armpits and genitals, and our adrenals were releasing corticosteroids, and something about testosterone was why, though I hated him, I kept imagining him with his shirt off. True, Ian Starkey knew how to hurt me, but I doubt he knew why he was doing it or that we feel pain when neurons in the brain convert an electrical signal to a chemical signal and back again, which is also what allows us to feel a kiss or my brain to take strange comfort imagining all the boys of the world leaning into the strong arms of their tormentors in spring under the apple blossoms, saying I forgive you, saying: I can never forgive you, saying, my enemy, my bully, my love.

When the star of Islam rises, the Jews rise with it to a golden age of intellectual creativity. When feudalism settles over Europe, they open shop as its bankers and scholars. And when the Modern Age struts in, we find them sitting on the architectural staff shaping it. If we now shift our sights from a general view of the history of civilizations to focus on that of the Jews only, we see an equally incredible succession of events. We see Jewish history begin with one man, Abraham, who introduces a new concept to the world—monotheism—which he hands to his descendants. Now Jewish history hits the roads of the world. After a nomadic existence in Canaan, enslavement in Egypt, and settlement of Palestine; after defeat by the Assyrians, captivity by the Babylonians, and freedom under the Persians; after an intellectual clash with the Greeks, strife under the Maccabeans, and dispersion by the Romans; after flourishing as mathematicians, poets, and scientists under Moslem rule; after surviving as scholars, businessmen, and ghetto tenants under feudal lords; after surviving as statesmen, avant-garde intellectuals, and concentration camp victims in the Modern Age, a small segment of these descendants of Abraham return—after a 2,000-year absence—to reestablish Israel, while the rest choose to remain in the world at large in a self-imposed exile. Such a succession of events would be improbable were it not historic fact. What can we make of these events? Are they mere accidents of history? Are they but blind, stumbling, meaningless facts, a series of causes and effects without a definite design? Or is this improbable succession of events part of what philosophers call “teleologic history”—that is, a succession of events having a predetermined purpose. If so, who drafted such a blueprint? God? Or the Jews themselves? Why would God choose the Jews as His messengers for a divine mission? Or, to use William Norman Ewer’s trenchant phrase, “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” The equally trenchant rejoinder by Leon Roth is, “It’s not so odd. The Jews chose God.” If God had a need for messengers to carry out a mission, He would have

It must never be forgotten, in viewing the history of those times, that the original object of the institution of chivalry, was to correct the evils of the feudal system; to strike the rod from the hand of the oppressor, to defend the defenceless, and to right the wronged; and had chivalry remained in its purity, it might have averted long the downfall of the system with which it was linked. The people loved the true knight as much as they hated the feudal lord; and long after the decay of the order, even the affectation of its higher qualities both won regard from the lower classes, and excited the admiration of all those above them, who retained any sparks of the spirit which once animated it.

I was strong and absolutely loaded. I had powerful friends with real political power who’d do my bidding—both the guild masters in the town, and even Cliff, the feudal lord. Even the king himself wouldn’t refuse me. Wait, does putting it that way make me sound like the villain?

In the course of history, kings have welcomed more and more people to their courts, which became more and more brilliant. Is it not obvious that these courtiers and the "officers" were stolen from the feudal lords, who just lost at one fell swoop, their retinues and their administrators? The modern state nourishes a vast bureaucracy. Is not the corresponding decline in the staff of the employer patent to all? Putting the mass of the people to productive work makes possible at any given moment of technical advance the existence of a given number of non-producers. These non-producers will either be dispersed in a number of packets or concentrated in one immense body, according as the profits of productive work accrue to the social or to the political authorities. The requirement of Power, its tendency and its raison d'etre, is to concentrate them in its own service. To this task, it brings us so much ardour, instinctive rather than designed that in course of time it does to a natural death the social order which gave it birth. This tendency is due not to the form taken by any particular state but to the inner essence of Power, which is the inevitable assailant of the social authorities and sucks the very lifeblood. And the more vigorous a particular power is a more virile it is to the role of vampire. When it falls to weak hand, which gives aristocratic resistance a chance to organize itself, the state's revolutionary nature becomes for the time being effaced. This happens either because the forces of aristocracy opposed to the now enfeebled statocratic onslaught a barrier capable of checking it, or, more frequently, because they put a guard on their assailant, by laying hands on the apparatus which endangers them; they guarantee their own survival by installing themselves in the seat of government. This is exactly what did happen to the two epochs when the ideas of Montesquieu and Marx took shape. The counter-offensive of the social authorities cannot be understood unless it is realized that the process of destroying aristocracy goes hand in hand with a tendency in the opposite sense. The mighty are put down - if they are independent of the state; but simultaneously, a statocrcy is exalted, and the new statocrats do more than lay a collective hand on the social forces - they laid them on the lay them each his own hand; in this way, they divert them from Power and restore them again to society, in which thereafter the statocrats join forces, by reason of the similarity of their situations and interests, with the ancient aristocracies in retreat. Moreover, the statocratic acids, in so far as they break down the aristocratic molecules, do not make away with all the forces which they liberate. Part of them stays unappropriated, and furnishes new captains of society with the personnel necessary to the construction of new principates. In this way, the fission of the feudal cell at the height of the Middle Ages released the labour on which the merchant-drapers rose to wealth and political importance. So also in England, with a greed of Henry VIII had fallen on the ecclesiastical authorities to get from their wealth, the wherewithal to carry out his policies, the greater part of the monastic spoils, stuck to the fingers of hands, which had been held out to receive them. These spoils founded the fortunes of the nascent English capitalism. In this way, new hives are forever being built, in which lie hidden a new sort of energies; these will in time inspire the state to fresh orgies of covetousness. That is why the statocratic aggression seemed never to reach its logical conclusion - the complete atomization of society, which should contain henceforward nothing but isolated individuals whom the state alone rules and exploits.

By the time Rose was subject to the Martins’ authority, in the early 1800s, South Carolinians of the upper classes had long adopted a frame of mind, often referred to as “paternalism,” that allowed them to feel that slaveholding was morally right and even benevolent. Inspired by their cultural roots in European feudalism, in which lords and serfs related on unequal but accepted terms, elites believed in the correctness of a hierarchical social structure that they understood as being not only natural but also ordained by God. To them, the world was strictly ordered, with a proper place for everyone in it: a select few at the top would dominate and take responsibility for a vast mass of dependents below. In this

Good God, Bertil, don't be daft. Peasants are like children. They love to frighten one another.

As the Russian Empire was expanding, it integrated new territories not only through russification, but also through spreading its collective Russian mentality, ready to fight with the slogan "For faith, for tsar, for Motherland". Precisely in this way and in this order, Russian government identified the values, for which the Russian people had to die. Still today, Orthodox faith is openly put forward by the Russian government as a unifying foundation for Slavic people. The tsar comes second, and Motherland lags behind: it will inevitably collapse if the tsar dies. This means the tsar has to be protected with far greater courage than the Motherland: because the Motherland is the tsar. For Ukrainians who has have never had their own tsar (we do not count princes and other local feudal lords), the Motherland, their homeland has always been more important than a foreign tsar and - which is the worse for Russia - more important than faith.

I gaze at the orchid sitting on his windowsill. It's wrapped in bamboo and tied with a purple tassel. Its yellow and green leaves are long and narrow, striped like a tiger's tail. The blooms are tiny, white, and fragrant. "Fūkiran," my father says. "Grown since the Edo Period and collected by feudal lords as gifts to the shogun or emperor." He slides the office doors closed. "I know." I smile because it's familiar. My mother has a woodblock of it above her nightstand. Neofinetia falcata.

Imperial governance was programmatic in that it was guided by coherent ideals and goals. All kings and emperors – like modern governments – had to react to circumstances and improvise, but they were not simply at the mercy of events. The difference lies in what they were trying to achieve. ‘State’ and ‘nation’ were not yet clearly delineated concepts functioning as focused policy objectives. Kings and emperors were not state-or nation-builders, because no one felt either needed building. Medieval monarchs were expected to build churches and cathedrals. Otherwise, their role was primarily to uphold peace, justice and the honour of the Empire. Changing circumstances, like violence, rebellions, or invasions, were not seen as ‘problems’ to be ‘solved’ through new laws, better institutions, or more coherent frontiers. Most of the misunderstandings surrounding the Empire’s political history stem from attempts to impose anachronistic expectations on its rulers’ behaviour. For most of the Empire’s existence, imperial governance was guided by the prevailing ideals of good kingship. Imperial and royal powers were never explicitly delineated. It was accepted by the twelfth century that the emperor possessed exclusive prerogatives (jura caesarea reservata  ) largely relating to a clearer understanding of his position as feudal overlord. Subsidiary reserved powers (jura caesarea reservata limitata  ) could be exercised with the advice of great lords. These were identified more precisely from the mid-fourteenth century and included declarations of war and the imperial ban.

The code sought to uphold accessible law, not favoring privileges by birth, religion, or superstition, nor based on local customs, exemptions, or feudal Lords. Under the penal code only true crimes, not phony offenses were outlawed. A code of civil procedure, a commercial code, a code of Criminal instructions was published, declaring the rights of citizens presumed innocent until declared guilty. It is one of the few positive documents to have influence on the rule of law to this day.

A wide, passionate mouth — a shape so wonderful that even in that strenuous moment sixteen generations of feudal privilege stirred in Lord Peter's blood.