Refeudalization

Last updated

In political theory, refeudalization is the process of recovering the political mechanisms and relationships that used to define feudalism. Because the term "feudalism" is slightly ambiguous, "refeudalization" is ambiguous, too.

Contents

In the modern era, the term "refeudalization" is used for policies that give special privileges to organized groups such as NGOs.

Refeudalization in 17th-century European historiography

The process of refeudalization is also used in seventeenth-century European historiography. The term was made famous by Italian Marxist historians Ruggiero Romano and Rosario Villari, to illuminate the social conditions behind the Neapolitan Revolt of 1647. The concept was influenced by Gramsci's ideas, the historiographical debates during the 1950s and 1960s that centered on Eric Hobsbawm's seventeenth century "General Crisis" as well as 1960s Italian politics. Villari used it quite specifically in reference to the increasing pressure in the six decades preceding the revolt of 1647, in which the peasantry and the lower-middle classes revolted against the feudal aristocracy and international financiers. The process was triggered by the royal state's need for money. The Spanish crown ennobled the bourgeoisie of rich merchants and financiers, who infiltrated and reinforced the noble order. Fernand Braudel found the “clearest case of refeudalization” in Spanish Naples. The monarchy had raised capital by selling feudal titles, which in the long term increased the fiscal burden that the seigneurial regime imposed on the rural poor, since the nobles were exempted from paying taxes to the viceroyal regime. Refeudalization in a more general sense has been used to explain Italy's failed transition to modern capitalism. Though Italy had pioneered the commercial revolution, feudal barons neglected business opportunities to innovate and further rationalize the processes of production.

Refeudalization in Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere

Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere is based on his research into the bourgeois class of the eighteenth century in Great Britain, France and Germany; his key work on the theme is The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). Habermas saw space that had been gained for the public around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries returning to private hands, a process which he called 'the refeudalization [Refeudalisierung] of the public sphere': 'Habermas discussed the pincer-like movement in which late modern consumer capitalism attempts to turn us into unthinking mass consumers on one hand, while political actors, interest groups, and the state try to turn us into unthinking mass citizens on the other'. [1]

Habermas's idea of the public sphere

For Habermas, the 'public sphere' is 'a space in which all citizens can critically, substantively, and rationally debate public policy' (though this does not necessarily exist in any single physical space: it can also be constituted, for example, by newspapers). [1] In its ideal form, the public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state". The public sphere is the source of public opinion needed to "legitimate authority in functioning democracy". Habermas made a distinction between lifeworld and system. The public sphere is part of the lifeworld and it is the immediate setting of the individual social actor, and Habermas opposed any analysis which uncoupled the interdependence of the lifeworld. [2]

Habermas's analysis is based on an oral bias; he believed that the public sphere can be most effectively constituted and maintained through dialogue, acts of speech, debate and discussion. In his further reflections, Habermas claims that public debate can be animated by “opinion-forming associations” which are voluntary associations, social organizations such as from churches, sports clubs, groups of concerned citizens, grassroots movements, trade unions – to counter or refashion the messages of authority. This public sphere began to form first in Britain at the end of the seventeenth century. It resulted in the Licensing Act (1695), which allowed newspapers to print what they want without the Queen’s censorship. However, there were still strict laws. But the sphere is seen as a crucial enabler for this to happen. [2]

Refeudalization of the public sphere

For Habermas, a key feature of the feudal is that small numbers of individuals embodied the public state: a king or similar officer was the realm (what Habermas called 'representative publicity'). Habermas saw the eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere as a positive contrast to this situation. But in the twentieth century, he perceived the rise of advertising, marketing and 'public relations' trying to manipulate the public and discourage critical thought, and he perceived the state, political parties, and interest groups increasingly using the same approaches to win votes. This is 'refeudalization' because 'the public sphere becomes the court ''before'' whose public prestige can be displayed─rather than ''in'' which public critical debate is carried on'. [3]

"Publicity once meant the exposure of political domination before public reasoning; publicity [here Habermas uses the English word] sums up the reactions of a non-binding goodwill. The bourgeois public sphere readopts feudal qualities in proportion to its formation by public relations [in English]: the "offering agents" display representative expenditure in front of compliant customers. Publicity imitates that aura of personal prestige and preternatural authority which the representative public sphere had once imparted.

A "refeudalization" of the public sphere must be discussed in another, more exact sense. The integration of mass entertainment and advertising, which in the form of public relations already assumes a "political" character, subjugates namely even the state under its code. Because private companies suggest to their customers in consumer decisions the consciousness of citizens, the state has to "appeal to" its citizens like consumers. Thus the public use of violence also solicits publicity.

Some recent commentators have argued that the politics of twenty-first century America, [4] [5] and the West more generally, [6] take further the trends observed by Habermas.

Refeudalization in sociology of neoliberal globalization

There is a third context which sociologists, drawing on Habermas, refer to contemporary socio-economic processes in the global economy as refeudalization. The concepts overlap with discussions of neomedievalism. The Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler uses the German expression "Refeudalisierung der Gesellschaft" to illuminate the forces behind neoliberal globalization. In his pamphlet "The Empire of Shame", he criticizes the new system of "Refeudalisierung" based on scarcity and debt. However, the concept in English is typically translated as the "new feudalization", which here means the subversion of Enlightenment values (freedom, equality and brotherhood) and the radical privatization of public goods and services. [7] [8] Comparable ideas have been developed by Sighard Neckel. [9] The historian and Director of CALAS Olaf Kaltmeier extended this approach to include political-cultural dimensions and applied it to Latin America. In doing so, he combines the extreme social polarization of the social structure with the unequal distribution of land in Latin America, spatial segregation in the form of gated communities and shopping centres (often accompanied by retro-colonial architecture), an extractivist economy with accumulation by dispossession, and a duplication of economic power through political power in the form of millionaires who, like Mauricio Macri or Sebastián Pineira, become presidents. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jürgen Habermas</span> German social theorist and philosopher (born 1929)

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Public opinion, or popular opinion, is the collective opinion on a specific topic or voting intention relevant to society. It is the people's views on matters affecting them. The term originates from France, and first appeared in the 17th century, though writers had identified the importance of the opinion of the people long before this. Prior to the advent of mass media, public fora such as coffee houses and gentlemen's clubs were used as exchanges of opinion and some reputable locations had great influence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public sphere</span> Area in social life with political ramifications

The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the people as a whole." Such a discussion is called public debate and is defined as the expression of views on matters that are of concern to the public—often, but not always, with opposing or diverging views being expressed by participants in the discussion. Public debate takes place mostly through the mass media, but also at meetings or through social media, academic publications and government policy documents.

Neo-feudalism or new feudalism is the contemporary rebirth of policies of governance, economy, and public life, reminiscent of those which were present in many feudal societies. Such aspects include, but are not limited to: Unequal rights and legal protections for common people and for nobility, dominance of societies by small and powerful elite groups of society, and relations of lordship and serfdom between the elite and the people, where the former are rich and the latter poor.

Alternative media are media sources that differ from established or dominant types of media in terms of their content, production, or distribution. Sometimes the term independent media is used as a synonym, indicating independence from large media corporations, but this term is also used to indicate media enjoying freedom of the press and independence from government control. Alternative media does not refer to a specific format and may be inclusive of print, audio, film/video, online/digital and street art, among others. Some examples include the counter-culture zines of the 1960s, ethnic and indigenous media such as the First People's television network in Canada, and more recently online open publishing journalism sites such as Indymedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oskar Negt</span> German philosopher

Oskar Reinhard Negt is a philosopher and critical social theorist. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at Leibniz University Hannover, and one of Germany's most prominent social scientists. Little of his work has been translated into English.

Discourse ethics refers to a type of argument that attempts to establish normative or ethical truths by examining the presuppositions of discourse. The ethical theory originated with German philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, and variations have been used by Frank Van Dun and Habermas' student Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lifeworld</span> Epistemological concept

Lifeworld may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given, a world that subjects may experience together. The concept was popularized by Edmund Husserl, who emphasized its role as the ground of all knowledge in lived experience. It has its origin in biology and cultural Protestantism.

<i>The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere</i> 1962 book by Jürgen Habermas

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society is a 1962 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. It was translated into English in 1989 by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. An important contribution to modern understanding of democracy, it is notable for "transforming media studies into a hard-headed discipline."

In sociology, communicative action is cooperative action undertaken by individuals based upon mutual deliberation and argumentation. The term was developed by German philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas in his work The Theory of Communicative Action.

<i>The Theory of Communicative Action</i> 1981 book by Jürgen Habermas

The Theory of Communicative Action is a two-volume 1981 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in which the author continues his project of finding a way to ground "the social sciences in a theory of language", which had been set out in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967). The two volumes are Reason and the Rationalization of Society, in which Habermas establishes a concept of communicative rationality, and Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, in which Habermas creates the two level concept of society and lays out the critical theory for modernity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Warner</span> American literary critic, social theorist

Michael David Warner is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for Artforum, The Nation, The Advocate, and The Village Voice. He is the author of Publics and Counterpublics, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, Fear of a Queer Planet, and The Letters of the Republic. He edited The Portable Walt Whitman and American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sociology of literature</span> Aspect of sociology

The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).

The salons of Early Modern and Revolutionary France played an integral role in the cultural and intellectual development of France. The salons were seen by contemporary writers as a cultural hub, responsible for the dissemination of good manners and sociability. It was not merely manners that the salons supposedly spread but also ideas, as the salons became a centre of intellectual as well as social exchange, playing host to many members of the Republic of Letters. Women, in contrast to other Early Modern institutions, played an important and visible role within the salons. The extent of this role is, however, heavily contested by some historians.

Andrew Arato is a professor of Political and Social Theory in the Department of Sociology at The New School, best known for his influential book Civil Society and Political Theory, coauthored with Jean L. Cohen. He is also known for his work on critical theory and constitutions and was from 1994 to 2014 co-editor of the journal Constellations with Nancy Fraser and Nadia Urbinati.

Public sphere pedagogy (PSP) represents an approach to educational engagement that connects classroom activities with real world civic engagement. The focus of PSP programs is to connect class assignments, content, and readings with contemporary public issues. Students are then asked to participate with members of the community in various forms of public sphere discourse and democratic participation, such as town hall meetings and public debate events. Through these events, students are challenged to practice civic engagement and civil discourse.

Public rhetoric refers to discourse both within a group of people and between groups, often centering on the process by which individual or group discourse seeks membership in the larger public discourse. Public rhetoric can also involve rhetoric being used within the general populace to foster social change and encourage agency on behalf of the participants of public rhetoric. The collective discourse between rhetoricians and the general populace is one representation of public rhetoric. A new discussion within the field of public rhetoric is digital space because the growing digital realm complicates the idea of private and public, as well as previously concrete definitions of discourse. Furthermore, scholars of public rhetoric often employ the language of tourism to examine how identity is negotiated between individuals and groups and how this negotiation impacts individuals and groups on a variety of levels, ranging from the local to the global.

In this article Jürgen Habermas, Sara Lennox, and Frank Lennox attempt to examine the notions of Habermas's thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere focusing on the development of the public sphere today. The article begins by demonstrating the idea of a public sphere, referring to it as a “concept” in which private individuals assemble to form a public body in an “unrestricted fashion”. According to Habermas, the public sphere itself is to derive from democracy. He highlights the importance of the freedom to assemble and to express opinions in an inclusive manner. The opinions on matters of general interest from a large public body require a vehicle of transmission in order to supply information and enable the possibility for societal influence. He determines that the modern means for this transmission are through media such as newspapers, magazines, television, and radio.

The European public sphere refers to the public sphere where ideas and information are exchanged by citizens of European societies that can influence the European political life. It is to have an "arena for EU-wide public discourse".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public opposition</span>

Public opposition describes a form of social activity that deliberately opposes establishment opinion in the public sphere in order to raise public awareness of topics, problems or social groups that appear to be neglected or oppressed. As with the public sphere, public opposition is in direct opposition to the private sphere — at its core, it is about occupying public spaces where people can gather and get informed. The development of various means of communication has decisively influenced the forms and possibilities of informational transfer.

References

  1. 1 2 Jamie Warner, 'The New Refeudalization of the Public Sphere', in The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, edited by Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 285-97 (p. 285).
  2. 1 2 Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962 (1990), p 292. ("The Structural Change of The Public Sphere"), translation Walter Kastorp (expressly for Wikipedia)
  3. ↑ Habermas, The Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 201, quoted by Jamie Warner, 'The New Refeudalization of the Public Sphere', in The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, edited by Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 285-97 (p. 287).
  4. ↑ Jamie Warner, 'The New Refeudalization of the Public Sphere', in The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, edited by Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 285-97.
  5. ↑ Jamie Warner, 'The Smugglers: The Rationality of Political Satire in the 2014 Elections', PS: Political Science & Politics, 49.1 (January 2016), 48-52. doi : 10.1017/S104909651500126.
  6. ↑ Alain Supiot; The public–private relation in the context of today’s refeudalization, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1 January 2013, Pages 129–145, doi : 10.1093/icon/mos050
  7. ↑ Jean Ziegler, L'empire de la honte (Fayard, 2005), ISBN   978-2213623993.
  8. ↑ Jürgen Schutte, 'Was ist: »Refeudalisierung der Gesellschaft"? Archived 2018-08-06 at the Wayback Machine ', attacBerlin (26.2.2008).
  9. ↑ Sighard Neckel, 'Refeudalisierung der Ökonomie: Zum Strukturwandel kapitalistischer Wirtschaft Archived 2020-08-09 at the Wayback Machine ', MPIfG Working Paper 10/6 (Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, July 2010).
  10. ↑ Kaltmeier, Olaf (2019). Refeudalización. Desigualdad social, economía y cultural política en América Latina en el temprano siglo XXI. Bielefeld, Guadalajara: BiUP.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.