An interesting article that, despite its status as a classic, I hadn't read before. Brown's central point - that the word feudalism has been too broadly applied and communicates a sense of uniformity where there was in fact a broad diversity of practices is clearly correct. I do, however, think she a bit too easily dismisses some of the counter-arguments. While we do generally want to aim for precision as historians, there can be value in talking about broad concepts that are too broad to really capture the specifics of a particular system but are nonetheless useful.

Take by example the topic of a recent AMA on AskHistorians - Empire. Empire is a concept that has been used in so many different concepts that to simply say "Russia was an Empire" isn't really to say much of anything specific about Russia at all. Replace Russia in that sentence with any given empire you want. Nonetheless, there actually is something useful about the concept - relationships of power, geographic relationships ("center" and "periphery"), etc. I've often quoted Mark Beissinger on this because I tend to think he got it right when he was writing about the concept of Empire in relationship to the Soviet Union. Rather than getting hung up definitions, he says why don't we consider this:

“Taking empire seriously as a case of ‘family resemblance’ rather than an instance of ‘conceptual stretching,’... impels use to be attentive to the specific ways in which the concept has been redeployed in the Soviet context.”

He adds:

“the task of the analyst should not be to provide a definitive answer to whether the Soviet Union was or was not an empire in some integral or essential way. Rather, what needs to be explained is why ‘the worlds first post-imperial state’ was vulnerable to framing as empire.”

Mark R. Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance’” Slavic Review Vol. 65, No 2 (Summer 2006), 298 and 302.

I think the same kind of approach is useful when using broad, far-reaching conceptual frameworks or in this case "constructs." Feudalism is a construct that doesn't really do a lot of work by itself. The extent to which it is used as a single explanatory word is the extent to which is mostly useless in precisely the way that Brown describes. However, the extent to which we can reframe our questions to ask why it appears to be a compelling construct and why certain features of (let's just say) European societies over many hundreds of years have been labeled as such even in spite of more historically specific analysis makes it a somewhat useful framework for discussing both similarity and difference. The same could be said for many other constructs - Democracy, Communism, Christianity, etc. When they become essentialized (Brown right criticizes this as Platonism in the article) they do become at best shortcuts for some meaning a scholar has in mind and at worst a lazy way to avoid having to define something too closely, both of which have the potential to mislead especially general audiences.

At the same time, to insist on one, single, clear definition of something like "feudalism" as the necessary prerequisite to use the term at all is I think making a similar mistake of essentializing. I think in the context of the historiographical argument that Brown is making her explicit disdain for the term is, however, reasonable. She seems to view that term as analytically limiting the historiography. Medieval Europe is mostly outside of my expertise, but I do wonder if the term could, rather than being abolished, be used analytically to illustrate precisely the differences and diversity that were present in Europe during that time period to a general audience. I think it might be possible if historians of that era were to embrace Beissinger's ideas about family resemblance that I quoted above. But I'm no expert on the more recent historiography on this topic - so maybe they already have!

A few points.

One of the biggest problems I see consistently in history is that it doesn't take itself seriously or analytically enough. Too often the practice of history seems to veer more towards literary criticism than towards an expansive analytical discipline which itself encompasses subjects as difficult and wide ranging as sociology, psychology, economics, technology and its application with respect to society, cultural archaeology and history, and so much more. I have more of a science background so to me when I see "theories" that aren't well defined, aren't falsifiable, don't have a well defined scope, and don't clearly make predictions I tend to think that these are just casual conceptions loosely bandied about or, worse, the work of pseudo-intellectual dilettantes (which, to be quite honest, there is no shortage of in the realm of history).

While I tend to favor a lot of what this essay has to say in regards to the weaknesses of the concept of feudalism I find it is lacking in several regards. One is that it is very much a literary critique, amounting mostly to a litany of what different people said in the past, rather than a hard hitting analysis of historical facts and how the concept(s) of feudalism does or does not fit them. Also missing is a suitable set of replacements for the concept, or even a framework with which to handle the relevant ideas. In the face of a void when it comes to discussing what often comes under the subject of "feudalism" nothing is offered. This, to me, seems a significant weakness. As there must be some model, methodology, or synthesis that is helpful in understanding the components of, say, European life, government, and culture in the middle ages. Most people, and most historians as well, intuitively understand that there are elements of commonality and similarity there which should be explored and should fall under some model that can help understand them, even if that model is very much different from the poorly defined and inaccurate model of "feudalism".

Additionally, there's a very big subject that hasn't been well addressed by theory so far as I can tell, though has been addressed by fiction in numerous aspects, many times directly. For lack of a better term I'll call it: the game of power. George R.R. Martin calls it "The Game of Thrones", Robert Jordan called it "The Great Game" or the "Game of Houses", the TV series "The Wire" calls it simply "The Game", others might term it "the law of the jungle" but that's significantly inaccurate (it's not mere anarchy). In modern times we're more familiar with the rule of law as a fundamental part of day to day life, but the difference between "the law" and "power" has historically been a lot more muddy. One of the big reasons why fictional explorations of medieval-style or criminal organizations (whether it's Game of Thrones, The Wire, Godfather, or what-have-you) is because they explore this familiar yet unfamiliar game of power. What does it mean to rally forces to your cause, or fail to do so? What are the consequences of breaking an oath of support or an alliance? How does one "play the game" and attain or maintain power without losing their life or their power-base? Historically you see the dynamics of this game again and again. You see instances of ruthless power mongering where there's a tendency toward purging or casting out potential rivals and/or those who are insufficiently loyal, in settings ranging from medieval kingdoms to organized crime to communist regimes to the boardrooms and executive leadership of modern multi-national mega-corporations.

To bring this more to the subject at hand, one thing that people often don't understand about the medieval world, in Europe and elsewhere, is how much of it is a blending of law and raw power. We tend to think of things like organized crime as outside civilized society, but for a considerable amount of history that sort of thing was just part and parcel of society and governance. It's not at all surprising that a modern remake of the pseudo-historical setting of noble families in Italy in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (Baz Luhrman's 1996 film adaptation) would visualize them as essentially competing mafia families/gangs. The difference between gang and local government was often non-existent historically, with many fascinating implications. Unfortunately, these dynamics are rarely explored from a theoretical perspective. To me it seems that so much of the study of "feudal systems" is in fact fumbling attempts to come to grips with this idea of the "game of power", which I think should be explored independently (though I have little hope of that, for the reasons outlined above).

I thought it was very interesting that the author included the example of Japan in the overuse of using feudalism to describe a political situation. When I took Japanese history classes in university, it seemed like the professor and the texts we read tried to use as many European terms to describe the situation in Japan, like feudalism and different noble titles. It makes me wonder how Japanese students are influenced by these ideas, if they are taught in such a way that paints Japan as being very similar to Europe.

Full disclosure: I am a medievalist and I don't use the F word (other than when mentioning the 'feudal revolution' aka 'feudal mutation' which in our trade is sort of a term for a particular theory [1]).

What I find most intriguing is how far apart various national traditions, for want of a better word, of historiography remain to this day. The English and American 'schools' seem to emphasise feudalism from more of a legal point of view (or am I reading this wrong?) whereas most scholars on the continent were more interested in the economic side of the question. You wouldn't know just from reading Brown's article, but 'feudalism' is a central term in Marxist theory that was an immense influence on scholars in countries like post-war France, for example. So I was quite amazed to find a theory piece on F. that never mentioned Marx, even in passing. But then again, I wasted the best years of my life on reading probably more French theory than any sane person should have ))

All in all, F. is just another concept in social sciences that tells us more about the particular period and culture when it was coined and elaborated than about the period that it purports to help study. Which sort of makes it pretty strange to compare F as seen by Maitland and Duby without regard to context. If you read French, there is [this 1990 article by Alain Guerreau in Annales] (http://www.persee.fr/doc/ahess_0395-2649_1990_num_45_1_278827#ahess_0395-2649_1990_num_45_1_T1_0139_0000) where he traces the emergence of feudalism as a concept in the age of Enlightenment and the economic and political realities of the day (debates on property rights, anticlericalism, etc) and its evolution over the following 200+ years.

[1] You would not know it from reading the piece but Brown's opening remark on Bisson might be an allusion to this debate on whether there was this supposed breakup of public order in some regions of Western Europe in the 11th century. 'Feudal mutation' only became a term after Brown wrote this.

This isn't exactly relevant, but I was wondering if it is common for papers to be so... bitchy?

The author spends a lot of time explaining why other people are wrong using not-so-subtle barbs like

Maitland's tolerance for unresolved contradictions was high.

Obviously, the point of this paper is to discuss what other historians have to say on the matter- I was just a little surprised at the tone and I wondered if anyone could weigh in on how that style of writing is perceived in the community?

Once again, when the word European is used, it means England and France, with some small remarks towards HRE. To this article's credit, it at least specifies western Europe, but still, little mention of Iberian peninsula, scandinavian kingdoms or Italy.

I don't dispute that there is value to be found in some overarching concepts like feudalism, but the chief problem with feudalism is twofold:

1. no one seems to agree even remotely on what the definition should be, and ends up defining his own version of it. Call me silly, but I think it'd be far more useful to use a new term there (if nothing else, you'd help to avoid reader confusion), or to use a descriptive term (fief-based monarchy, or fief monarchy, perhaps?).

2. public at large has encountered the term and misunderstood it thoroughly. This is a serious problem, unlike what some more academic-oriented people would have you believe (I encountered the attitude of "eff the public, they're morons" pretty damn often) - gripe all you want about middle ages being misrepresented in media, but who is to blame for that if not the historians who refuse to crawl out of their offices to talk to the unwashed masses? This attitude of "if it isn't in academia, it doesn't exist" is why most historians keep saying utter bullshit about, say, swords, but that's another matter entirely.

In my opinion, fedualism needs to go the way of the broadsword: the term became too corrupted and generally misunderstood to be useful. I think that something should take its place to describe the government system of Anglofrench sphere of European middle ages, just give it a fresh name. Several somethings are probably in order here, actually.

After all, several people here said that students going into history have to be essentially re-trained in what the term means - that right there is a waste of time.

And if some new terms do emerge, we should be pretty clear about them being modern classifications and constructs - I keep spending roughly an hour or two every weekend explaining just this when someone asks what a bastard sword really is (the one to blame for bastard sword popularity and confusions is, of course, John Snow - not surprising that he couldn't explain the difference himself, he knows nothing, after all).