Feudal Society and Its Culture is one of the more ambitious books Progress Publishers ever sent abroad, and one of the least polemical. It is a collaborative world-history of the Middle Ages, "written by a group of scholars from Moscow and Leningrad," edited by the medievalist Victor Rutenburg, who signs its second preface. Its subject is not a country or a century but a whole epoch taken globally: Western Europe and Byzantium, Russia, the Arab and Iranian lands, North Africa, Ethiopia, pre-Columbian and colonial America, India, China and Japan, each treated by a specialist in the region, and each treated for its society and its culture together. "The distinctive characteristic of this book," the publishers write, "lies in the fact that it presents a synthesis of social and cultural history." That aim — to write the economic history of the medieval world and its art, learning, religion and everyday life as a single story, and to do so on a genuinely planetary scale — was unusual in any historiography of the period, and the execution is frequently very good. This is a work of scholarship, and it should be read as one. Its faults are not the falsifications this series is usually obliged to name; they are conceptual, and they are inherited.
Begin, as this series always does, by dating the text rather than the spine. The copyright page reads "© Progress Publishers 1988," and the book was typeset in the USSR. But 1988 was the fourth year of perestroika, the year of the Nineteenth Party Conference, and nothing whatever of that moment has reached this manuscript. The words Gorbachev, perestroika and glasnost do not occur; neither does restructuring in its political sense, nor any reference to the Twenty-Seventh Congress; the years 1985, 1986 and 1987 are entirely absent. The latest datable reference in 232,000 words is to 1974, and the historiographical apparatus — the invocation of L. V. Cherepnin and his school on the formation of the Russian centralized state, for instance — belongs to the Soviet academy of the 1960s and 1970s. This is a pre-glasnost book in a glasnost jacket: an older manuscript, settled in the framework of the Brezhnev-era academy, that reached English translation only in 1988. Whatever loosening was underway in Soviet intellectual life by then, it did not touch these pages, and the reader should not look here for it.
What organizes the book, from the first page of the publishers' preface to the last chapter on Japan, is a single proposition: that "feudalism" is not a name for a particular arrangement of medieval Europe but a universal, law-governed stage through which the whole of humanity — or very nearly the whole — was obliged to pass. The disparaging Enlightenment view of the Middle Ages, the preface explains, has been repudiated, and "feudalism has been recognized as a natural stage in historical development." Feudalism, the editor's preface adds, differed radically from the slavery that preceded it and the capitalism that followed: "It was a necessary historical stage through which most peoples of the world have had to pass." The authority for this is stated plainly and without argument: "The theory of social formations on which Soviet historical science is based is used as the foundation for the scientific periodization of history."
That sentence is the hinge of the whole book, and it is worth pausing on. The "theory of social formations" it names is the doctrine, canonized in Soviet scholarship from the 1930s, that every society climbs the same five-runged ladder — primitive-communal, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, communist — in the same order. Within the book the doctrine is a given, a foundation, a tool of periodization applied to the evidence. It is never itself examined. Feudal fragmentation in Europe is "part of the law-governed evolution of feudal relations"; commodity production emerges "within the regularities governing its general development"; the epoch as a whole is a lawful sequence unrolling on one foundation, "the feudal mode of production." The question this series always asks — by what standard, and is the standard sound? — is the one question the book is built to foreclose. The periodization is the frame through which everything is seen, and a frame is the last thing a picture shows you.
Bound up with the stage-frame is a second inheritance: the class-struggle master-narrative. "The history of the Middle Ages is the history of acute class conflict between the peasants and the feudal lords," the preface announces, and the vocabulary bears it out — the words peasant, uprising and revolt together run to hundreds of occurrences. The feudal state "was always an instrument of power in the hands of the feudal lords and hostile to the masses of the peasants." Religion, likewise, is read as superstructure: the three great faiths "became the synthesis of and sanction for the feudal system, bestowing upon it the aura of divine authority." Some of this is simply true, and usefully said. The medieval order was a structure of domination; its lords did live off the coerced surplus of the direct producer; the Church was, among other things, an ideological pillar of that order. A history that says so is not thereby falsified. The difficulty is narrower, and it appears where the master-narrative meets the material the book is actually strongest on — the culture.
For the greater part of its length Feudal Society and Its Culture is not a demonstration of a schema but a rich, generous survey, and the credit belongs where the learning is real. The Byzantine chapter is the work of someone who knows the field intimately: it carries the reader through the iconoclast crisis, the Macedonian and Palaeologan cultural revivals, the Hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century, and the strange late flowering at Mistra where Gemistos Plethon dreamed of a Byzantium reformed on Platonic lines — and it makes the genuinely interesting argument that Byzantine art "stopped at the threshold of the Renaissance without crossing the line," pressing right up to realism and then, under the "cold winds of ascetic hesychasm," freezing. The Russian chapter is alive to its own subject's art in a way official histories rarely manage: Rublyov and Dionisy are discussed as painters, the icon treated as "an historical work" in which a people read its own sufferings and deliverance, the Italian architects of Ivan III's Kremlin named one by one. The Western European chapters move with evident authority through the Carolingian and Ottonian "renaissances," the rise of the towns and the guilds, scholasticism from Duns Scotus to Gerson, the symbolism of the Gothic, the Reformation and the Renaissance — and here the editor's own hand is visible, for the treatment of Florence, of Dante and Petrarch and Boccaccio, and above all of the Ciompi revolt of 1378, the "first proletarian uprising" as the book (citing Marx) calls it, has the vividness of a lifelong specialism.
Nor does the reach stop at Europe. The book's deliberate, and admirable, ambition is to make the medieval history of Africa, Asia and the Americas "equal participants" in a single world-historical process rather than a footnote to Christendom — and the chapters on China's poetry, on the syncretism of Mahayana Buddhism with Shinto in medieval Japan, on the art of flower arrangement, on the medieval theatre of Ethiopia, on the astronomy and architecture of the Maya, Aztec and Inca, are written with real curiosity and real information. This impulse — to treat the whole world's Middle Ages as worth serious cultural attention, and to bind social and cultural history together — is the book's genuine and lasting contribution, and it was ahead of much Western medieval scholarship of its day, which was still largely confined to Latin Europe.
It should be said, too, that the authors are not crude, and do not pretend the schema is frictionless. The publishers' preface concedes openly that "the distinctive and the common characteristics of feudalism in the East (Hither Asia, India, China and Japan) present a problem which is still widely discussed among historians," and promises that "the authors of this book have not intended to gloss over it. On the contrary, they retain a variety of approaches and opinions." That is an honest sentence, and the chapters largely honour it: the difficulties of the East are not hidden. This is the mark of scholars working in good faith, and it is why the book's central weakness is so clearly visible — because the authors themselves keep laying out the evidence that strains against their category.
Search this book for the concept Marx built specifically to describe the very societies its Eastern chapters cover, and it is not there. The phrase Asiatic mode of production occurs zero times; the word Asiatic appears only in its geographical sense ("the Asiatic continent," "Asiatic trade"). Across chapters on India, China, Japan and the Iranian and Arab lands — precisely the ground for which Marx coined the term — the category is simply absent. This is the same finding the companion introduction to A History of India in this series reached independently, and here it is generalized across half the world.
The absence is not an oversight; it is a decision taken decades before these authors wrote and far above their heads. Marx's own list of the great epochs in the economic development of society, set out in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ran: the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and the modern bourgeois modes of production. The Asiatic mode was Marx's — a society of self-sufficient village communities, with no private property in land, the state standing above the villages as universal landlord, tax and rent fused into a single levy — and he developed it in his 1853 articles on British India for the New York Daily Tribune and in his correspondence with Engels that summer. In the Soviet theoretical debates of the late 1920s and early 1930s, culminating in the Leningrad discussion of 1931, the Asiatic mode was condemned and effectively banned: it implied that much of humanity had travelled a distinct and non-progressive road, which offended both the universal five-stage ladder then being canonized and the political need to promise the colonial world a future identical to Europe's. Stalin's 1938 codification, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, fixed the five stages as the road every society walks. After that, the historian of Asia had one permitted task: to find feudalism where Marx had found something he thought was neither ancient nor feudal.
The Indian chapter of this book is the case where the strain becomes almost unbearable, and it is unbearable precisely because the author is honest. Under the heading "Indian Feudalism" he records that Indian society lacked what European feudalism had. "The hierarchical structure of the ruling class was weakly developed and during certain periods non-existent." "Revenue from the peasants was normally levied in the form of a fixed state tax." "Also in India there was no serfdom in the sense of the juridical personal dependence of the peasants on their feudal land owner." "Estate barriers in India were replaced with caste barriers." And, decisively: "The Indian form of feudalism differed from the European both in the predominance of state ownership of the land." He goes further, to the very edge of the forbidden thought: "By Indian law the ruler collected taxes only because he defended the land from foreign invasion," so that "State ownership of the land never gave the treasury the right to dispose of this land," and "nowhere in the Indian historical sources is there any document establishing the monarch's ownership of the land."
Set that inventory down and read it back: no private property in land, tax and rent merged, no serfdom, a weak or absent lordly hierarchy, the state as landlord, the self-sufficient caste-village persisting to the present day. This is the Asiatic mode of production, enumerated feature by feature, in the author's own sentences. Every diagnostic Marx used is present except the name. The scholarship arrives at the concept from every direction and then, at the last step, files it under a category it fits nowhere — "the Indian form of feudalism" — because that is the only category the schema permits. The word Marx wrote is the one word that cannot be written.
What the Indian chapter does acutely, the book does everywhere. "Feudalism in America" opens on the Aztec, Maya and Inca — societies the chapter itself describes as moving "from a primitive communal society to one based on slaveowning" and never as feudal at all, so that the chapter's real feudalism turns out to be the transplanted Iberian kind arriving with Cortés and Pizarro. (This is a nuance to the schema's credit: the pre-Columbian civilizations are not simply crammed onto the ladder.) Byzantium is granted "complete and unconditional private ownership of the land," which makes its "feudalism" look markedly unlike the Western model that gives feudalism its name. Only for Ethiopia, where medieval land grants really did resemble European fiefs, does the label sit easily. The universal category, in short, is universal by fiat; the actual societies keep exceeding it, and the book's honesty is what lets us see them do so.
The tradition from which this series writes never accepted that history is a single staircase every nation must climb in the same order and at the same tread. Its objection is not to historical materialism — the analysis of societies through their modes of production and the class relations built on them — but to the freezing of that method into a fixed ladder of obligatory stages, which is a different and lesser thing. The distinction is exactly the one the book effaces when it makes "the theory of social formations" a foundation rather than a question.
Three lines of that reply are worth pointing the reader toward. First, Marx himself, whose 1859 enumeration this book invokes as "the founding fathers of Marxism" but silently truncates: the Asiatic mode he named is the missing rung, and its suppression is not a reading of Marx but a departure from him. Second, the debate among Marxist historians in the West that ran throughout the very years this manuscript was taking shape — the exchange between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy in the early 1950s over the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) behind it — which turned precisely on the point that the transition was neither uniform nor mechanical, that "feudalism" covered widely divergent social orders, and that a schema treating the stages as an escalator flattens what most needs explaining. Ernest Mandel's Marxist Economic Theory (1968) took the further step of restoring the Asiatic mode to the analysis of pre-capitalist societies and insisting that the sequence of forms was a field of concrete study, not a template known in advance.
Third, and most directly, there is Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development, formulated against exactly the unilinear stagism that Stalinism turned into dogma. Backward societies, on this account, do not obediently repeat the advanced ones' path; they fuse archaic and modern forms into something without precedent. "To jump over intermediate stages is the way of backward countries," Trotsky wrote in his 1932 lecture In Defence of October; "the law of combined development expressed itself in the economic field at every step." That is a far better instrument for the medieval world this book describes — a world where, on its own evidence, caste-villages and state-landlordism in India, tributary empires in China, and classic vassalage in France were contemporaries that no single tread of a single ladder can hold together. Historical materialism as its founders practised it was a method of concrete analysis, sensitive to exactly these differences. The "theory of social formations" as canonized in Moscow was the method's fossil: the conclusions reached in advance, the evidence sent to find them.
There is a final, lighter observation, offered as such. This is a book fluent in the language of domination and ideology — the feudal state as "an instrument of power in the hands of the feudal lords," the Church as the "sanction for the feudal system," bestowing on it "the aura of divine authority," the whole superstructure derived from the property relations beneath it. It turns that analytic vocabulary on medieval lords and priests with skill. The one structure to which it is never turned is the periodizing authority itself — "the theory of social formations on which Soviet historical science is based," which stands outside the analysis as its unexamined foundation, the one doctrine in a materialist book that is permitted to float free of the social conditions that produced it. The point need not be pressed; the authors were medievalists, not apologists, and the silence is the schema's, not theirs.
None of this makes the book worth less than its learning. It makes it a document of constrained intelligence, which is the more valuable thing, because the constraint is legible and the research beneath it holds. A reader who knows that "feudalism" here is a mandatory label rather than a demonstrated finding can read straight through it and lose almost nothing: the Byzantine art criticism, the Russian icons, the Florentine popolo minuto, the flower-arrangers of Kyoto and the astronomers of Yucatán are all still there, described by people who cared about them and knew them well. Where the book insists on the feudal formation while itemizing state-owned land, absent serfdom and the missing hierarchy, the reader may quietly supply the category the authors were not allowed to use. The forced periodization is a tax levied on the prose. It is not a corruption of the scholarship — which is exactly why we can detect it, in the authors' own sentences, contradicting the label they were required to affix.