Anarchism Is Tribal Collectivism: Take A Look

By Walter Donway

December 18, 2021

These were the ideological bricks (e.g., reason, secularism, science) that laid the required foundation of laissez faire capitalism.

In my essay for Savvy Street (“What Did Capitalism Require to Emerge?”) I traced philosophical developments from the ancient world forward. These were the ideological bricks (e.g., reason, secularism, science) that laid the required foundation of laissez faire capitalism in a few countries in the nineteenth century.

I hope you knew that I left out a few details of 3,000 years of Western history! One such omission was the lesson of the “feudal era” (not called that at the time): Capitalism had no chance to emerge until a sufficiently powerful government had emerged. The de facto anarchism of the feudal era did not look anything like laissez faire capitalism.

My preferred historian here is the French scholar Marc Bloch (1886-1944). His monumental Feudal Society published in France in 1940 is my chief source. He specialized in medieval history, but, with the advent of World War II, turned to criticizing the mythology of an invincible France. When Paris fell to the Nazis, he fled south to Lyon to join the resistance, putting his communications skills to good use. Captured with other members of the resistance, Bloch, and some 50 others, herded to a field in Lyon, were machine-gunned by the Nazis.

Note: My narrative is presented as though I were speaking. No references are given. I have avoided historical controversies in favor of widely appreciated facts and conclusions.

Broadly speaking, feudalism (476 AD to 1543 AD) in Western Europe came into existence when governments became too weak to exercise a monopoly on the retaliatory use of force within their borders. This forced most people to bind themselves to service of a lord in exchange for his protection. Society became a hierarchy of subservience from the slave at the bottom to the king at the top.

First, a bit of background.

The Roman Empire with its appeal of the rule of law and citizenship, appeal of wealth and civilization, and power of legions marching on Roman roads had imposed its rule across Europe from the Iberian Peninsula to the Rhine River to the British Isles. The Western Roman Empire, split off from the Eastern (Byzantium), began to weaken slowly, later cataclysmically, when the populations of “barbarians” (non-Romans) between the Rhine and China—the vast Steppe—surged toward the Roman Empire for refuge from other tribes and for land, conquest, and loot.

By roughly the fifth century, the Germanic peoples were replacing Rome with barbarian kingdoms. Over centuries, barbarian rulers managed to create and defend governments somewhat on the model of Rome. The outstanding example was the Germanic Carolingian Empire (800-888) created by the great Charlemagne on the model of the Roman Empire. It was the last (and long influential) effective government in Western Europe before the onset of feudalism. To introduce an anachronism: the bottom line was—the illumination of Greek and Roman civilization had dimmed.

Some of the forces that felled the Western Roman Empire felled or weakened these later organized governments. The period that we call the “first feudal era” began with the long decline of government power across Western Europe. This meant de facto anarchy. Iberia and Italy were partial exceptions, and perhaps Britain, but across the vastness of Europe’s forests and huge “wastes” were villages, small remaining towns, where lived peasants, “lords” at various levels, chieftains, burgesses, and, above all, an emerging class: a lord’s “man” serving and being protected by the lord of a manor. Robbers, brigands, were everywhere. No one travelled without protection.

From the eighth to the tenth century, all of Western Europe lived in terror.

From the eighth to the tenth century, all of Western Europe lived in terror. Attracted by its remaining wealth, murderous, merciless marauders attacked. From the eastern Mediterranean and North African coast came the Saracen (Arab Islamic) pirates. Over the Rhine surged galloping raiders from the Steppe (loosely called Hungarians), and from the far north a Germanic offshoot, the Scandinavians, or Vikings. Not once, but repeatedly for literally centuries.

Young men, then, as some now, wanted adventure, valiant deeds, sex, loot, and status. Societies with no organized, disciplined outlet for this energy of youth always sent them marauding. The Danes and other Scandinavians, incentivized by loot, blood lust, rape, and slaves, became highly skilled in navigation and military tactics.

The Vikings looted, burned monasteries and towns and crops, raped, took slaves, and murdered both men and children too young to enslave.

They looted, burned monasteries and towns and crops, raped, took slaves, and murdered both men and children too young to enslave. The Vikings—Swedes, Norwegians, Danes—were known for dealing with children by skewering them and heaving them aside. When you understand that these assaults continued for two centuries, on every European coast from Northern Ireland to Provence, you can imagine the mindset of ordinary people.

There was no government power able to field an effective army against the invaders. Attempts occasionally did prevail on the battlefield. It made no difference; what was needed was government law-keepers at all times and in all locales. Various kings and princes had no money for that.

There was no government power able to field an effective army against the invaders.

In these centuries, few men, rich or poor, could read or write. Judges for the most part were not literate, so few records were kept. Alone, the clergy—the monks, parish priests, and bishops—were schooled and kept records. An exception was Italy, where Latin, the only written language in Europe, then, was widely known. Across the vastness of Western Europe in these centuries, people made do without writing. But by about 700 A.D., almost all were Christian, so that the church became the best-organized pan-European power. The European mind assented without hesitation to faith, fear of demons, and certainty that the soul went to heaven or hell. At the same time, almost all education, scholarship, and recording of history was made possible by the Catholic Church.

Without reliable time pieces, both the time of day and date were left to experts. The majority of contracts, drawn up by clergy, were undated. A reason that the end of the world, scheduled for the year 1,000, did not create panic is that the common man could not figure out when the year 1,000 would occur.

Money was always in short supply, and anything but the basic silver coin (denarii) came from outside Europe. And so “wages” were difficult to pay.

The overwhelming economic, social, and legal relationship in the feudal era was the “lord” and his “man.” The ordinary man desperately needed a protector; almost every powerful man needed “men” to work the lands of his manor. Nothing more continuously characterized Western Europe than the manor with its lord, tenants, and slaves.

The relationship key to the era was “homage.” A man put his folded hands between those of another man—his lord—and the two kissed on the lips. With a few exceptions, this pledged lifelong service by one in exchange for “succor”—support, protection—by the other. Except in slowly growing urban areas—the cities—no one could survive without subservience to a lord.

An “independent” individual stood naked against every marauder, brigand, and gang; there was no one to call for help but one’s kin or one’s lord. Few historians could venture an assessment of the psychology of the feudal man more credibly than Marc Bloch:

“…violence was an element in manners. Medieval men has little control over their immediate impulses; they were emotionally insensitive to the spectacle of pain, and they had small regard for human life, which they saw as only a transitory state before Eternity…”

Bloch writes that a bishop at Worms, in “Germany,” as we now call it, wrote in 1024: “Everyday murders in the manner of wild beasts are committed …. They attack each other through drunkenness, pride, or for no reason at all.” Thirty-five completely innocent people connected with his church, all innocent, had been killed that year by other serfs of the church. He wrote, “The murderers, far from repenting, glory in their crime.”

Growing fear and revulsion at this easy predation motivated a century-long “peace movement” that spread across Europe, with assembly after assembly in every country pledging peace and Christian forgiveness in dealing with their fellow men. Pledges became specific bans on a long list of behaviors. Enforcement saw, inevitably, emergence of unofficial police forces. Bloch calls this “a cry for peace—a long cry for peace … a great collective oath of reconciliation and good conduct.”

Over two centuries, the councils and leagues failed to suppress disorder. Some governments approved of them as auxiliaries to their own weak forces. Some condemned their arrogance in taking upon themselves protection for which they should look to their lords.

An exception and a bright spot, increasingly, were the towns. There, the artisans, traders, and first manufacturers fiercely defended autonomy. In fact, an individual alienated from his kin, or his lord, fled to a town. But these were targets of the invaders, too. Town after town fell to the tactics of the looting invaders. As decades wore on, most towns were smaller and above all farther inland from the coast.

In the rigidly hierarchical society of Western Europe, no group approved of merchants. To clergy, they were enemies of decency because of their usury (actually, any profit-making). To the lords, counts, and other “nobility” (as they long lobbied to be designated), they were upstarts outside of the hierarchy. To “knights,” professional fighting men who were vassals of lords, merchants were engaged in lowly work suitable to slaves. The burgesses responded by creating communes: pledging to each other mutual defense, aid, and equal rights. No word in the feudal era evoked more rage than “commune.” Why? Because this was the sole “pledge” in the name of equality, threatening an entire society predicated on the relationship of domination and subservience.

Sick of being despised and denigrated, their trade caravans swooped down upon by lords and their knights, the courts useless for contractual law, money perpetually scarce, and taxes on all sides the communes periodically revolted. But gradually their strength grew because theirs was the only wealth obtained not from agriculture (the only “honorable” money), inheritance, taxation, or looting—so towns became cities that fortified themselves, defended themselves, and settled their own legal issues. No single force did more than the cities to overcome the customs, social structure, economic weaknesses, and lawlessness of the era; they prefigured an emergent capitalist order.

By the end of tenth century, the raids by Saracens, Hungarians, and Scandinavians were over. Governments fielded standing armies. Roads were repaired and bridges thrown across every river. First in Britain, at the instigation of the great King Alfred, then elsewhere, fleets were built to intercept (and pursue) pirates.

As looting became unprofitable, the Hungarians settled down to farm in the region now known by that name. The Scandinavians, already settled in enclaves in England, France, and elsewhere, began farming. The Saracen pirates withdrew to the eastern Mediterranean and Iberia was purged of Islam.

The long anarchic horror ended only gradually when preconditions of national government emerged in the twelfth century. Marauding had been so widespread and murderous that its cessation enabled a huge jump in the European population. That meant a denser population to rally against invaders, but, more important, more taxes for stronger government.

Another precondition of competent government was literacy, either Latin or writing in the vernacular, without which extended government administration is impossible. Another was the reintroduction of concepts of Roman law via the monasteries. Not Roman law per se influenced Europe, but Roman law exemplifying consistency—elimination of contradictions—in thinking. The chaos of law by custom gradually came under discipline of the exquisite Roman example.

Governments striving for national territorial control realized that without roads there would be less trade. Nor could they project armed force across the realm. (The Roman roads did not quite live up to their legend as indestructible.) The roads were repaired gradually over decades; governments made them safer for travelers.

Another precondition: increased availability of specie that facilitated taxation, providing funds both for salaried bureaucracies and adequate military forces. Still another precondition: development of a sizeable literate elite who grasped the Roman concept of citizens bonded by common loyalty to a government—a concept apparently baffling in a society where the sole bond was a personal relationship with kin, lord, or commune.

Centuries of free-wheeling predation in Western Europe came to an end when governments committed to control defined geographical areas. These regimes became national governments—monarchies or empires—across Europe. This was the historically decisive emergence of the “nation state.”

Governments were concerned above all with curtailment of the personal “justice” of the vendetta—universal between kin groups in the early feudal period (and legal). A common recourse of the courts—“trial by combat”—ended.

Logic suggests men welcomed national governments, at first, as capstones of the lord-man hierarchy of protection-for-service. But in parts of Europe, such as Iberia, the law said that it was a “free man” who did homage to a lord—and could withdraw at any time from the relationship. As national governments (monarchies striving to militarily dominate armies of local baron) emerged, the concept of the “freeman”—now electing loyalty to a king—often prevailed.

Starting at the end of the eleventh century came the crusades, much later the ‘Hundred Years’ War, and later still the ‘Black’ Death.

It had been an age of anarchy. One of the great governments that has ever existed, deeply rooted in law, its civilizations magnificent and profoundly flawed, often loathsome, by our standards, had succumbed to forces of anarchy. Its influence died centuries later. The feudalist response was a society erected on utterly primitive “serve-me-and-I’ll protect you” relationships. Without enforcement of law by government, no individual could afford freedom. The imperative was to join a gang. Tribalism, whatever its rituals and adornments, was the only alternative to government (in fact, many “lords” had been “chieftains”).

As the second feudal era progressed, the bargain with emerging new governments was that every individual, in return for the security of law, was bound to serve in time of war. That principle of feudalism was superseded by the effectiveness of a trained, equipped, standing armed force financially supported by taxing the populace.

Greek and Roman literature were being rediscovered in Western Europe. This was the beginning of the Renaissance. The rise of a great family, the Medici, in Florence, one of the wealthiest once-despised trading hubs, catalyzed the Italian Renaissance, which in turn changed the face of Europe in coming centuries. Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1444 made the spread of the Renaissance possible.

Was this, then, civilization? The end of violence, at last? Not quite. At exactly the time of the invention of the printing press and the rise of the Medici, Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who led the French to amazing victories over English troops, was captured by the English (1431), deemed a witch, and burned at the stake.

After a thousand years that we know today as the feudal era, men rediscovered freedom under law. Only law, enforced by acknowledged and adequately funded government, created a sphere for the individual protected on all sides from the enemies of the mind—from what Ayn Rand called the “mystics of muscle.”

The end of feudalism freed men in Western Europe from mystics of muscle (force and violence) and began to break the grip of mystics of the mind (faith).

The winner, only gradually, after hard-won battles, was the individual’s reason. We call this the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Age of Science, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason.

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About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here

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