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The Right Kind Of Feudalism

THE RIGHT KIND OF FEUDALISM

An article by Professor Mark Harrison, Department of Economics

On October 7, 2011, ten years after the coalition’s invasion of Afghanistan, President Karzai lamented the failure to create personal security for Afghan citizens. In this article, written in January 2002, Professor Mark Harrison argued that what Afghanistan needed was “the right kind of feudalism”. Is it now too late for Afghanistan to find some kind of peace?
Soldiers

It might be thought that what Afghanistan needs is a powerful dose of democracy and liberal capitalism. This isn’t going to happen, at least not for a century or so. For a start, take democracy. We think of democracy as “majority rule”. But majority rule by itself is not enough. It’s also important that the majority doesn’t rule by exterminating minorities. In a democracy, minorities have rights that cannot be overridden: rights of free speech, criticism, and opposition. In Afghanistan there are many minorities, but there is also too much hatred and there are too many guns for any minority to be sure of these protections.

Then take capitalism. For a capitalist market economy to work ownership rights must be taken for granted most of the time. Business grinds to a halt if you have to spend all your time guarding your property with guns, or paying lawyers or bribing officials to get what you’re due. If warlords, thieves, or bureaucrats take a cut too frequently, economic life will slow down or come to a near stop. Too much of a cut and the only activity that’s left is when people grow their own food and then hide it until they can eat it. Afghanistan has already come to this.

Feudalism is the best that Afghans can hope for right now. Feudalism emerged in Europe from the Dark Ages, when the costs of fighting became so heavy that warlords got together and chose rulers to keep order among them. The result was a more stable form of society in which everyone had prescribed rights and responsibilities and everyone knew their place. In fact, everyone was fixed in place: peasants in their villages, squires in their manors, monks in their monasteries, kings in their courts. The farmer served the noble by providing him with food and labour. The noble served the king by providing him with taxes and men. Kings and nobles provided justice and protected those under them. As a result, economic progress became possible. Feudalism of the right kind proved prosperous and stable, and left monuments of art and culture that are still admired and loved after many centuries.

A thief who stays in one place and settles down is better than one who plunders and moves on.

It’s true that feudalism was an unfree society. People could not choose where to live, what to believe in, whom to serve, or with whom to trade. Peasant revolutionaries saw it as organised robbery. Women and children were subjected to domestic tyranny. Yet it was not the worst of all possible worlds. For what feudalism restricted first of all was the universal freedom of each to rob and kill all others.

The late American historian Mancur Olson put it like this: such rulers are thieves, but a thief who stays in one place and settles down is better than one who plunders and moves on. The reason is that the thief who settles and rules the territory around him has an interest in its prosperity. He protects the people under him in his own self–interest, because they are his assets. To enlarge his own revenues he gives them legal rights and provides them with services to encourage the economic activity that he can tax. Thus as European society was stabilised on feudal lines, dukes and kings built roads and towns, provided schools, and organised trade. They taxed the trade, which was bad, but they prevented others from taxing or robbing it and this at least was good. They spent heavily on armies and navies; they also patronised the arts and sciences. They provided law: the laws were biased in their favour, but at least there were laws, not just the law of the jungle. Even the hereditary character of the lords and monarchy, which now seems laughably antique, had an important function. By agreeing to the hereditary principle, the nobles gave incentives even to a dying ruler to care about the stability and prosperity of the kingdom he would bequeath to his children, and ensured that the ruler’s death would be followed by an orderly succession, not civil war.

The Afghan warlords need to agree some rules of mutual self-restraint. Everything must start from this. Otherwise there will be no rules at all and Afghanistan will return to civil war; or a dictator will emerge to restrain the warlords by force, and Afghanistan will have to undergo a new tyranny.

The Magna Charta stopped the king from robbing, imprisoning, and killing without lawful reason

It was important for European countries that their feudalism was of the right kind. The ruler had to accept limits on his power in relation to both the nobility and all citizens. In England the king’s responsibilities were agreed among the nobles and written down in the Magna Charta of 1215 which also set out principles of justice, ownership, and trade. The Magna Charta stopped the king from robbing, imprisoning, and killing without lawful reason. The result was that the English monarchy became more pluralistic than tyrannical. The state and religion, although not fully separate, at least retained separate powers. Women had some rights, although fewer than men. There was a Parliament, although at first it was only for the nobles.

Is feudalism really the best that Afghans can hope for? I do not mean that we should silence Afghan democrats when they ask for elections or Afghan women when they demand education and a visible role in society. Part of the deal should be their right to speak and be heard. But we should not blame Afghan rulers who do not deliver this immediately and in full. There are worse things they can do, such as return Afghanistan to a perpetual state of internal warfare.

Mancur Olson also wrote that democracy had the best chance to evolve when it was hard for one ruler or group to impose their will on all the others, leading to an absolutist dictatorship. To encourage power-sharing, and make it difficult for new big or little tyrants to emerge, we should distribute aid to projects and communities that cross the boundaries of each warlord’s domain, valley by valley. Perhaps a period of enlightened, pluralistic feudalism may then permit Afghanistan to evolve over the next few centuries into a more decent place for its citizens to live.

Mark Harrison is a Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick and a research fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. He has written or edited a number of books including Guns and Rubles: the Defense Industry in the Stalinist State, published in 2008 in the Yale-Hoover series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War; The Economics of World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and The Economics of World War II (Cambridge, 1998). His articles have appeared in leading journals of comparative economics, economic history, and Russian studies.

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The Right Kind Of Feudalism

THE RIGHT KIND OF FEUDALISM

An article by Professor Mark Harrison, Department of Economics

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