On Feudalism and Science Wars

It is a familiar fact from philosophy of science that often highly specialized sub-fields of the same discipline or different disciplines will use the same word for slightly different phenomena or concepts. This is even so when scientists may believe they are tracking the same concept across different fields or when the disciplinary specific terms descend from the same theories and practices in the past. The best such documented cases involve the ways there are really quite distinct, although often partially overlapping gene concepts in the bio-medical sciences. What’s especially nice about the case of genes is that the history of reflection on this phenomenon is itself quite old and often gets rediscovered. My first awareness of such cases involved a reading group on the use of game theory in different social and life sciences back in the 1990s.

As regular readers know, I tend to think of synthetic philosophers as well situated to diagnose such cases and to help mediate among them, where that is necessary. (Often there is no such necessity at all!) Today’s post is on an adjoining phenomenon. For, sometimes synthetic philosophers are late on the scene! [Of course, synthetic philosophy is not copyrighted anyone can claim to be one.]

Historical Political Economy (HPE) is a field that aims to “build connections between social scientists and historians.” I learned this from an entertaining post by Mark Koyama (GMU), who understands himself also as contributing to HPE. I assume HPE is especially interested in building connections between political economists and historians. That’s actually itself a crowded area, which is also occupied by people who align with PPE or political science or economists that draw on cliometrics. But arguably also some archeologists and anthropologists (think of David Graeber and David Wengrow). Koyama mentions an exemplary paper in the field that was published in a flagship political science journal (APSR) and he himself advertises a paper published in a distinguished economics journal (Economic Theory).

Now, the issue Koyama confronts is that in his own area of HPE the concept ‘feudalism’ helps generate quite useful research problems and results. But, as he notes, that concept has been under attack among medieval historians since Susan Reynolds (1994) Fiefs and Vassals. Back in the day I was alerted to this literature through the eminent scholar, Julie Klein.

To simplify Reynolds’s position (this is not Koyama’s version), the concept ‘feudal’ is of relatively late coinage (late 16th century) used initially by lawyers who were back-projecting the documented practices in a limited area (Lombardy) to a wider and historically more expansive area of Europe. But through these lawyers feudalism found its way into political economy (and a host of other early modern theories) and eventually ended up playing a non-trivial role in Marxist thought, too. The claim is not just that feudalism is anachronistic; rather focusing on fiefs and vassals simply does little justice to historical practice.

So, for example, when qua Adam Smith scholar I write about Smith’s views on Feudalism there is no problem. But were I qua historian of philosophy or qua historian of economic thought or qua skeptical liberal political theorist to take Smith as a starting point to reflect on the nature of feudal times, I may not only get the data wrong (Smith’s data are dated by now), but I may just end up mis-characterizing events in a misleading fashion according to the historian.

Now, according to Koyama historians have reached the point that the use of ‘feudalism’ (and its cognates) is itself becoming a sign of lack of expertise or methodological ineptitude (or bad popularization). As he puts it cutely, “feudalism began to drop out of scholarly usage among historians. It became the F-word.” I have not encountered this myself but it strikes me as plausible (especially because I am familiar with the phenomenon in different context).

Now, since HPE is constituted by the aim to build connections with the historians it can’t simply ignore the historians. But since Koyama identifies himself as a social scientist, he doesn’t want to give the historians a kind of legislative or property right over the use of ‘feudal’ and its cognates; as he puts it, “we cannot be hostage to scholarly fashions in another field.” I think the use of ‘fashions’ here is a bit of wishful thinking. Right now there is no reason to assume that the historians will return to the concept, even if it may end up being useful in other fields. And that’s Koyama’s ultimate justification: it’s interesting to his intellectual community. Of course, there is a risk that HPE can’t continue talking with historians, and so may end up having to change its aspirations.

There are historians of philosophy, who sometimes try to settle internal debates through an appeal to ‘what real historians do.’ Let’s leave aside that such a claim is usually mediated through purportedly canonical claims/representations of folk who may not be seen as mainstream historians by the rest of the history profession. (Not to mention that historians actually have a wide diversity of methodological practices and historiographical stances.)

If you want to see the kind of heat that such talk generates in practice, I encourage you to look at the responses from historians of philosophy in response to Dmitri Levitin’s polemical work on Newton and the history of science (see Stephen Gaukroger in TLS; Katherine Brading in History of European Ideas; or the introduction to my Newton’s Metaphysics.)

Somewhat more annoyingly, when one reflects on what is said about ‘what the real historians do’ one usually finds a bit of long forgotten philosophy that was incorporated into historiography when it seemed convenient. I am not myself partial to the thought that now discarded, or forgotten, philosophy is necessarily bad philosophy. (The real intellectual problem is that it is not evaluated as philosophy, a point Daniel Dennett used to make regularly in response to scientists ill-judged criticisms of philosophy.)

And, yet, my last remark might make one think that when it comes to such cases one (let’s call it) mother-discipline must be in the right. And, surely, when it comes to what happened in the past history must be the mothership? And, yet, by their own lights, feudalism was initially a legal concept and then found its way into the science of the legislator (i.e., political economy). So, maybe first possession gives the property right in the concept? In fact, one can easily see that different disciplines will have different kinds of theoretical resources to begin to make a case for themselves as legislator or property owner (notice the mixed metaphors) about the proper use of a concept.

And, indeed, sometimes a rather hegemonic discipline can bully adjoining fields into a particular kind of use of a term because it fits their own conceptual scheme best. But in practice, science and scientists are people and so opportunistic; and they will use what works best for them in their own fiefdom.