The refeudalization of modern capitalism

Jürgen Habermas once investigated the structural transformation of the modern public using the term ‘refeudalization’. He reconstructed how, in the course of the development of economic monopolies, pre-bourgeois forms of power again penetrated the public sphere. It is not only the fact that the social sciences today speak again of a crisis of the public sphere, however, that gives Habermas’ concept of ‘refeudalization’ new relevance. On the contrary, a social change is taking place in numerous areas of present-day society which, in the course of a neoliberal modernization of the economy, is once again re-creating pre-modern social forms, hierarchies and power structures. This does not take place as a relapse into past social forms, but as a paradoxical result of social transformations that generate the old as the new and thereby produce ‘neo-feudal’ patterns in the distribution of wealth, recognition and power. In this paper ‘refeudalization’ is presented as a key concept for understanding the development of modern capitalist societies today. It will be shown that the dichotomy of ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ forms of transformation of capitalism must be complemented by more complex models of paradoxical social change.