![]() In such a society, incentives to progress disappear. Financial and industrial feudalism, he thought, was now a system of precisely defined group privileges, divided among social strata as rigid as any in medieval times. ![]() It becomes simply a privilege arising out of economic concentration and government guarantee. In this situation the profit of the entrepreneur ceases to be the reward for a willingness to undertake risk and the efficient minimization of costs. Lange criticized Roosevelt’s New Deal and Keynesian intervention by arguing that such policies supported the monopoly positions of certain capitalist groups. The idea of industrial feudalism was introduced by Polish sociologist Ludwik Krzywicki (1859-1941) as a consequence of industrial cartels, with the capacity to stabilize their markets and their profit margins, at the cost of economic and social stagnation and declining opportunities for innovation and social advancement.Īmong Krzywicki’s most enthusiastic admirers was the economist Oskar Lange (1904-1965). As the distribution of wealth becomes more unequal, that property, and the credit practices associated with it, eliminate social mobility and thereby recreate industrial feudalism. In our new working paper, we extend this idea to the present day by showing how social classes are differentiated by the composition of their property. The concept and analysis of industrial feudalism emerged in Polish Marxist discussions of the 1890s in relation to the social and economic hegemony of large industrial corporations. In effect, that society loses the economic and social dynamism by which capitalism overthrew the hereditary hierarchies of feudalism. Industrial feudalism emerges as industrial society is stratified into relatively closed social classes that are defined in relation to their property or their professions. The concept of Industrial feudalism is a striking way of understanding how this situation arises even as we are offered more consumer choice and markets are liberalized. ![]() We live in an age of growing inequality, insecurity over future prosperity, and anxiety about employment and opportunities for professional advancement.
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