Word: feudality
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...flash and dazzle of its remarkable development projects, Saudi Arabia remains a feudal monarchy. Slavery was not outlawed until 1962. Murderers are still beheaded and adulterers stoned to death under Islamic law. Yet thanks to a gift of Allah?proven reserves of 150 billion bbl. of petroleum bubbling underneath the hot desert sands?this extraordinary nation is hurtling in a blink of history's eye from a medieval past toward the 21st century...
...rise to a clearer delineation between those who owned the means of production and those who did not. The peasantry and the displaced aristocracy that so often aligned with the amorphous bourgeoisie against the proletariat in times of social crisis is vanishing along with the obsolete ideas of the feudal hangover. The increasing rationalism that is intertwined with industrial capitalism allows the members of the maturing proletariat to better realize their own interests...
Until the mid-18th century, criminals were disemboweled and beaten in a ghastly revenge drama. In his own dissection Foucault shows how torture originated in feudal society: "Its ruthlessness, its spectacle ... its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system." Then, within 40 years (1769-1810), Western reformers over threw the penal catechism. An "art of un bearable sensations" gave way to "an economy of suspended rights." But Foucault argues that the real aim of the change was "not to punish less, but to punish better ... to insert the power to pun ish more deeply into...
...revolutionary sounding the first, heady, rebel call to arms of insurrectionary mass man. Using his own hyphenated emphases, Shaw describes her as a "protestant" and a "nation-alist." Joan protests against the authority of the church in favor of the individual conscience. She subverts the authority of the feudal aristocracy by proclaiming the supremacy of the nation-state. It is the love of democracy, not the love of God, which binds Joan's commoner-soldiers to the peasant-saint. It is the fear of democracy, not the fear of God, which Joan puts into the hearts of the lords...
Typically, Toffler's 90-second explication about what precipitated the transformation from feudal to industrial society would take the breath away from quite a few Harvard historians. It's simple, Toffler says, the society and economy, which was relatively easy to regulate during the feudal age, became too complex to be run by a handful of feudal barons. The inexorable trend toward modernization forced this small, powerful elite to involve more people in the decision making processes. Voila! The bourgeoisie...