Word: feudally
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...reason and will. Go beyond science to politics and society: if all bodies, great and small, are subject to the same universal laws, the idea leads on to democracy (equality of all humans great and small) and the principle of universal justice. Newton's laws ousted older preferments of feudal hierarchy and magic (though Newton himself devoted frustrated years to the study of alchemy) and installed the authority of the inquiring human mind...
...French, Dunn acknowledges, faced a broader revolutionary challenge than the Americans had a few years earlier. Wresting political autonomy from a power across an ocean was not the same as toppling a thousand-year-old home-grown feudal system. But, the author argues, the French could have learned one lesson from America and thereby avoided a bloody philosophical blunder. Instead of following the Founding Fathers' careful protections of individual liberties, the French made the unity of their people the highest goal. "Curiously," Dunn writes, "all the qualities that had traditionally been attributed to the quasi-divine king--oneness, indivisibility, infallibility...
CURT FLOOD He was more successful on the field than he was in court, but when outfielder Curt Flood sued baseball in 1970 to win the right to sell his services to the highest bidder, he initiated a process that would destroy the feudal structure of pro sports. Flood lost his battle; his fellow players, in time, won the war. Those who do not thank him daily in their prayers should be ashamed of themselves...
...Census was almost completely wiped out in a fire, and Southern courthouses were burned in the Civil War. The public records office in Dublin, Ireland, was destroyed in a fire in 1922. And in China's Cultural Revolution, the centuries-old ancestor records compiled by villages were declared "feudal garbage." In India, where most vital statistics are still unrecorded, rare documents are at Hindu holy spots where priests, known as pundits, write down births, deaths and marriages. But the documents, narrow sheaves of paper tied in cloth, are crumbling from rot, and the pundits themselves are dying...
...privilege it now occupies in Western thought. It might have its roots in the medieval tradition of courtly love, which originated in southern France in the eleventh century largely as a reaction to the drabness and poverty of life at the time and to the oppressive rigidity of the feudal system. It eventually would become a justification for sexual activity outside the normative channels of marriage (see, for instance, the story of Tristan and Isolde or of Lancelot and Guinevere), something that might have motivated its subsequent popularity...