By Marian L. Tupy
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
On a recent podcast, Tucker Carlson praised
feudalism as “so much better than what we have now” because a ruler is
“vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.” This romantic view of
medieval hierarchy ignores a brutal reality: For most people, feudalism meant
grinding poverty, disease, and early death.
As Gale L. Pooley and I found in our 2022 book Superabundance,
society in preindustrial Europe was bifurcated between a small minority of the
very rich and the vast majority of the very poor. One 17th-century
observer estimated that the French population consisted of “10 percent rich, 50
percent very poor, 30 percent who were nearly beggars, and 10 percent who were
actually beggars.” In 16th-century Spain, the Italian historian
Francesco Guicciardini wrote, “except for a few Grandees of the Kingdom who
live with great sumptuousness … others live in great poverty.”
An account from 18th-century Naples recorded
beggars finding “nocturnal asylum in a few caves, stables or ruined houses”
where “they are to be seen there lying like filthy animals, with no distinction
of age or sex.” Children fared the worst. Paris, according to the French author
Louis-Sébastien Mercier, had “7,000 to 8,000 abandoned children out of some
30,000 births around 1780.” These children were then taken—three at a time—to
the poor house, with carriers often finding at least “one of them dead” upon
arrival.
People were constantly hungry, and starvation was only
ever a few bad harvests away. In 1800, even France, one of the world’s richest
countries, had an average food supply of only 1,846 calories per person per
day. In other words, the majority of the population was undernourished. (Given
that the average person needs about 2,000 calories a day.) That, in the words
of the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla, gave rise to “serious forms of
avitaminosis,” or medical conditions resulting from vitamin deficiencies. There
was also, he noted, a prevalence of intestinal worms, which is “a slow,
disgusting, and debilitating disease that caused a vast amount of human misery
and ill health.”
Sanitation was a nightmare. As the English historian
Lawrence Stone wrote in his book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England
1500–1800, “city ditches, now often filled with stagnant water, were
commonly used as latrines; butchers killed animals in their shops and threw the
offal of the carcasses into the streets; dead animals were left to decay and
fester where they lay.” London had “poor holes” or “large, deep, open pits in
which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row by row.” The stench
was overwhelming, for “great quantities of human excrement were cast into the
streets.”
The French historian Fernand Braudel found that in 15th-century
England, “80 percent of private expenditure was on food, with 20 percent spent
on bread alone.” An account of 16th-century life in rural Lombardy
noted that peasants lived on wheat alone: Their “expenses for clothing and
other needs are practically non-existent.” Per Cipolla, “One of the main
preoccupations of hospital administration was to ensure that the clothes of the
deceased should not be usurped but should be given to lawful inheritors. During
epidemics of plague, the town authorities had to struggle to confiscate the
clothes of the dead and to burn them: people waited for others to die so as to
take over their clothes.”
Prior to mechanized agriculture, there were no food
surpluses to sustain idle hands, not even those of children. And working
conditions were brutal. A 16th-century ordinance in Lombardy found
that supervisors in rice fields “bring together a large number of children and
adolescents, against whom they practice barbarous cruelties … [They] do not
provide these poor creatures with the necessary food and make them labor as
slaves by beating them and treating them more harshly than galley slaves, so
that many of the children die miserably in the farms and neighboring fields.”
Such violence pervaded daily life. Medieval homicide
rates reached 150 murders per 100,000 people in 14th-century
Florence. In 15th-century England, it hovered around 24 per 100,000.
(In 2020, the Italian homicide rate was 0.48
per 100,000. It was 0.95
per 100,000 in England and Wales in 2024.) People resolved their disputes
through physical violence because no effective legal system existed. The
serfs—serfdom in Russia was abolished only in 1861—lived as property, bound to
land they could never own, subject to masters who viewed them as assets rather
than humans. And between 1500 and the first quarter of the 17th century,
Europe’s great powers were at war nearly 100 percent of the time.
Carlson’s nostalgia for feudalism is not unique on the
MAGA right. The influential American blogger Curtis Yarvin, for example,
attributes to monarchs such as France’s Louis XIV decisive and long-term
leadership that modern democracies apparently lack. But less frequently
mentioned is how, for example, that same Louis ruined his country during the
War of the Spanish Succession. As Winston Churchill wrote in Marlborough:
His Life and Times,
After more than sixty years of
his reign, more than thirty years of which had been consumed in European war,
the Great King saw his people face to face with actual famine. Their sufferings
were extreme. In Paris the death-rate doubled. Even before Christmas the
market-women had marched to Versailles to proclaim their misery. In the
countryside the peasantry subsisted on herbs or roots or flocked in despair
into the famishing towns. Brigandage was widespread. Bands of starving men,
women, and children roamed about in desperation. Châteaux and convents were
attacked; the market-place of Amiens was pillaged; credit failed. From every
province and from every class rose the cry for bread and peace.
The Great Enrichment, a phrase coined by my Cato
Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey, of the past 200 years or so lifted
billions from the misery that defined human existence for millennia. It was
driven by market economies and limits on the rulers’ arbitrary power, not
feudal hierarchy.
There are many plausible reasons for Carlson’s (and
Yarvin’s) openness to giving pre-modern institutions such as feudalism and
absolute monarchy a second look. One is a lack of appreciation for the reality
of the daily existence of ordinary people whose lives, in the immortal words of
the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Another is their apparent conviction that the United
States is, in the
words of President Donald Trump, “a failed nation.” Except that we are
nothing of the sort. The United States has plenty of problems, but the lives of
ordinary Americans in 2025 are incomparably better than those of the kings and
queens of the past. Our standard of living is, in fact, the envy of the world,
which is the most parsimonious explanation for millions of people trying to get
here.
Solving the problems that remain and will arise in the
future will depend on careful evaluation of evidence, historical experience,
reason, and hard work. Catastrophism does not help, for it rejects human agency
by declaring that the future is already decided. Hunkering down under a
protective shield of feudal hierarchy or placing our trust in a modern
incarnation of Louis XIV is no guarantee of success. We tried it before, and
the results were disastrous.
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