Seriously, what some of you people are doing is painting a pretty picture of an ugly system and idolizing the past. Romantisizing the past leads in the direction of primitivism. But if you genuinely think that fuedalism was some sort of utopia of freedom, fine, go try to bring it back. But don’t complain to me when you find that your attempt fails and that you’re wasting your time.
No one has suggested that.
A lot of misinformation is in circulation regarding certain periods (e.g. Industrial Revolution.) Not all revisionism is the romanticization of harsher times.
Except that it doesn’t have that much to do with “Romaticizing”, there are many periods were people took orientation from older days. The Renaissance is such an example. In a sense the reformation was this, too. Both were not about just copying past eras or cultures. It was about finding meanings and ideas that could be adapted to the present.
The other writers are right in that there is much of disinformation about culture, society and politics of the middle ages - the Dark Ages, if you won’t. Actually Dark Ages refers to the period of ~600 to 900 - The reason being the lack of available literature from this time.Well people were rather preoccupied with warfare since the political order had to be reshaped after the Fall of the Roman Empire.
Personally I don’t think that feudalism was a more “ugly system” then i.e. our present day democracy. What interests me is the underlying social philosophy and it’s inner working. I also get the impression that you are a staunch believer in social progress in the sense that you believe that any era and its social system is always better then the prior eras and their social systems.
Concerning social orders I found an interesting program at econtalk.org: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/08/weingast_on_vio.html