----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com>
But more crucial, as Sombart and everyone that came afterwards notes, was that there was no medieval history of feudal classes. Therefore there were no clearly stratified class cultures to hand down -- distinct ways of speaking and acting that you were born into -- which in European countries were passed into the new classes to give them both a much greater class consciousness. Manners were more eqaligarian and earning a living wasn't treated with contempt.
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The absence-of-feudalism argument has come under attack for a while. William Appleman Williams takes an all too brief look at the problems with such an argument vis a vis the colonies in "The Contours of American History." Karen Orren fries some pretty big fish in "Belated Feudalism" that looks at the evolution of US labor law in the context of master-servant dynamics, as does Robert Steinfeld's two volumes on the creation of free labor. Finally, James L Huston's "Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution 1765-1900 narrates the arguments on stuff like primogeniture, entail etc.and the emergence of the labor theory of property in post-revo. culture; he ends the book by saying [duh] that we now have a maldistribution of wealth every bit as absurd as the feudalism we claim to have abolished with the founding of the republic.
Ian