What are you talking about? In communist countries the working class rules unified and unbroken! :)
True, but what I think I am poiting at is that the Church was not simply some kind of adjunct of feudalism that provided ideological justification for it. It stood largely outside of the system of lords and manors (and definitely outside of hereditary passage of property after the introduction of celibacy, which as far as I know was done for precisely this reason).
I'm sure somebody somewhere must have fleshed out the idea that the Church represented some kind of survival of the system of the Roman Empire.
I think maybe it would be profitable to compare the situation of the Church in Medieval Europe to that (historically later) of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was ground underfoot by Peter the Great and very definitely made into an adjunct of the state.
----- Original Message ---- From: Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com>
Has there ever been a society where the people at the top weren't engaged in a vicious struggle with each other? Obviously the Christian Middle Ages (or parts thereof) stand out as particularly violent, but you also have the attempt by capitalists to seize each others' markets, the struggles among the grey bureaucracy in communist countries, the famous troubles of the Roman Republic, &c. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk