Category Archives: History

Harold Perkin, Donald Trump, and the Age of Corporate Neo-feudalism

1 Jun 2026 By in History, Ideas Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Satirical cartoon from Puck's magazine in 1885, depicting a handful of powerful men carving up a continent and all its goodies.

It must have been in the late 90s. I was living in Hyde Park, and a friend invited me to a private lecture that Harold Perkin, a distinguished British historian, was giving. Perkin, who died in 2004, was pretty much the father of English social history. He was the very first person hired in the British university system to teach the history of society. His main scholarly work, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, established his interest in how industrial forces impact national characteristics such as class. Perkin’s passion for this subject had burned unabated since the book was first published in 1969.

The Perkin I saw was elderly, but his ideas were fresh and forward-looking. Now at the end of his career, his thoughts were trained on modern capitalism and its capacity to overwhelm political systems, impairing the enhanced freedom and power that individuals have enjoyed since the birth of market economies. Essentially, Perkin believed that contemporary global capitalism and its leaders represented an engrossing, trans-national system that no nation-state could match. He saw the rise of a hyper-wealthy elite as transforming society in ways that would impoverish and limit the majority. This was to be the subject of a book, one that Perkin get to write before he died.

The historical process whose implications Perkin had begun to lay out is now being felt across American society. The internet, the rise of real-estate investment “trusts,” the wealth gap, the economic dominance of a handful of monopolistic tech companies, the growth of cryptocurrencies, and, finally, AI: these developments and the people behind them are dictating the course of the United States. This new capitalist formation runs according to its own rules, which many of us lack the deep expertise to understand or discuss. Since Perkin’s time, this many-sided process has been given a name: corporate neo-feudalism.

Here are the hallmarks of corporate neo-feudalism, according to Google AI:

  • Extreme stratification, with a tiny elite commanding many essential resources and a majority owning nothing.
  • Rent-extraction and the development of a rentier class: corporations do not transfer ownership of goods or technology to individuals, instead requiring them to rent access to essentials such as software, information, and utilities.
  • Coercive legal agreements that blur and erode the individual’s rights of ownership, free speech, and privacy, such as the contracts that come with electronic devices, smart appliances, and cable TV.
  • A subversion of democratic power, whereby corporate interests pour so much money into lobbying and other forms of political patronage that citizens’ needs are irrelevant, their distinct interests ignored.
  • The privatization of essential “public goods,” such as information, health care, and household utilities, so that, to subsist, citizens must pay what corporations demand or go without, creating a perpetual dependence on self-interested capitalistic entities.
  • Arguably, these developments could reduce ordinary people to the status of serfs, by whittling away their capacity for truly “free” expression, upward mobility, or agency. Existence, independent of what corporations supply, becomes impossible, unthinkable. Essentially, tech is birthing new means of capital production–new, wealth-producing “tools” absorbing the resources of all for the benefit of a few.

The paradigm of corporate neo-feudalism is extraordinarily useful, even if it doesn’t hold true in all its details, and even if citizens remain convinced of their undiminished independence—for now. Corporate neo-feudalism gives a name to the changes Americans see taking place around them, as when local governments take the side of deep-pocketed corporations to create AI data centers; or when President Trump talks about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of respecting it as a Palestinian homeland.

In general, we can see how “corporate neo-feudalism” describes the types of people and interests that organize the president’s ambitions, policies, and world-view. He identifies with a hyper-wealthy elite who are birthing a new sort of mass society. He wants to be a respected leader among those “geniuses” intent on engrossing all the world’s goodies and creating new forms of wealth and money, without respect for niceties like Constitutional government, the health of the planet, or the people’s will. Trump is using the presidency not just to add to his fortune (initially based on old-fashioned real-estate), but to catapult himself upward into a nose-bleed social class, where his peers are not republicans but free (rogue) agents like Musk, Altman, MBS, Putin, and Xi. To Trump, enriching himself and cementing his position within this new world order matters much more than his fellow-citizens do. Trump consistently looks past the nation-state, and cares not a jot if, in the eyes of Americans, his actions are thoroughly corrupt. A trans-national miscreant, Trump knows he can easily transcend our rule of law.

This new economic profile of the US matters because our republican form of self-government pre-supposes widespread independence and prosperity. American government has a circular quality, in that a big part of its purpose has always been to create a populace that is educated, capable, and prosperous, because it is from the people that each generation of leaders must rise. Citizens must be autonomous, discerning, and well-informed to be self-governing; if they are consigned to a dependent, servile class instead, the future of American federalism will be bleak indeed.

When Trump promised the nation a “Golden Age” in his second inaugural, was it “corporate neo-feudalism” that he had in mind? This term, along with Trump’s fondness for tariffs and other grandiose qualities, recall the Gilded Age, that glitzy, vulgar period following the end of Reconstruction (1876) and the waning of the idealism of the Civil War. The late-nineteenth century was characterized by revolutionary innovations (think railroad empires, steel manufacture, the birth of oil, the use of telephone and telegraph, and the commodification of agriculture), which, in turn, generated great wealth disparities, political corruption, and a long stretch of low, lost politics. Captains of industry amassed unimaginable fortunes, running roughshod over flat-footed officials and callously exploiting the powerless with impunity. The political mind of America just couldn’t keep up. Will this be the case in the Golden Age, too?

Image: Fred Opper’s 1882 illustration for Puck,
“Monopoly Millionaires Dividing The Country,”
from this source.

Washington Liberates New York City

9 Sep 2025 By in History, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , ,
A historical illustration depicting George Washington's triumphant entry into New York City on November 25, 1783, with a crowd of people celebrating and an American flag waving.

This print from the mid-nineteenth century is a vivid reminder that George Washington had a pre-history with New York City, prior to his 1789 presidential inauguration at Federal Hall. The print commemorates “Evacuation Day,” when, on November 25, 1783, Continental troops under General Washington entered the city in triumph, officially marking the end of its occupation by the British during the Revolutionary War. Given that the British had controlled the city for seven years, ruling it under martial law, the rejoicing was general and profound. New Yorkers continued to celebrate Evacuation Day for over 100 years.

This representation of “Washington’s Triumphal Entry Into New York,” was the work of Christian Inger, a German emigre who settled in Philadelphia in the 1850s and worked as a lithographer.

Image: courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

The Great Seal on Federal Hall

19 Aug 2025 By in History, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , ,
Engraving of the Federal Edifice in New York, showcasing its front façade with a clock tower and intricate architectural details.

In 1789, Philadelphia’s Columbian Magazine published this “View of the Federal Edifice in New York.” It’s one of a handful of extant contemporary depictions of the defunct Federal Hall, showing its location at the T where Nassau intersects with Wall Street in Manhattan’s First Ward. This engraving captures the appearance of the building in the year George Washington was inaugurated on its balcony.

The most notable feature of the print is its rendering of the Great Seal, particularly the rendering’s inaccuracy. Here, the eagle rises above the shield and a free-floating olive branch: this is substantially wrong. (cf. the previous post on the Great Seal). The artist either drew the Seal wrong from memory or neglected even to study this feature of the building in person. Maybe he copied from another artist. It’s also possible that the Great Seal was improperly rendered on the building itself.

In any event, this illustration is a significant reminder that the Great Seal was newly invented and its features not well-known to Americans when federalism under the Constitution got going in 1789. It also highlights the ambiguity of much documentary “evidence.”

Image: from this source

Charles Thomson and The Great Seal of the United States

12 Aug 2025 By in History, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , , , , ,
An artistic depiction of a bald eagle with outstretched wings, holding a shield featuring three horizontal stripes and a branch in one talon. Above, there is a banner reading 'E Pluribus Unum' and a starry sky.

Judging from depictions of Federal Hall that I’ve been discussing, some version of the Great Seal of the United States crowned Federal Hall. Every view of the long-defunct building shows some version of the Great Seal as the dominant feature of the pediment. This is noteworthy, because, when the pediment was created in 1788, the “Great Seal” itself was just a few years old.

The tricky business of coming up with symbols to express American nationhood began during the Revolution (1775-1783), when officials of the Continental Congress felt the practical need for a iconography to represent unity. The symbols they came up with were often clumsy: first stabs at projecting power, capturing the unique identity of the United States, and distinguishing their new self-governing nation from old European monarchies. This new symbolic language, marking the states’ rapid transition to a nation, appeared on currency, official documents, flags, military insignia, and eventually buildings.

Charles Thomson, a Philadelphian who served as Congress’s secretary, designed the Great Seal in collaboration with William Barton, an attorney who had made a study of heraldry. According to historian Ben Irvin, in his Clothed In Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors, Thomson and Barton were the first to come up with the combination of the eagle and the shield, which are the essence of the Great Seal. Congress officially adopted the seal on June 30, 1782.

Thomson and Barton’s design incorporated much of the iconography popularized during the war, including the red and white stripes on a field of blue; the number thirteen, as manifest in the bundle of arrows; and the ‘new constellation’ of stars. The eagle, however, was an innovation, and in certain respects a curious one.

Irvin goes on to explain that, in 1775, Ben Franklin had issued a three-dollar bill as Continental currency, depicting Britain as an eagle and America as “a weaker bird.” Franklin despised Thomson and Barton’s choice of the eagle to depict the newly independent nation, arguing that the eagle was a scavenger, “a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly.” Should the new United States be depicted as predatory?

Others, however, approved of the eagle, viewing it as “a symbol of empire.” Even then, some Americans were thinking of the United States in imperial terms. As for Barton, who first proposed the eagle, he assigned it a different, very specific meaning. Barton explained that his eagle was the “Symbol of supreme Power & and Authority, and signifies the Congress.” Note that the official seal predates the Constitution and the creation of the presidency.

Despite early federalism’s structural weaknesses, the Great Seal signified the aspirations of a new, self-governing people—to rule themselves through the mechanism of Congress. It has proved an enduring ideal. This aspiration was integrated into the face of the building where the First Congress met. It’s something to ponder as we gaze on the modern version of the Great Seal of the United States, prominently displayed on the dais where President Trump stands.

Image: from this source.

Holland’s Street View of Federal Hall

5 Aug 2025 By in History, The Social Life of Politics Tags: , , , , ,
A historical illustration of Federal Hall in New York City, featuring various architectural styles and buildings lining a street, dated 1827.

This is an important late 18th-century view of New York’s Federal Hall, showing the style of adjacent buildings. Tiny print on the lower left side explains that this lithograph, published by C. Currier, was based on a drawing by George Holland made in 1797. The process of lithography came into use only several decades later, facilitating the mechanical production of works in color. This one was made by Charles Currier, who, like his more famous brother Nathaniel, was a skilled printer whose work met the public’s appetite for American scenes.

Here, the colors of the print accentuate the contrast between Federal Hall’s refined facade and the more utilitarian mercantile establishments that typified the neighborhood around Wall Street.

It’s worth noting that during the Revolution, the British army had attacked and occupied New York City. Much of the old city was destroyed, and its population shrank. By the time of the Founding, the city had come roaring back. Building boomed, and the population tripled to some 30,000 people. Many of the buildings in this scene were likely rehabbed or new, just like the newly refurbished Federal Hall.

Holland’s drawing captures the modern yet workaday character of the neighborhood where the Congress first convened under the Constitution. Yet, Federal Hall had likely been destroyed by the time Currier’s lithograph appeared. Other features of the scene endure today, notably Trinity Church, whose spire is visible at left.

Image: from this source.