Many people think that there are good socio-political arrangements and there are bad ones. I think this is a convenient but dangerous oversimplification. Any arrangement of power has something bad in it. The question is whether the benefits outweight the costs. And that one changes with time.
So instead of good or bad socio-political arrangements, we have current / productive and outdated / dysfunctional ones.
This is not a new idea. The whole Hegelian-Marxian dialectics of social history was based on this insight. Of course they went a bit extreme with their prophetic interpretations that these changes are somehow predestined and they lead to the ultimate form of government (the Prussian Monarchy for Hegel, the Proletariat-Dictatorship for Marx). We can skip on these prophetic claims.
But the insight that all socio-political arrangements start out as progressive ones that benefit large groups of people and solve important issues is a very good one.
Don't let conspiracy theory fans and New Left whining about "the power" and "the establishment" mislead you. It is the people who create new structures and they do it because they find it advantageous.
But once a power structure is created it can be hard to get rid off it. They create their own culture, their own "values", and they can stay a lot longer than they are beneficial.
We are in an uncomfortable part of history where our dominant power structures seem to be outdated. Nation states certainly are, and many have the feeling that the capitalist-parliamentary democracy structure is losing its charm as well.
So what does this means for our future? Nothing good. Outdated power structures can last for ages before we finally get rid of them.
Just check out feudalism!
The central idea of feudalism was to give inheritable lands and sources of income to underlings in exchange for delegating tasks for them. This is basically a very bad idea - under normal circumstances.
When you are delegating power you usually want to keep check on your delegates. You want to be able to revoke that delegation and their payments as well. So giving them their posts and lands forever is quite a bad idea - under normal circumstances.
But the Carolingian dynasty did not live under normal circumstances. They had to manage an empire in an economically retarded environment. From the 3rd century onward the economics of Western Europe shifted toward self-sustaining latifundiums, so trade and the production of trade goods dropped.
There was also a severe import-export deficit during the Early Middle Ages. All the relevant tradegoods (spices, luxury fabrics) were imported (even wine was imported from Greece) and without any exportable product, Western Europe paid with gold and silver. This lead to a shortage of cash.
The poor conditions of roads, few navigatable rivers and the loss of control over the seas (Mediterranean was controled by the Arabs, the English channel by Norsemen) didn't help neither.
So the Carolingian empire, which created some measure of political stability, a cultural renaissance and placed the seeds of economic growth had severe problems to solve. How to manage an empire and how to maintain an army while being unable to pay them in cash (due to deficit in cash)? The poor transport conditions also ruled out the option of paying them in produce (something that the Chinese empire did quite often, paying wages in rice and silk, but they dedicated an enormous amount of public works to maintain roads and canals).
The only solution was to give the means of production (villages) to their delegates as payment. They also couldn't keep a large army in one place, so they had to spread out their warriors to all the manors and called them together only for short campaigns.
In this way the problem of administering their empire and maintaining their army was solved. At the cost of handing out not payment but the sources of income itself and control over the population.
These grants were not intended to be inheritable (that's why the Caroling age is not even considered to be feudalism proper) but the system quickly shifted into that direction.
Political failure of feudalism
The problem is that the advantages of feudalism did not last long. The political arrangement very quickly became a burden for everyone involved - this was apparent by the early 10th century during the time of the last Carolingians.
The monarchs worked hard to get rid of feudalism, they wanted direct control over their holdings and tried with various degrees of success to weaken the dukes (their direct underlings). They tried to build a proper bureaucratic control instead of the feudal one. During the early stage of the Holy Roman Empire the emperors used the bishops and the count palatines (pfalzgraf) to circumvent the Dukes and the feudal hierarchy. That's why the investiture struggle was such a great blow to the European civilization.
The Dukes were on one hand working hard to deny the monarchs the obligations they owed to them, while on the other were working hard to cement direct control over their lands and weaken the lesser nobles.
They were the most successful ones because a duchy is a much more natural unit of coordination than a large kingdom of diverse regions. This is the same reason why modern nations states will break up sooner or later.
Then there were the lesser nobles. They tried to resist feudalism as well. Their military obligations were expensive so they did everything to get rid of it. They pushed into the direction of a "warrior democracy" where things are decided by the gatherings of all the nobles and not by individual rulers. The Saxon nobles managed to get such rights reinforced by the emperor in the early 11th century and more followed later: the English Manga Cartha, the Hungarian Golden Bull and so on.
It is very intrigueing that the history of feudalism, almost right from the beginning, is the history of how everyone struggled against feudalism.
So as a solution to the political problem of governance feudalism, like a proper startup, failed fast.
Total failure and happily ever after
It's military advantage lasted a bit longer. But by the 13th century, the high middle ages, that was over as well. The short campaigns which characterized the rise of feudalism was replaced by long sieges of stone castles. So instead of military service monarchs asked cash from their vassals and hired mercenaries. The nobles were reluctant to wage wars for their lieges anyway and mercenaries became the norm.
So feudalism became a dysfunctional arrangement by the 13th century. Yet it lived happily ever after until the French Revolution. That is five hundred years later! And even then it took more than a century to get rid of it. In Hungary the legal prerogatives of the feudal nobles were abolished only in 1918 by Károlyi Mihály (and the right wing still hates him so much).
That means it loved for nine centuries after becoming a burden, and for six centuries after becoming completely useless!
The big problem is that a useless socio-political arrangement still extols its price upon society. In case of feudalism that price was the political, economical and legal prerogatives given to the feudal nobility, who did nothing to earn it for the last 600 years of it.
So beware of outdated power structures!
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