The Young Marx on Feudalism as the Democracy of Unfreedom

Abstract Karl Marx consistently contrasts the alienation and egoism of bourgeois, capitalist society with the holism and intimacy of medieval feudalism. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of right , he cryptically terms medievalism the ‘democracy of unfreedom’, arguing that feudalism embodied an integration of political and economic life that the fragmented modern constitutional state abandons. Focusing on writings from the early 1840s, this article examines Marx’s account of feudalism to better understand his early democratic theory and its relationship to his account of human emancipation. While Marx rejects feudal nostalgia and insists on the revolutionary progress brought by capitalism and liberal constitutionalism, he nonetheless believes that medievalism models a partial unity of political and economic life that ‘true democracy’ will restore and radicalize.