We are accustomed to a capitalist economy, good communication and transportation, and to solving our problems at the state or national level, so we tend to think that decentralized authority is primitive and ineffective. This is not necessarily so, and feudalism is not completely foreign to American society. Let me try to discuss feudalism from three different aspects. The paragraphs in bold will provide the sort of discussion that you are likely to find in the average college textbook; those in regular print will provide some idea of the historical conditions under which the feudal organization of society arose; and those in red will discuss the growth of an example of American feudalism with which most of you are familiar, if only through films and TV.
