Academic literature on the topic 'Feudal hierarchy'

Abstract This chapter takes issue with the Hartzian thesis that there has never been a significant hierarchical political culture in the United States. My argument, it is worth stressing at the outset, is not that hierarchy is powerful in the United States. Nothing so perverse is intended. Relative to other nations of the world, America is distinguished by the weakness of hierarchy. But relative weakness is not the same thing as nonexistence. Skipping the feudal stage, as Hartz suggests, did weaken the social basis for hierarchical values. But hierarchy as a way of life is not limited to feudal social relations. Hierarchy finds support wherever social relations are highly stratified and the group has sanctions over the individual, whether this be in the army, the patriarchal family, the modem corporation, or on a large plantation.’ If such hierarchical values as deference, authority, noblesse oblige, obedience, and sacrifice of the parts for the whole have never had the same level of appeal in the United States that they have had in India, Japan, Great Britain, and other countries, neither have they been wholly without advocates.

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is an increasingly demanded resource for learning to make sequential decisions towards long term goals. Feudal hierarchies are among the most deployed frameworks. However, there are few theoretical results for hierarchical structures. In this work, we formalize the common two-level feudal hierarchy as two Markov decision processes, with the one on the high level being dependent on the policy executed at the low level. Despite the non-stationarity raised by the dependency, we show that each of the processes presents stable behavior. We then build on the first result to show that, regardless of the convergent learning algorithm used for the low level, convergence of both prediction and control algorithms at the high-level is guaranteed. Our results contribute with theoretical support for the use of feudal hierarchies in combination with standard reinforcement learning methods at each level.

Abstract In contrast to other West European countries, the formation of the modern state in Germany proceeded not at the royal and national level but on a princely and regional one. The German principalities, such as the electorates of Brandenburg, Saxony, and the Palatinate, the archbishoprics of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, the duchies of Bavaria, Wilrttemberg, Jillich-Berg, Brunswick Lilneburg, and Mecklenburg, the margravate of Baden, and the bishoprics of Munster, Wilrzburg, and Bamberg, were recognizably developing from the thirteenth century onwards in the direction of institutionalized territorial states, with the ultimate goal of unitary systems of administration and oflaw under the control of a single sovereign, the ruler of the principality. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, by contrast, right down to its demise in 1806, continued to remain in the older world ofhierarchical and feudal relationships.

The year 1868 is usually considered to be the beginning of modern Japan. In that year the Tokugawa government, a feudal samurai government in Edo (today’s Tokyo), was replaced by a modern imperial government (initially based in Kyoto, the old imperial capital) at a time of internal crisis and the fear of colonization by European imperial powers. This revolutionary political change is named the Meiji Restoration because the ancient imperial system was nominally restored under Emperor Meiji. The new government began as a mixture of ancient Japanese and modern Western imperial systems, but it soon became a completely Westernized government, which adopted a policy of full-fledged modernization. However, the introduction of Western science had already started long before the Meiji Restoration. During the Edo Period, the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867) strictly controlled overseas trade and the Netherlands was the only European country with which Japan had diplomatic relationship from the middle of the seventeenth century until 1853. In the second half of the eighteenth century some books in Dutch on science, technology, and medicine were imported into Japan. For the introduction of Western medicine, physicians played an important role. During the Edo Period there was a class system: the samurai class (warrior) controlled the common people in villages and towns. All the professions were considered to be hereditary. However, physicians could move rather freely along the social ladder (hierarchy). If physicians were employed by feudal lords, they became accepted as members of the samurai. There was a reform movement among physicians during the eighteenth century. In 1754 Yamawaki Toyo (1706–62), a physician in Kyoto, received official permission to inspect the anatomy of a human body, using a cadaver of a condemned criminal, after he had inspected otters (a small animal with four webbed feet), the structure of which was quite different from Chinese medicine’s teaching. After him physicians were allowed to inspect condemned criminals’ bodies.

Abstract When Otto of Freising wrote it would certainly have required uncommon prescience to prophesy in any form a check to urban libertas, the resubjection of commune to hierarchy and monarchy, lordship (or signoria). In his day Italy-acclaimed ‘garden of delights’1-was in the midst of transformation, a further, revolutionary advance, unparalleled in Western Europe, of towns and trade, the urbanization and commercialization of economy, society, and, in growing measure, government. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the era of Western expansion, Italy-and more especially now the North and Centre-became indelibly identified, to contemporaries and for posterity, with two subversive, ‘anti-feudal’ forces, republicanism and capitalism: of liberty and civility, ‘political man’, civic ethic, and po/is-mindedness (libertas in Italia sedem principalem eligit), and of commerce (mercatura), ‘economic man’, business ethic, and the embour geoisement of civil and political society (in Italia regnat populus). Trade and freedom drew together in creative but tense combination: from political and economic developed also cultural renaissance and deviation-Italy’s unmedieval culture, practical, secular, humanist-while from the relationship between them resulted all the innermost history of the Italian city states, of progress, crisis, and revolution from commune to signoria.

Abstract Agrarian reform varies in goals and coverage, as well as in what triggers it—sometimes revolutions and sometimes other paths. In more feudal societies, the main objectives have been to raise the incomes of beneficiaries and to curtail the abuses associated with serfdom or extreme societal inequality. Under communist regimes, land is taken from former landholders by force and provided to families that have been organized into cooperatives or state farms. In more capitalistic societies, the main objective is to raise the income and economic security of farm families by providing them with more land and more secure title to it. Land passed to beneficiaries may come from large landowners or from the state. Land expropriation usually involves partial payment to the landlord. The process may be market-based in the sense that (1) it involves a voluntary sale by the former owners, and (2) the new operator’s purchase is partially subsidized. Some implementing governments have been autocratic (e.g., military), while others have not. Often ethnicity is related to position on the socio-economic hierarchy and plays a role in revolutions or protests. Putting an end to slavery/serfdom has the most widely achieved benefit. Fast equitable growth has been achieved in a few cases; however, many others have fallen short on this front, usually as a result of strong opposition from vested interests, but frequently also from a lack of understanding and competence by those implementing the reform.

This chapter is devoted to the formation of the education system in a number of Left Bank and Right Bank Ukrainian lands in the first half of the XIX century. The purpose of our study is to study the educational policy of tsarism towards ethnic, religious and social groups living in Ukraine. General scientific and historical research methods were used, including a systematic approach, the principles of objectivity and comprehensiveness, historical-genetic and synchronous methods. Statistical data published in official publications of the Russian Empire were the main source of information on public education. In particular, the “Military-Statistical Review of the Russian Empire analyzed in detail the social, economic, religious development of each province as in the midnineteenth century. The historiography of the problem is analyzed. It is noted that the attention of researchers is focused on the study of certain elements of public education, the level of education of social classes, national minorities, the formation and development of higher education. Study of general features of educational policy of the state in the provinces of Forest-Steppe Ukraine remains outside the scope of scientific research and its impact on the formation of the foundations of national identity of the Ukrainian people, public struggle for equal and fair nature of all levels of education. It was found out that the system of educational institutions was formed at the beginning of the XIX century. in the Russian Empire. It did not guarantee the right to free and unrestricted access to education for all social groups. The tsarist struggle against the influence of the Polish aristocracy on educational processes in the provinces of the Right Bank of Ukraine strengthened the Russification policy under reactionary-conservative slogans. Education becomes an instrument of the policy of the autocracy and is aimed at protecting the existing feudal system. It is recognized that the opportunity to receive education directly depended on the social status and place of the person in the hierarchy. The vast majority of Ukrainian serfs did not have the opportunity to teach their children at all, as their education depended on the good will of the landlords and was not regulated by the state. It is established that the development of higher education in the Forest- Steppe Ukraine during the first half of the XIX century testified to the complete dependence of the educational policy of the autocracy on the will of the autocrat. The founding of Kharkiv University took place in line with the Enlightenment traditions in 1805, spread in Europe under the influence of Napoleon’s conquests. However, universities lost their self-government, freedom of teaching and became completely dependent on state funding during the reign of Nicholas I. The university administration paid considerable attention to the supervision of students and their discipline. It is concluded that the Ukrainian intelligentsia represents the interests of the oppressed people. They focused their energy on studying the history, culture, language and customs of the people, which in turn led to the politicization of the protest and the emergence of the Ukrainian nationaleducational movement.

This chapter discusses the ‘Lord’s space’, which refers to the space (or notional space) round a feudal lord, especially a sovereign prince—or, indeed, space symbolically associated with the Lord God. It focuses on literary examples, particularly plays and masques, which were undoubtedly designed in part to assert through their display the prince’s greatness, even if they contained specific contents of an advisory or controversial nature. France and Britain in the seventeenth century are apparently to be regarded as ‘theatre states’. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the dominant symbol of nature had become the theatre. In the midst of all the significant theatricality, a prince’s location, both in the cosmic or intellectual and in the material theatre, must be a matter of moment. The prince required to be the cynosure of all the looking, so that theatres must be constructed accordingly. That was possible, because in the early seventeenth century court theatres were hardly ever permanent buildings, but rather temporary facilities, usually erected for a single performance, perhaps in a hall of Whitehall Palace that also served many other functions. The chapter then considers the hierarchic ordering of objects and people that had long governed the visual imagination of medieval people.