Beyond “American Feudalism”: Perspectives from the Black Enlightenment Tradition

This paper traces the intellectual history of a contemporary fringe philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment to nineteenth-century representations (and perversions) of the medieval world by figures on either side of the slavery debate. Theorized by Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land in the early 2000s, the Dark Enlightenment wholly rejects democratic institutions. Instead, it seeks to establish a network of feudalistic governing structures that function like mini-fiefs or plantations. Adherents of the Dark Enlightenment seek to “retire” all federal government employees and replace them with a panoply of community-based absolute monarchs who will run their mini-fiefs like businesses. Building on my previous book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (2024), I ask the question: What can understanding how early and antebellum Americans framed the Middle Ages and the notions of “feudalism” tell us about how they wielded or contested coercive power? Moreover, how can reading the anti-feudal writings of black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and James W. C. Pennington alongside the pro-feudal writings of enslavers such as George Fitzhugh and William Smith inform debates about the limits of democracy in American society?