Do We Live with Less Freedom Than Medieval Peasants?

In this episode of American Socrates, we take a deep dive into life before capitalism, exploring feudalism, debt, and the shift to modern wage labor. From the predictable obligations of medieval serfs to the precarious freedom of today’s workers, we examine how stability and autonomy have been historically valued — and often set in conflict. Drawing on David Graeber’s insights on debt and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s analysis of enclosure, we unpack how capitalism’s “freedom” can disguise insecurity, and why understanding this history matters for building fairer, more balanced systems today. Listeners will walk away questioning modern work, rethinking freedom, and imagining alternatives that combine security and agency.

Transcript

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]

Most people today assume capitalism is just the way the world works. The people have always worked jobs for money, bought what they need with wages, and tried to climb the ladder. But that's not true. Let me paint you a different picture. Imagine yourself as a serf in medieval Europe. You don't own the land you live on, but you're guaranteed a small plot to farm. In return, you owe your lord a few days of labor every week. You'll never get rich. You'll never leave this village. But you'll always have food on the table. Shelter over your head. And the certainty that next year you'll still be here farming the same land. And so will your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren. Your obligations are clear and your survival is secured.

Now, fast forward 700 years. You're working in an Amazon warehouse. You don't own the warehouse. You don't control the pace of your work. And if the company needs to cut costs, your job can vanish before tomorrow morning. There's no guarantee of security. No land to fall back on. No, Lord, who owes you any sort of protection? You're free to quit at any time. But you're also free to watch your kids starve. Free to sleep on the street, free to drown in debt. If the paychecks begin to dwindle or stop coming altogether.

So who's better off here? The serf with no freedom but lifelong stability. Or the modern worker with their presumed freedom, but nothing stable to rely on. Capitalism likes to sell us all on the idea that we've escaped the dark ages. But maybe the truth is a bit more uncomfortable. Maybe the serfs weren't as bad off as we think. And maybe our freedom has come at the cost of something even more valuable to us, perseverance and self-reliance. 

Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. 

When people talk about feudalism, they usually imagine a lofty medieval castle. Lordly knights on horseback and, you know, peasants doing backbreaking labor in sun-drenched fields and in broad strokes. That picture isn't wrong. Feudalism was the economic system that tied all of medieval Europe together. A web of obligations that organized society without markets, banks, or labor contracts. Instead of money binding people together, it was loyalty, trust, duty. These were your people, and you depend on each other. And everyone knew it. It was not egalitarian, though.

At the top of the chain stood the king, who granted large estates to powerful nobles. In return, those nobles owed the king military support, loyalty and taxes and kind. You know, so much grain, so many horses, so many soldiers. The nobles in turn divided their land among lesser lords. On and on down until you got to the knights, who were the lowest level, who each pledged their service and defense in exchange for authority and dominion in their realm. And at the bottom, working the land where the serfs, who are peasants bound to the soil, are responsible for producing nearly everything that kept the whole system running. Serfs can't leave, nor can they prosper. But it was the sworn duty of their lords to make sure that they were taken care of. 

Neither was this economic web wholly secular. The church was deeply embedded in it as a landowner and as a spiritual authority, holding both Lord and prince to their obligations. Monasteries held vast estates worked by peasants. Bishops commanded wealth like any other noble, and priests justified the system as divinely ordained. Every Sunday at Mass. To question your Lord wasn't just disobedience or disloyalty. It bordered on sinfulness. That partnership of church and manor gave feudalism a moral order, one that would eventually shape the Protestant notions of duty and work centuries later.

Even today. In practice, a serf was not free to leave the land. He owed his lord several days of corps of labor each week plowing, harvesting, mending fences, hauling wood, maintaining the roads, that sort of thing. This was work demanded, not for wages, but because duty required it. And so it was owed to the Lord and to the community, to the church, to your neighbors. He also owed rents in a kind a portion of his harvest, his eggs, his livestock. All of that went to the Lord to stock the keeps and maintain the castles. And if our serf died, his family could not simply just pass on the land. They had to pay the Lord a fee called a Harriet. Often the best animal from the households before inheritance was then allowed.

On top of all that, the church demanded its tithe, usually one tenth of what was grown or earned. This was the price paid by serfs for physical protection and spiritual guidance and salvation. The duties stacked up high, but in exchange the serf had security. His lord was bound to protect him, to provide justice in disputes, and most importantly, to guarantee access to the land that fed his family. No one, not even the Lord, could remove the serf from his home. Daily life was predictable. Then the agricultural calendar dominated it. Planting in the spring. Harvest in the autumn. Lean winters broken up by long series of sodden feast days. Work was grueling, but it followed a rhythm most people today would find remarkably stable. Hunger was real, disease was constant. But the life of a serf was not precarious in the way, say a gig workers life is today. They knew what tomorrow would bring more of the same obligations, yes, but more of the same protections also.

This is what made feudalism durable and lasting. It was orderly. Everyone had a place. Yes, and everyone had obligations. And everyone had someone above them to whom they owed their loyalty. Even the king who had God. For nearly a thousand years in Europe. This system held together kingdoms, villages, parishes and entire lives. In short, feudalism was not a market economy. It was a moral economy, one rooted in duty, protection and stability, all guaranteed by a church that would condemn even a king for its dereliction. And it worked because it promised something.

We all crave a life where, however hard it may be, tomorrow looks very much like today we could and should ask what exactly it is that holds a society together. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not barter or even money, but debt. Human beings don't usually begin with clean, free exchanges. They begin with webs of obligation to one another. You owe me this. And I owe you that. Debts create trust. They create shame. They create loyalty. They create entire communities and societies. And that was as true, if not more true, in the feudal village as it is today.

A serf owed his lord labor and duties. He owed the church its teeth. He might owe his community coffee labor to repair the roads, to maintain the fields, to build the fence. But they bound people together. Your duties were the thread that tied you to your Lord, your Lord, to you. You to your church and your church, to you. You to your neighbors and your neighbors to you. You might resent them, but they gave life a kind of order and stability. You know, were you sick or injured? Your neighbors would show up to help you if you were attacked. Your lord wrote in to avenge that injustice. Were you troubled? Your priest would arrive to listen and counsel. They were there for you as you were there for them. Then came the enclosures.

Ellen Menkiens Wood documents in her history of the era that capitalism didn't arrive as a natural stage of progress. It was forced the commons, which was land the peasants had worked for generations, were suddenly and irrevocably fenced off as somebodies private property. Serfs were expelled from fields that had been theirs, and their way of sustaining themselves, of their way of paying their debts to their communities for centuries.

Suddenly the web of obligations was ripped apart. What was left was not freedom, but a brutal new dependance on wage and money for survival. The dispossessed had no choice but to sell their labor in order to survive. In the name of progress, the security of feudal life was traded for the precarity of capitalism. This was a conscious choice on the part of powerful aristocrats and rich merchants in order to increase their own power, their own wealth, and their own status in their society. Religion shifted with it under feudalism. You could believe your station was ordained by God, that the ties of duty were part of the great chain of being. But Protestantism reframes the story. Endless labor became a kind of virtue in itself. Proof that you were saved or worthy of your life in the eyes of God. And capitalism turned this moral duty into an economic one. If you don't work, then you don't eat. No one is obligated to save you or to care about you at all. The freedom of the market then came with chains just as real as the feudal lords, but much with less direct, less concrete and more abstract.

And that's where the irony really comes in here. Because compared to the modern, say, Amazon warehouse worker, the medieval serf had customary rights to land. He couldn't just be tossed out on his butt. He had hosts of feast days and holy days when no one would make him work, adding up two months off every year. His obligations were heavy. Yeah, but they were also predictable, and he could work around that. The Amazon worker is free in a sense, but they are absolutely obligated to hustle for their survival, forced to compete for shifts monitored by algorithms and free to be fired at will at any moment. The Amazon worker is disposable in practice.

So in some ways the serf looks positively liberated by comparison. Let me just go through and enumerate several of the differences then between the medieval serf and the modern free worker. One, land access. The serf had a guaranteed plot to live on and feed his family with. The warehouse worker, no. No stake, no fallback. You can work full-time and sleep in your car if it doesn't pay enough to pay your rent. Think of the people in San Francisco who work full-time. It's a Starbucks, but literally have to sleep in their cars because they can't afford rent, given the wages for full-time work. 

Two, job security. The serf knew his obligations and what that bought him the protection for his life. The modern worker, however, can be fired at any moment for any reason or even no reason at all. There's no real sense that you belong to your company in the way that the serf belongs to the land. The Lord could not remove them or risked upsetting the church.

Three, work rhythm. The serfs' labor followed a very predictable calendar, punctuated by very lengthy and well-established vacations. Holy days. The modern worker is scheduled, monitored, and expected to produce without pause, even on holidays and in some industries without any vacations at all. You work harder and longer as a modern worker than the serf did. Who would have a month and a half off during the winter?

Four, community ties. Serfs were embedded in a web of mutual obligations and shared survival, so no one threatened their place inside their community. Workers today compete with everyone for shifts, for promotions, for wages, for business, making everyone else a threat to their livelihood. The surf understood his world to be one of mutual relationships. So even people who weren't family were like family in and of the sense that they made something that you needed and you made something that they needed. And so both of you depended on each other in a way that made you want to protect one another. That is not true in today's society. In today's society, the only people you depend on is your boss. And so the only person you're loyal to is your boss. And that's again, a cultivated choice. 

Five, rights to inheritance. Serfs could pass on land after they paid their Harriot. They could secure a kind of family continuity because the land wasn't to be removed from them. Unless, you know some strange external circumstances, like they didn't pay the Harriet or something like that. The modern workers inherit often more debt than they do property, and they're taxed if it is a property far more heavily than the surface tax for his inheritance.

Six, protection from the powerful. The Lord was obligated to protect the serf. That's not true of either the modern corporation or even the government of the people. Protection in the modern world tends to exist only for the bottom line, and not so much for the workers themselves. We protect private property owners in a way that we do not protect the rights of their employees. And yet we tell ourselves, oh, we are so much more free now. We escaped all those terrible conditions under serfdom in the past. The irony is so sharp you could shave a rock with it. The serfs had stability, predictability and a place in their communities, a sense of freedom that most modern workers could only dream of.

Okay, so feudalism was secure, but capitalism is free. And this freedom and stability seem to be in some kind of tension. It's not naturally aligned, but built into the design of the system itself, this tension, this expense. You can't have more freedom without losing security. And you can't have more security without losing freedom. Or at least so it seems. Economic instability is obvious to us today. It's so normal we don't even question the idea of it. In capitalism, work is just contingent. Jobs just vanish. Sometimes shifts and hours are just get cut. Companies can fold, disappear. Debt will loom over everything, even if you're technically employed.You live in a constant state of uncertainty. Uncertainty about tomorrow. You can't predict what's going to happen to you. You can't predict how much money you're going to make. And what's worse, because of that, no matter how hard you want to work, you can't get ahead. You can't do better. You're limited by the forces of the market, by the pulls of your employer, and there's a lack of freedom in that way, too. You can't be sure where this is all going to bring you. And that pressure shapes every decision and every relationship, every plan you have for the future.

Social instability is what follows from that. Communities that once formed around neighborhoods, trades or extended families have been displaced by mobility demands, gentrification and global labor markets. AI is coming for your job right now. Many modern workers are alienated not just from their product, as Marx would say, but from neighbors, coworkers, and even civic life itself. The networks of mutual obligation, the bound feudal societies together may have been rigid and hierarchical, but they were real and they were strong. They gave people a stake in their community, larger than themselves. Today, freedom is often thought of as individual freedom, and isolation comes bundled up with that. We have a loneliness epidemic. We have this sense of disconnectedness. I'll probably talk about in a future episode, this feeling that we don't belong anywhere, that nobody really cares about us. That's the price. So the defenders of capitalism would say of freedom. You have to live like that. If you want to be free and they say freedom is so much better, that isn't it better to be isolated, lonely and miserable, but free. It's tempting at this point to romanticize feudalism then, and indeed, as we've discussed earlier, serfs had predictable lives, some protection, access to lands, a way to rise or fall on their own, and a place in a stable moral and social hierarchy.

But security alone does not equal a good life. Feudal society was brutally rigid. Social mobility was basically impossible, except by incredible luck. If you were born a serf, you were going to die a serf, and your children were going to inherit that same fate. Obedience was enforced through direct oppression: corporal punishment, arbitrary fines, forced labor, torture, & torment. All of these were used in order to keep people exactly in their place. Obligations were clear, but compliance was not optional. Stability then, for the surf came at the cost of their autonomy, their creativity, their self-determination. Security was guaranteed, but then so was subjugation again. That was the price of security. You had to be under the heel of your masters. This whole thing makes it sound like we're forced then to choose between either protective guarantees of feudal life or the precarious liberties of capitalism.

But we can ask, is stability and freedom always to be in such a conflict? Are we really obligated to choose to pay one price or the other in this situation? Or is that tension something that could, in theory, at least be resolved through maybe a different kind of social design? One model that gives us a glimpse is the worker-owned cooperative in a co-op. Members share ownership. They share controls and they make their decisions collectively. They all benefit, then, from the surplus that their laborers produce. They have the stability of a predictable income and the assurance that they can't be arbitrarily fired because they themselves are co-owners. At the same time, they retain a lot of the freedom over how they're going to do their work. The pace with which they're going to do their work. Often the types of projects that they take on and the possibility of leaving the company if they ever want to. Here. Stability and freedom are not so mutually exclusive. They're intentionally designed in such a way as to coexist.

Libertarian socialism. That's an idea I've talked about before on this show. Extends this philosophy beyond co-ops, to worker councils, to horizontal forms of organization over the entire nation. It asks us the question, why should we accept a system where freedom necessarily comes with insecurity? Why accept a world where stability comes at the costs of oppression? And if alternatives can and do exist, should we not at least imagine them? Study them. Explore their possibilities.

So the question we're left with is not simply whether capitalism is better than feudalism. The question is whether the systems we build any systems could allow us to have both. Could we design, work and society in a way that gives people both necessary security and the freedom we desire? Could we combine the serfs stability with the worker's agency without the oppression of the past, or the precariousness of the present? That's the question I want to leave you with today. And it's not an abstract one. Every policy that we end up passing, every workplace we structure, every co-operative we build, is an experiment in how freedom and stability can or can't coexist.

The systems we inherit are not unchangeable. They were designed by people and they can be altered, redesigned and eliminated. If we take that idea seriously, we can begin to imagine what a world might look like where nobody has to choose between being safe and being free. 

So what does all of this mean then, for you right here, right now? You're obviously not a serf. And you probably don't work in an Amazon warehouse. But in many ways, your life is shaped by the same tension between freedom and stability. The systems around you your job, your school, your city, even your social networks often pushed you to sacrifice one for the other, and it feels pretty terrible. Every victory seems to contain a small essence of defeat. Take a moment and ask yourself, then where do I feel the most insecure and where do I feel trapped? Are there areas where freedom has become a burden rather than a blessing? Are there ways you could build more stability into your life, through relationships, through your community, through more savings or building more skills? All of this without giving up your sense of autonomy.

And conversely, are there areas where you have a lot of stability but you lack any kind of control over your life? And could you reclaim some of your agency there? One small but powerful action is to look for collective forms of security. You could support your local co-op, um, your local mutual aid network, or a worker-owned business. These aren't just political gestures. They're practical experiments in balancing freedom and stability in everyday life. You don't need to wait for the perfect system to appear. You can start building pockets of it right now in small ways, but ones that will matter a great deal to you.

And finally remember this the story of feudalism and capitalism isn't just history. It's a story about human choices, about how societies design work, obligation, freedom, how they share resources and responsibilities. And if we can understand the choices that create the instability of modern life, we can begin to imagine practical alternatives. We can ask questions like, what if there was a way to have both stability and freedom? And we can take small steps then, right now to live in that. What if, rather than resigning ourselves to some sort of horrid and inevitable tension?

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