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NancyLebovitz comments on Why is Mencius Moldbug so popular on Less Wrong? [Answer: He's not.] - Less Wrong
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Many science fiction writers have postulated the return of feudal social structures, noble houses, monarchies and such in "the future." The democratic era we live in and take for granted could very well have resulted from a drunkard's walk away from long-term social norms., and if we could survive cryotransport, we might find ourselves in nondemocratic, hierarchical societies in Future World.
BTW, I've noticed from watching The Walking Dead series that feminism, progressivism and democracy have to fall by the wayside when our kind of civilization collapses and the strong males have to take charge to keep the surviving hunter-gatherer bands in business. Why couldn't this also happen in a society which manages to maintain high living standards and technological progress?
Offhand, I can't think of any sf which has explained why a return of a feudal system is plausible. Instead, the story just starts out with a feudal system in place. I believe this is because feudal systems[1] are familiar and lead to interesting stories.
[1] Having been exposed to a little bit of actual history, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if the feudal societies in fiction are gross oversimplifications of real world feudalism.
There is a sizable minority of academic historians that deny there ever was such a thing as real world feudalism (as it is popularly conceived of). See for example, the work of historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown.
Can you give a quick summary of what they mean by this? This sounds very interesting.
In the Vorkosigan series, the main events surround a planet with a feudal system. This is explained because the planet lost contact with the larger galactic civilization and regressed in tech level massively. Meanwhile certain powerful bandits and raiders became strong enough in the chaos and passed down their roles on to their children. Then when they ended up being reconnected with the advanced technology societies they became very quickly a feudal culture with advanced technology. One major aspects of the stories is how this is an inherently unstable situation. (I have to wonder if this is in deliberate contrast to something like Dune where society stagnates in a feudal system with advanced tech for hundreds of years.)
Wil McCarthy's Queendom of Sol novels, as I recall, provide some backstory for the feudal government in a very advanced civilization with a lot of transhuman tech. The upper class in this society even went out of its way to find the remaining plausible pretenders to royal status, so it made an heir of Tonga's royal family as the queen, and married her to the survivor of some obscure noble family in Catalonia. McCarthy argues that this arrangement would provide stability and reduce the waste of resources on politics because the queen and her consort, like everyone else, would live for really long times and exploit the human tendency to form dominance hierarchies.