Could neo-feudalism work in a Space Opera setting with:

• Instantaneous communication through telepathy (uncommon, about one in every few billion born in a society of trillions to low quadrillions)
• Intergalactic communication using Planck-scale wormholes (rare, typically reserved for nobility)
• A functioning Portal Network that allows for vastly multi-galactic (>10,000) travel and commerce (present in almost every fucking solar system)

Would neo-feudalism complete with a hierarchy of nobility still make sense as a means of governing space with this kind of arrangement?

My instinctive reaction is no. Feudalism is pretty closely tied to limits on transportation and communication.

The reason I ask is I'm planning on handing off all government to machine superintelligences which control the lives of the civilian population, and I thought that would work better under a feudalistic model than a democratic one (plus feudalism fits the theme of the setting better, since it's got a strong undercurrent of mysticism harkening back to the feudal days of China and Japan).

Dune was kinda like that, wans't it? Except the part with the computers, since thinking machines are outlawed under the Orange County Bible. Still, the Spice was able to replicate all of those feats.

Feudalism isn't just "not-democracy". You need a specific set-up for the reciprocal ruler-vassal relationship it involves; I haven't thought too hard about what that would look like on an interstellar scale because frankly I hate Feudal Future, but easy travel and communications aren't it. There's very little incentive for AI Ruler X to deputize System Y to AI Vassal Z when X can easily find out what's going on and exert influence in Y on its own.

Feudalism depends on the local government being the only government able to act easily in local matters. If you have a functional portal network then outside authority can easily project power onto local matters. Even good communication makes it iffy as outside government can make its will known directly to the people; under a circumstance with good communication but bad travel feudalistic government is possible primarily in an environment of extreme threat.

In a situation where both communication and easy reinforcement of a threatened community or easy deployment of force to put down dissent and enforce the will of centralized government is possible, feudalism is simply not going to happen.

Plus, feudalism in real life wasn't a stable system. There was forever a power struggle going on between the local lords and the central authority, and the central authority won because it was able to develop effective governing structures for projecting its power outwards, wearing down the lords. Plus, a state governed by a central authority is going to outcompete states without it, meaning that the equilibrium will shift towards the centralizing power sooner or later. The case in point is Poland-Lithuania. The nobles won the power struggle against the king, reducing the central authority to impotence; after that, the state underwent a long slow decline until it was destroyed by powerful, centralized neighbors.

Given that, feudalism in a setting with easy strategic communications and the existence of high-power states is simply not viable.

BattleTech made a whole 'verse based on a Feudal Future.

My impression is that BattleTech has much slower interstellar travel.

So feudalism in general doesn't work for an intergalactic setting? Because this setting encompases a good chunk of the LSC, which contains upwards of 100,000 galaxies.

Feudalism does not work on any kind of scale above a certain level of rapid communication/economic development. That level is well below the level needed to sustain space travel.

That's a little more debatable. It's often struck me that the transition to an interstellar society - even one with FTL travel and the like if it was slow enough - would basically mark a huge regression in the unification of economics and communications. Feudalism would be a possible model for such a society to follow - though personal dislike aside, my reading of historical trends is that it would be extremely unlikely. Some sort of federalism would be more probable.

Edit: I do think that it would be reasonably possible to base an interstellar society under the parameters given on historical China in a more unified period.

edited 27th Nov '14 12:48:25 AM by nrjxll

Would the problem of easy communication be mitigated somewhat by replacing the Portal Network with "trade routes" of exotic matter that dump massive amounts of negative energy a ship can coast along and use to temporarily fuel its Alcubierre drive to thousands of times their normal output? It would achieve the same basic effect (easy intergalactic travel), but it would marginally increase the travel time from "instant" to "a few days to go from solar system to solar system, half a month to cross the galaxy, eight weeks to make it to another".

Does this help at all?

Still doesn't work, for the reason that planets are big. You cannot analogize a feudal baron with his few square miles of territory with a feudal ruler of a planet; the amount of resources are completely out of scale.

Remember, feudalism was an economic system, not just a political one. It also happened to be a very inefficient economic system: it was centered around agriculture, in a system whereby the peasant had little incentive to produce more than he needed to (because his feudal lord would just take it away), and whereby the real drivers of economic growth—the markets, the craftsmen, and the towns in which they were situated—were excluded. Feudalism was outcompeted politically, militarily, and economically, and that's just in the Eurasian land mass.

(Also recall that feudalism is not absolutism, or autocracy, or authoritarianism. It's entirely possible to have planets under despotic or dictatorial rule, but that is not feudalism.)