How to Use feudalism in a Sentence

feudalism

noun
  • Format #1 is very much like feudalism, and #2 is, of course, chaos.
    — WIRED, 6 July 2023
  • What better place to beta-test the future of digital feudalism?
    — Gregory Barber, WIRED, 6 June 2019
  • Throughout many of his articles, Kotkin has laid out policy ideas that might ward off feudalism.
    — John Loftus, National Review, 18 Oct. 2020
  • The notion that wealth equals fee simple ownership of a piece of land is as quaint as the idea that feudalism was an exchange of work for security.
    — Roger Valdez, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2025
  • As media monopolies gained control of discourse, a new feudalism arose.
    — Alex Ross, New Yorker, 15 June 2026
  • When feudalism gave way to industrialism, factory workers did much the same thing.
    — Erik Kain, Forbes, 27 Jan. 2023
  • Fifteen hundred years later, the rules of Middle Ages’ feudalism were formal.
    — Scott Feldmann, Orange County Register, 5 May 2017
  • The early stages of the revolution famously abolished the last vestiges of feudalism in France.
    — National Geographic, 10 Sep. 2020
  • Under feudalism, tenants were obligated to work the land of their lords, and lords were obligated to provide for the basic needs of their tenants.
    — Eula Biss, The New Yorker, 8 June 2022
  • But though the attempt to overthrow the aristocracy had been put down, the old feudalism could not be resuscitated—at least not in England.
    — Kevin Baker, Harper's Magazine, 23 June 2020
  • Marx saw socialism as a new mode of production that would follow capitalism the same way that capitalism had followed feudalism.
    — John B. Judis, New Republic, 24 Aug. 2017
  • The museum charts South Korea’s rise out of feudalism and colonialism into the democratic present.
    — E. Tammy Kim, The New York Review of Books, 17 Dec. 2020
  • Capitalism is constantly mutating into something else, and a growing number of scholars think the online age could be giving way to a sort of neo-feudalism.
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 9 Sep. 2022
  • Officials turned to unfavorable land relocation and quit-rent, a holdover from feudalism that was essentially a land tax, in hopes of course-correcting.
    — Francine Uenuma, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 June 2023
  • People in the 21st century typically see feudalism as a bad thing and more importantly, something from the distant past.
    — Roger Valdez, Forbes, 8 June 2021
  • Family farmers say concentrating farmland among a few big companies is akin to feudalism, and un-American.
    — Alana Semuels / Fremont, Time, 27 Nov. 2019
  • The productive wonders of capitalism did that, not socialism, not communism, not feudalism, not welfarism.
    — The Editorial Board, Oc Register, 28 Nov. 2025
  • In Europe, this started to change after the French Revolution, which abolished feudalism and serfdom.
    — Robert Sullivan, Vogue, 30 Nov. 2018
  • Still later, as feudalism declined, the Catholic Church encouraged and enforced imprisonment for unpaid debts.
    — Kristin Collier, Longreads, 1 Dec. 2021
  • For its part, Kering gets first look at a new crop of talent without the whiff of feudalism attached to a prize, as well as a bird’s-eye view on new ways of selling and communicating without any risk to its more boldface brands.
    — New York Times, 16 Dec. 2021
  • Beckert has evidently assessed the consumer landscape—a sluggish demand for exegeses of feudalism, a frothy bubble for tracts that put capitalism in its place—and banked on product-market fit.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker, 24 Nov. 2025
  • The abolition of slavery in the United States and feudalism in Japan were profound social and economic transformations.
    — Harold James, Foreign Affairs, 20 Apr. 2021
  • To a largely illiterate society trying to overcome feudalism, these posters again give us insight into how the new Soviet government wanted to emphasize progress.
    — Anne Tschida, miamiherald, 22 June 2018
  • Relaxing the moral and ethical bans on usury propelled western Europe’s social, economic, and political orders from feudalism to capitalism.
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 18 Jan. 2024
  • Greig and Walter, stalwart veterans of British stage and screen, lead a compelling ensemble in a story that hinges on the rattling collision of dying feudalism against rising industrialization.
    — Robyn Bahr, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Apr. 2020
  • Capitalism, the scholar Cedric Robinson argues, was not a revolutionary departure from feudalism but an extension of it, a new permutation.
    — Eula Biss, The New Yorker, 8 June 2022
  • John Locke, after the fall of the Cromwell regime—is a design for perfect feudalism, with social rank and authority corresponding exactly, in perpetuity, to the amount of land held by an individual.
    — Marilynne Robinson, Harper’s Magazine , 20 July 2022
  • Under Elizabethan feudalism this notion was unthinkable if only because none but the royal had the alternatives of seemingly absolute choice, the liberties of the masses being hedged about by all sorts of rigid proscriptions.
    — Andrew Aoyama, The Atlantic, 28 Feb. 2024
  • The setting is little more than an opportunity for Cannon, who wrote the Pitch Perfect movies and directed the uproariously sweet Blockers, to dole out easy criticisms of feudalism in the name of female agency.
    — David Sims, The Atlantic, 1 Sep. 2021
  • Nowadays there is less merriment, sunk as Moscow is in a combination of Putin stagnation, the Ukraine war, and the techno-feudalism that is making serfs of all of us in a world owned by billionaires pumping propaganda through the black boxes in the palm of our hands.
    — Literary Hub, 3 Apr. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'feudalism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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