1) Realism - key features (chapter 14)

Realism is an international relations theory which states that world politics is driven by competitive self-interest.

The international system is anarchic.

• There is no actor above states capable of regulating their interactions; states must arrive at relations with other states on their own, rather than it being dictated to them by some higher controlling entity.

The international system exists in a state of constant antagonism (openly expressed and usually mutual opposition).

States are the most important actors.

• All states within the system are unitary, rational actors

• States tend to pursue self-interest.

• Groups strive to attain as many resources as possible (see relative gain).

The primary concern of all states is survival.

• States build up military to survive, which may lead to a security dilemma

2) Feudalism - key features

Feudalism can be defined politically as a personalized and geographically decentralized system of rule, and economically as the local and coercive extraction of surplus from a dependent peasantry, the two dimensions being fused in the institution of lordship and the feudal vassalic pyramid.

3) Absolutism - key features

Absolutism, in which the state was the patrimonial property of the ruling dynasty and where lords became absorbed into the absolutist state apparatus, while the independent peasantry became subject to centralized taxation.

The features of the absolutist state include the fact that the state is the personal property of the king; the nobility is transformed from a land­based class into an office­holding class; and extraction of surplus from a freed peasantry mainly takes place through the royal tax system.

4) Capitalism - key features

Capitalism is based on a set of social property relations in which property-less direct producers are compelled to sell their labour-power to the owners of the means of production in return for wages.

Given that both producers and capitalists are subjected to market competition, production is for sale in the market. While surplus value is created and extracted in the process of production itself, profits are realized from earnings from sale in markets after payment of costs including payment of labour power.

5) Feudal state formation in France

The pattern of feudal state formation in Capetian France (from ‘Capet’, the family name of French monarchs) was determined by the complete post­millennial fragmentation of political power in the form of the banal regime (Brenner, 1996). From the late eleventh century onwards, and indeed throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the princes and the king tried to regain control over their territories. Internally this meant seeking to regain power lost to the castellans during the break-up of the Carolingian Empire and externally by competing with one another.

The logic of French state building consequently unfolded under the constant pressures of geopolitical competition within the ruling class, driving smaller lords into the hands of greater lords, concentrating the political power of lords and their control of the peasantry.

In this process, the Capetian monarchy deployed the whole arsenal of feudal expansionary techniques of political accumulation to establish its suzerainty (over-lordship) over Francia during the course of four centuries. These ranged from outright war and annexation, through dynastic marriage policies, alliance building and bribery to simple confiscation and enfeoffment (the process by which a lord was turned into a vassal), so that the local aristocracy was either suppressed, co-opted, intermarried, bought or tied to the king by unstable bonds of vassalage (Given, 1990).