ABSTRACT
The trouble is that the words feudal and feudalism are used in many different senses, so that they represent not one concept but many. The resulting misunderstandings and muddles constitute the first and most obvious pitfall in the comparative use of feudalism. In looking at the stages of history Karl Marx was chiefly interested in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Historians of other countries took over the study of the feudal law as a way to understand their own national histories, so that the vocabulary of fiefs and vassals became imprinted in their minds too, and with it the problem of the stages by which fiefs had become hereditary. The use of the single word feudalism discouraged analysis of the difference between what Marx was talking about and the broader version of the pre-Marxist concept that came to be expressed in the Bloch/Weber formulation.
