Democratic capitalism eats its parents: reflections on the refeudalization process 1 Robert van Krieken University of Sydney/University College Dublin “Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com'è bisogna che tutto cambi” - "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. Tancredi Falconeri, in The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Abstract: In this paper, I outline the important contribution that Sighard Neckel’s writings on the process of refedualization makes towards grasping the inner logic and dynamics of current crises of democratic capitalism. After a brief reconstruction of Neckel’s approach, inspired originally by Habermas’s comments on refeudalization in relation to the structural transformation of the public sphere, the paper goes on to discuss the connections with related bodies of work, including Alain Supiot’s account of refeudalization in law and politics, Frank Ankersmit’s analysis of political representation and sovereignty, Hedley Bull’s examination of ‘new medievalism’ in international relations, and Olaf Kaltmeier’s research into refeudalization in Latin America. In all of this expanding body of research into refeudalization, Neckel’s particular perspective is especially distinctive in emphasising the central role of the new structural transformation of the public sphere, providing a vital contribution to the adequate understanding of the world we live in today. Keywords: Refeudalization, capitalism, democracy, Habermas, Ankersmit, Supiot, Hedley Bull, law, politics For some time now there has been broad agreement that a variety of features of contemporary social, political and economic life are, if not in crisis, undergoing major transformations. Democracy, liberalism, the rule of law, capitalism, the relationships between humans and the natural world and animals, are all being understood as being in decline, undermined, in crisis, or approaching catastrophic tipping points. Following the 2008 financial crisis and the apparently unstoppable division of the world into the ultra-rich and the precariat, alongside the accelerating crisis of global warming and the turn towards populism and authoritarianism, there are now numerous discussions of whether and how both capitalism and democracy might be coming to an end (Streeck 2014; 2016; Moore 2016; Wallerstein et al 2013), or being turned into a ‘new despotism’ (Keane 2020). On the one hand, the core conceptual orientation in many such accounts is that the transformations at issue constitute a new, previously unknown, development moving significantly beyond the world we have known so far, using the prefix ‘post-‘ and words such as breakdown, end, or collapse. On the other hand, another currently popular construction of the line of historical development taking place is that the crises of both democracy and capitalism can be understood in terms the re-emergence of pre-democratic, pre-capitalist 1 This is a longer version of 'Reflections on the refeudalization process: back to the future', pp. 83-98 in Sarah Lenz and Martina Hasenfratz (eds) Capitalism unbound: Ökonomie, Ökologie, Kultur, Frankfurt a.M: Campus, 2021, with all the quotations translated into English.