He Left Out How Primitive Christianity and Capitalism Are Fundamentally Incompatible

While Hall obsesses over Mossad's role in Iran (and how sometimes conspiracy theories are true), I will hate the Abrahamic god my own way. The deity of butthurt vanity who peeped from the Edenic bushes to see if He'd be obeyed Just Because. The collateral damage to the poor companion animals is unforgiveable.

Hall is an Enlightenment scholar - not OF the Enlightenment but a continuator of it, locating evil in a non-supernatural source. I thought at first that he was a macrohistorian working the same turf as Victor Duruy, who observed how the Noble Knights actually did their jobs in the beginning before they became oppressors.

Hall’s broader intellectual project — especially in 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘋𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 and 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 — often reaches back into deep historical transitions to explain the emergence of modern subjectivity and economic structures. He’s not a medievalist, but he does sometimes gesture toward the feudal → commercial transition, the emergence of proto‑bourgeois subjectivity, the early formation of market discipline,

and the long arc of moral‑economic regulation. Those themes can lead a thinker to the 11th century, because that century is a hinge in several major macrohistorical narratives.

Even if Hall doesn’t explicitly specialize in it, the 11th century is a magnet for anyone tracing the deep origins of capitalism, sovereignty, and subjectivity.

1. The Commercial Revolution begins (c. 1050–1200)

• Revival of long‑distance trade

• Growth of towns and guilds

• Monetization of rents

• Early financial instruments

This is the first major pulse of European economic expansion after centuries of contraction.

2. The Gregorian Reform (1070s–1120s)

This is huge for anyone studying ideology, authority, or subject formation:

• The Church centralizes power

• New moral disciplines emerge

• The individual conscience becomes a political object

This is exactly the kind of “deep structure of subjectivity” Hall cares about.

3. The Norman institutional revolution (1066 onward)

• Land surveys

• Codified obligations

• Proto‑bureaucratic governance

• A new model of state extraction

Again: perfect terrain for someone interested in the genealogy of modern power.

4. The shift from gift‑economy to rent‑economy

This is the century when:

• customary obligations start to be commuted into money

• lords begin to think in terms of profit

• peasants become more mobile

• markets become more central to subsistence

This is the embryonic form of the capitalist relation.

So why might Steve Hall NOT emphasize the 11th century?

Even if he hasn’t published a formal medieval study, the 11th century is the first major rupture in the long arc of Western economic subjectivity — the kind of rupture Hall loves to trace.

His work often argues that:

• modern capitalism is rooted in deep cultural transformations, not just industrial ones

• subjectivity is shaped by long‑term ideological regimes

• violence and economic order co‑evolve across centuries

This is one of those moments where a total stranger’s architecture lights up beautifully. The 11th‑century hinge I've been circling fits almost uncannily into Hall's civilizational mechanics. What I'm intuiting about Steve Hall’s deep‑structure emphasis becomes even clearer when refracted through the sequence of instrument → institution → expansion → conflict → universal empire → decay → invasion.

Below is a clean, high‑resolution mapping.

The 11th Century as an Inflection Point in an  evolutionary history driven by one core mechanism: a civilization rises when it invents an effective economic organization. It declines when that instrumental organization becomes a disserviceable institution.

The 11th century is precisely when Western Christendom reinvents its instrumentality after centuries of stagnation. It is the moment when the West restarts its S‑curve.

Let’s walk the mapping step by step.

🜁 1. Imagine my surprise when I heard the word "prodromal" on the news last night. The word means "embryonic" and Spengler used it. But this was in the context of the next flu virus. Even so: Prodromal → Cultural Synthesis (c. 700–1050).

The long incubation after the Carolingian collapse:

Civilizations generally begin in a period of mixture and gestation. For the West, this is the era of:

• fragmented feudal polities

• low trade volume

• subsistence agriculture

• localized violence

• weak central authority

This is the “pre‑expansion” plateau. The West has no functioning instrumentality yet.

The 11th century is the moment when this changes.

🜂 2. The Instrumentality Replacing Feudalism is Born (c. 1050–1150).

The Commercial Revolution is the new engine. Now any functioning instrumentality must:

• mobilize the social surplus

• coordinate elites

• reduce internal conflict

• open new channels of opportunity

• create a positive‑sum dynamic

The 11th century delivers exactly that:

The Commercial Revolution

• revival of long‑distance trade

• monetization of rents

• growth of towns

• guild formation

• proto‑capitalist accounting

• new credit instruments

The Gregorian Reform

• ideological centralization

• moral discipline

• bureaucratic coherence

• a unified elite ethos

The Norman institutional revolution

• land surveys

• standardized obligations

• proto‑state administration

Together, these form a new, coherent instrumentality of economic: a fusion of commercial energy + clerical discipline + feudal militarism.

This is the West’s second wind.

🜃 3. Age of Expansion (c. 1150–1300)

The S‑curve surges upward

This expansion phase is marked by:

• population growth

• urbanization

• technological innovation

• territorial enlargement

• cultural creativity

The 11th‑century reforms ignite:

• the Crusades

• the rise of Italian city‑states

• the Gothic economic boom

• the university system

• agricultural intensification

• the Champagne fairs

• the birth of European banking

This is the West’s great upward sweep.

🜄 4. Institutionalization (c. 1300–1500)

The instrument ossifies

The turning point arrives when the instrument of expansion becomes:

• self‑protective

• monopolistic

• rigid

• extractive

The 11th‑century innovations now harden into:

• guild monopolies

• Church bureaucracy

• feudal rent‑seeking

• aristocratic closure

• scholastic orthodoxy

• financial oligarchies

The Black Death accelerates the breakdown, but the deeper cause is institutional sclerosis.

🜅 5. Age of Conflict (c. 1500–1650)

The struggle between vested interests and new instrumentalities

The Age of Conflict is defined by:

• class struggles

• ideological polarization

• competing elites

• attempts to create new instrumentalities

This is the era of:

• Reformation vs. Counter‑Reformation

• mercantilism

• early capitalism

• religious wars

• state centralization

• colonial competition

The 11th‑century instrumentality is now obsolete, but still powerful enough to block alternatives.

🜆 6. Universal Empire (c. 1650–1815)

The consolidation of the dominant minority

Toynbee’s Universal Empire is not always literal empire; it is the political unification of the dominant minority for that time and place.

For the West, this is:

• the absolutist state

• the bureaucratic‑military machine

• the Atlantic empires

• the triumph of mercantilist elites

The 11th‑century institutional logic — clerical discipline, fiscal extraction, hierarchical order — reaches its final, rigid form.

🜇 7. Reconstitution Instead of Decay and Invasion (1815–present)

The long unraveling

Quigley sees this phase as:

• declining investment in expansion

• rising internal conflict

• ideological exhaustion

• external challengers

• new instrumentalities emerging outside the old system

Industrial capitalism, democratic revolutions, and global markets are new instrumentalities that arise against the institutionalized 11th‑century legacy.

This is the Long Century when the West fought against the Curse of Adam. We Faustians weren't going to take it lying down anymore.

🔮 Why Steve Hall’s emphasis fits this so well

Hall’s interest in the 11th century — even if implicit — aligns with mine because:

We are both absolutely right. Er, ahem...

The 11th century is the moment when the West’s second instrumentality of economic progress is forged.

It is the hinge between:

• feudal subsistence → commercial dynamism

• local custom → universal discipline

• gift economy → monetized economy

• warrior aristocracy → bureaucratic authority

• fragmented polities → centralized states

Hall’s focus on subjectivity, discipline, and the deep roots of economic order maps directly onto my mechanism of ideological and institutional formation. The commands in our carbon-based cyberspaces are erased and replaced.

🜉 If you want, we can go further.

The fun part is that this framework practically begs to be applied to something like Christian nationalism, even though no one ever wrote about it directly. If anything, it’s the kind of phenomenon Hall would have treated as a diagnostic clue about where a civilization sits on his great arc from instrument → institution → expansion → conflict → universal empire → decay.

It almost writes itself.

1. Christian nationalism as a symptom of institutionalization. My core idea is that when an instrumentality of society (say, a religious tradition meant to provide meaning, cohesion, and moral imagination) becomes an institution serving its own survival, it often hardens into identity politics (People Like Us versus People Like You). In that sense, Christian nationalism would look like:

- A defensive identity formation emerging when older integrative structures lose legitimacy  

- A sign that religion-as-instrument has calcified into religion-as-boundary-marker  

- A movement that expresses fear of social fragmentation, not confidence in cultural vitality

Do not treat it as a theological phenomenon at all — but as a civilizational stress signal.

2. A classic Age of Conflict pattern. Or a Time of Troubles or an Epochal Crisis marred by Reactive Strife, an Age of Conflict is marked by:

- Class struggles between old elites and rising groups  

- Ideological polarization  

- Attempts to restore a mythic past

- Militant reform movements that promise renewal but often accelerate fragmentation  

Christian nationalism fits that pattern almost too neatly. Toynbee’d likely see it as one of the “reform movements that fail,” not because its adherents are insincere, but because it tries to solve structural problems with symbolic politics.

3. The “misplaced concreteness” always warned about

Toynbee had a tragic sensibility about how civilizations misread their own crises.  

He’d probably argue that Christian nationalism:

- Mistakes cultural anxiety for religious revival  

- Treats political power as a substitute for civilizational creativity  

- Confuses identity with instrumental renewal  

In other words, it tries to use the past as a toolkit for the future — a move Toynbee thought rarely works.

4. The Universal Empire horizon

Toynbee believed that when a civilization is drifting toward a Universal Empire phase, you often see:

- Intense ideological movements trying to “save” the civilization  

- Attempts to impose unity from above  

- Mythic appeals to origins  

- Fusion of religion and state power  

Christian nationalism would strike him as a late-stage phenomenon — not a herald of renewal, but a sign that the civilization is struggling to find a new integrative principle.

Christian nationalism becomes a glyph of the Age of Conflict — a symbolic condensation of:

- institutional calcification  

- identity panic  

- nostalgia as political program  

- the tragic misreading of civilizational stress  

- something that dramatizes the tension between instrumentality and institution, or the way a civilizational symbol becomes a boundary instead of a bridge.

Now let's all sit down to dinner and discuss why the Vacuum Catastrophe is where the Fae live.