Why did no one after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in europe adopt a bureaucratic and imperial government and...

>Who needs a complex legal system when the King can just talk to God?
I almost puked, thanks user

Simple economics

You don’t need (nor can you really afford) a powerful bureaucratic state when your society is primarily rural and dominated by powerful land owners, as opposed to being primarily urban and dominated by powerful civil servants and/or money lenders.

The Roman bureaucratic state eventually proved to be worse than useless and the feudal model was in many ways a step up from the slave owning latifundia plantations of antiquity

This guy gets it, Feudalism wasn't a planed thing, it is just the way to get shit done when you're on Mad Max level of society.

I was trying to be funny and I just made people puke.

It's a weird feeling.

I knew you were trying to be funny because I saw the wojak you posted user. If it makes you feel better I thought it was funny.

Feudalism could survive where Roman imperial government could not. Not only was it not restored, Eastern Roman Empire switched into Feudalism as well.

What good is a Roman government for? Feudalism guarantees that all profits in society goes into military (not in useless luxuries), nearly 100% of able bodied men can be conscripted, every patch of land is overseen by a castle or a fort, and a warleader with an army at hand, that society is resistant to decadence, as the moment a decadent ruler or a vassal arises, he'll be eaten by others internally, rather than defeated from the outside.

Divine right is superior to retarded Roman Imperium, only outshined by Chinese Mandate of Heavens.

Romans literally adopted divine Right before anyone else (Aurelian tired it with Sol Invictis, and Constantine did it with Christianity)

>The bureaucratic government of Rome was the result, all the elaborate laws were just to prove that everything was fair.
Noone gave a fuck about fairness past Augustus.

Yup. Divine right arose specifically because just letting the soldiers pick the ruler was a recipe for continuous disaster. By adopting the divine right model, westerners no longer had to worry about soldiers nominating their general as the ruler just because his was the largest army, as true power in a country now flowed from the religious apparatus of state, which kept the civilian and military unified and avoided the sort of calamity endured by the Romans when their crude model for enlightened despotism broke down.

Proto-feudalism began much earlier in the late 3rd century with things like the Diocletian tax reform, which essentially tied you to the land where you were born and severely crippled social mobility. It was already a response and attempt at a solution to changes happening within the empire and couldn’t just be reversed (Julian did try however, unsuccessfully).

Why didn't China become feudalist like Rome in its periods of disintegration? I know all about the philosophical influences of Chinese political thought (Legalism, Confucianism, etc) but were there other reasons that contributed to this divergence? Was the principate really that retarded?

>Was the principate really that retarded?
More or less that.

Chinese political philosophy and system could be compared to European Enlightenment and Absolutism, rather than Rome.

>tfw Romans will never reunify the Mediterranean and conquer the G*rmanics/Slavs
>tfw there will never be a new Pax Romana presided over by a dynasty of virtuous, benevolent sages
>tfw there will never be an elite class of Roman bureaucrats morally educated in Neoplatonic and Stoic Classics in order to revere the Gods

Hold me my brothers.

>Why didn't China become feudalist like Rome in its periods of disintegration?
Three answers.

1) Because Feudalism was the hallmark of Zhou Period's fall and the Warring States period. A period so shit, the various Philosophies of Chinese thinking at the time converged on the idea that a centralized state was better instead of being organized into dubious hierarchical relations of feudalism. The Qin unification made this into a reality. Under Legalism tho.

2) However, Feudal China survived the Qin Dynasty unification because the Han Dynasty- in an effort to quiet the angry nobles who lost everything under Qin unification- ran a dual system of centralized government and feudal domains. So dukes, marquises, and kings governed their inherited fiefdoms while their neighbors were civil governors appointed to provinces.

3) The remaining Feudal nobility then started killing each other during the end of the Han Dynasty. In the Three Kingdoms and Northern/Southern Dynasty periods that by the time the Sui Dynasty reunified China, there were so few of the nobility left. The Scholar-Bureaucrat aristocracy dominated by that point.

it was easier to rebuild a governmental feudal system from the ground up rather than try to adopt and fix an overloaded, decrepit, and rotten imperial system that contradicted itself at times. there is a reason why justinians law reforms were a huge deal, roman red tape was miles thick and cutting through it was like swimming a mile through a lake of molasses.

Do you seriously think people back then had a choice of what organization type they'd choose? Or even a plan? Feudalism happened because that's what obviously happens in a post apocalyptic warrior based society, might makes right and the strong rule.

contd.

4) Even well beyond the demise of Chinese feudal nobility, there was still a sort of controlled feudalism in place in China. In the form of the Military Systems of the Tang-Song period.

The Sui-Tang Dynasties ran what is called the "Fubing System." The logic of this system was to provide for a standing army that was capable of paying for its own. To do that, the government basically paid soldiers in land. In times of peace, soldiers tilled the fields with their families. In wartime, soldiers left while their families continued farming. This led to the rise of hereditary military families in which being born into a Fubing village meant you're a soldier for the rest of your life.

And then there's the office of Jiedushi. In Tang China's frontiers there were many threats. So to simplify handling this threats, the Tang issued their top generals the rank of Jiedushi and a posting to a frontier province. The rank allows them full civil/military authority in the province. It allowed them to collect taxes, raise their own personal armies, appoint their own officers, and go to campaigns on their discretion.

This worked initially until greedy generals caused the Tang to decline (An Lushan, famously) into the 5 Dynasties and 10 Kingdoms period. After that, all Chinese dynasties started preferring state armies.

I'm aware of most of this. I was looking for why Germanic-Roman landowners survived to form feudalism while Chinese nobility weakened and were gradually replaced by scholar bureaucrats in the wake of their periods of fragmentation.

>Germanic-Roman landowners
No such thing mate, Germancis were feudal organized before the migration age and after. Hallmark of a tribal society.

How does that contradict my point? In places like Gaul, didn't the Gallo-Roman landowners intermarry with the Frank leadership?

>might makes right and the strong rule.
Samuel hide? is that you?

>In places like Gaul, didn't the Gallo-Roman landowners intermarry with the Frank leadership?
Apparently not, that's why the salic law distinguishes so heavily between free Franks and gallo-romans. I'm not even sure if there was gallo-roman landowners left, like why would the Franks tolerate them when they could have the entire cake to themselves instead.

Never said, I approve of this, but apparently thats how things work in a tribal society under very insecure conditions. the one that can provide safety by force for you decides whatgoes down.

>thats how things work in a tribal society
t. never been in a tribal society