There is some corroborating evidence from a different corner...left-wing flakes are obsessed with the Rousseau's Noble Savage archetype, they have this romantic notion of going back to the land, free bands of roving hunter-gatherers living in tipis on the plains of Utopia, in peace and harmony with their neighbors and the planet. This is a pathetic fantasy of course, but our myths tell more about us than our history does.

But what about the other side? The bourgeois mind finds comfort in the trappings of aristocracy, nobility, kingship. The neofeudal world of fairy tales, movies, even the local Renaissance Fair still dominates our folklore and fantasy today. Look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy and other sword-and-sorcery fantasies. Can you really dismiss as coincidence all those noble knights and warriors
and Lords engaged in combat against collectivist sub-human hordes led by evil geniuses? I can only interpret this as subconscious nostalgia for feudalism. At the core of the fairy tale is a right-wing pornography, look at the Nazi obsession with the Teutonic knights and even English and American mythology, (among societies who long ago tamed their aristocracies) concerning lords and ladies, noble kings, and a stout and cheerful yeomanry (never an oppressed and exploited peasantry).

When any empire collapses, a period of total chaos follows, followed by a gradual consolidation into a patchwork of semi-independent communities each led by a strong family. This social structure still survives today in the small family-owned business, explaining part of its great appeal to the proletariat. It provides stability and peace, and the price to be paid is relatively small, a portion of your produce goes to the Manor. Feudalism has occured in many places, Homeric Greece, Post-Roman Europe, the Japanese Shogunates, Mogul India, and the warlords of China and today, Afghanistan. Feudal lords are often at war with each other, but the fighting is usually done by paid professionals and land and peasantry are too valuable to destroy outright. Even if the castle is stormed, the new lord won't be that much different. After a while, a hierarchichal structure of King-barons-serfs develops which is quite stable, provided there is always a viable heir. The survival of these institutions to the modern times, even if only as symbolic and traditional structures, testifies to the deep hold they have on the European imagination. Their grip on our folklore argues the same: for all its drawbacks, feudalism does restore order, and the castle has a wall to hide behind when the barbarians come to visit. Feudalism delivers, and the people remember.