The term was made famous by Italian Marxist historians Ruggiero Romano and Rosario Villari, to illuminate the social conditions behind the Neapolitan Revolt of 1647.
The concept was influenced by Gramsci's ideas, the historiographical debates during the 1950s and 1960s that centered on Eric Hobsbawm's seventeenth century "General Crisis" as well as 1960s Italian politics.
Though Italy had pioneered the commercial revolution, feudal barons neglected business opportunities to innovate and further rationalize the processes of production.
Habermas saw space that had been gained for the public around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries returning to private hands, a process which he called 'the refeudalization [Refeudalisierung] of the public sphere': 'Habermas discussed the pincer-like movement in which late modern consumer capitalism attempts to turn us into unthinking mass consumers on one hand, while political actors, interest groups, and the state try to turn us into unthinking mass citizens on the other'.
[2] Habermas's analysis is based on an oral bias; he believed that the public sphere can be most effectively constituted and maintained through dialogue, acts of speech, debate and discussion.
The Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler uses the German expression "Refeudalisierung der Gesellschaft" to illuminate the forces behind neoliberal globalization.
However, the concept in English is typically translated as the "new feudalization", which here means the subversion of Enlightenment values (freedom, equality and brotherhood) and the radical privatization of public goods and services.
[9] The historian and Director of CALAS Olaf Kaltmeier extended this approach to include political-cultural dimensions and applied it to Latin America.
In doing so, he combines the extreme social polarization of the social structure with the unequal distribution of land in Latin America, spatial segregation in the form of gated communities and shopping centres (often accompanied by retro-colonial architecture), an extractivist economy with accumulation by dispossession, and a duplication of economic power through political power in the form of millionaires who, like Mauricio Macri or Sebastián Pineira, become presidents.