By Antonio Ambrosino
When history repeats itself, the Middle Ages return in 2025
In the silent flow of modern days, a strange echo rises — as if the past, long buried, were whispering through the cracks of our present. Despite scientific and technological advances, our society reveals unsettling similarities with the medieval past. From Berlin’s new zoning fees to London’s congestion charges and city taxes, echoes of feudal levies reverberate in metropolitan fee structures. The term neomedievalism thus rises, in an analytical key, to describe an era in which power dynamics and social structures echo those of the Late Middle Ages: uncontrolled migration, oppressive taxation, and a direct, authoritarian control wielded by today’s new aristocracies—represented by institutions and lobby groups.
In the Late Middle Ages, the continent was the theater of relentless migrations: peoples in search of fortune or refuge crossed borders, shaping ethnic and cultural realities, but sometimes also igniting social disorder. Today, in a globalized world, migratory flows take on similar contours, producing contrasting effects: on one hand enriching the cultural fabric; on the other exacerbating tensions in a society unable to integrate newcomers fully. This parallel goes beyond sheer numbers, reaching into the ways these dynamics are managed and exploited by the same power systems.
A further and disquieting element of continuity regards excessive taxation. Modern tax policies—often perceived as a crushing burden—recall the levies imposed with rigor in the Middle Ages, weighing on ordinary citizens with an impact reminiscent of serfdom. In this new era, institutions and managers stand, in a quasi-feudal manner, as guarantors of direct control over the community, relegating the population to a passive and almost resigned role, awaiting an intervention that always seems postponed.
Completing the picture is a marked, widespread authoritarianism, fueled by retrograde laws that, instead of solving social contradictions, often accentuate or circumvent them, leaving structural problems unaddressed. This legislation, devoid of the flexibility required by modern times, blocks progress, confining social dynamics in immovable and archaic patterns—much like the rigid normative system of medieval fiefs, where law was a tool of domination and control.
The concept of neomedievalism is therefore not a mere rhetorical evocation but a profound, reasoned critique of the state of our contemporary era. It calls attention to the need for renewal, for overcoming old paradigms that still, unconsciously, guide power distribution and collective governance.
Yet beneath this critique lies a deeper unease — a sense of disorientation, of spiritual fatigue, as if the soul of modernity were adrift. The loss of harmony between power and nature, the erosion of communal bonds, and the fading of visionary ideals leave us wandering through a landscape that feels both familiar and estranged.
Only by awakening civic consciousness and promoting courageous, imaginative reforms can we prevent modernity from dragging on like an echo of the past — trapping citizens in a form of passive servitude akin to that which defined life in the feudal age.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 