Introduction

Farang Sakdina is an extended essay written in 1957–1958 to correct what M. R. Kukrit PramojFootnote 1 states was a translation error that associated farang (western) feudalism with the traditional Thai “feudal” system called sakdina. Kukrit’s point is that while both words (feudalism and sakdina) described systems of politics, loyalty, and governance in the early-modern world, it is not appropriate to assert that the two are equivalent. Kukrit explains that this mistake was made in the 1950s by both Communists promoting their theory of dialectical materialism, and Americans promoting policies rooted in liberal “modernization theory,” which were the basis for supporting democracy and capitalism in Southeast Asia. Kukrit’s thesis is that Americans (capitalist materialists), and Soviets (Marxist materialists) made the same error in assuming that the two institutions—farang feudalism, and Thai sakdina—were equivalent.

To replace such theories of social action, Kukrit proposes a theory of good governanceFootnote 2 and political change rooted in doctrines, which emphasize dialectical tensions, i.e., the “contradictions,” which he says emerge in any political system.Footnote 3 His point is that the historical contradictions underpinning change in Europe and Thailand were fundamentally different. In particular, in Europe there was a chronic land shortage, and as a result a peasantry was attached to the land. The land (with bound serfs) was owned by the nobles. In feudal/sakdina Thailand there was an abundance of rich arable land, and a shortage of labor, and as a result, peasants were personally attached to the nobility in a social ecology in which proximity to power, not control of land rights, was key to holding a kingdom together (see also Scott, 2009: pp. 59–62). The result Kukrit writes is that the dialectic (i.e., thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) is different in Thailand than in Europe, and political change proceeded differently. A textual analysis of Kukrit’s book, reflects how he thought the structures of modern democratic governance in Thailand needed to be rooted in a pre-existing Thai cultural predisposition that reflected pre-existing view of how hierarchy, society, and property ideally worked. The relationship between this cultural predisposition and what Bourdieu calls “habitus” is discussed below.

Writing retrospectively in 2022, it is apparent that Kukrit made a good point. As he hypothesized, things have not turned out the way that the liberal Anglo-American modernization theorists predicted. Thailand has developed, though not always (or even usually) in the context of democratic electoral politics; indeed it was one of the most military coup-prone countries of the twentieth century and perhaps remains so in the twenty-first century (see Farelly, 2013). As Kukrit described in 1957–1958, the source of social tension, what Kukrit calls contradictions, continues to have the military at the center of Thai governance in ways that few other countries do in the twenty-first century. The continuing central role of the military in Thailand, which is now guaranteed in the new 2018 Constitution, is a persistent autocratic challenge to pressures by outside promoters of good governance policies. The good governance donors continue to promote issues of efficiency, inclusivity, and especially transparent democratic elections, just as they did in the 1950s when Kukrit wrote Farang Sakdina.

The effective failure of American or British advisors to prescribe a policy, which would actually achieve the goals of what the UN would call good democratic governance is a theoretical challenge. Such policies defined Thai patrimonial traditions of hierarchy as corrupt because they violated good governance principles of equity, transparency, and efficiency. This was the case when Kukrit wrote in 1957–1958, and it is the case today. It is also why it is productive to return to Kukrit’s critique of 1950s Cold War politics in Thailand, which might be called “Buddhist dialectics.”

My thesis is that Kukrit is correct, and the social scientific assumptions the many foreign advisors brought from elsewhere to Thailand were flawed, and as a result do not achieve the democratic goals they set for Thailand starting in the 1940s and 1950s. This flaw was pointed to in Farang Sakdina (1957–1958), and is why I think the book works today as both post-colonial theory, and a corrective to more western social theory, especially theories rooted in materialism. If this is the case, Kukrit’s approach will provide a more robust, efficient and parsimonious way to understand the development trajectory of Thailand since the book was written in 1957–1958, and indeed perhaps provides a context for the coup of 2014, and the student demonstrations of 2020. Indeed, such utility is the test of a good social theory. Thus, the goal of this paper is to identify a robust understanding of a general theory of “good governance” from a Thai perspective, and contrast this with western assumptions. Notably Kukrit’s methodological approach is rooted in established understandings of comparative historical sociology (see Ragin, 1987; Goldstone, 1991; Waters, 1999: pp. 54–57).

Thailand scholars may find this a strange claim to make about Kukrit whose primary reputation is rooted in literature, politics, journalism, and even film. He is also associated closely with the nationalistic Thainess movement (khwam pen Thai). However, I think too that the “hat” of comparative social theorist can be added to Kukrit’s repertoire on the basis of how he developed his theory of political change in Farang Sakdina, using examples form England and Thailand.

Kukrit Pramoj and his times

Kukrit Pramoj was a major figure in the arts and politics in post-World War II Thailand, and his novels were major contribution to Thai literature during the second half of the twentieth century. Politically he was engaged in the post-World War II reconstruction of Thailand and the intrigues of governance as rule shifted between democratic and military figures in the late 1940s. In the 1950s–1980s, he also published a newspaper, Siam Rat, penning essays that needled carefully the authoritarian military dictatorship, and promoted the re-emergence of the Thai constitutional kingship under King Phumiphol, Rama IX. This occurred at times when government censorship could be severe; Kukrit was known for not pushing “too far,” and avoiding direct confrontation (and prison), despite his role as a journalist.

In the 1970s when an opportunity for democratic politics opened briefly, Kukrit founded the Social Action Party, and served briefly as Speaker of the Thai House of Representatives, and for 13 months as Prime Minister in 1975 and 1976. During the time he was Prime Minister, the American war in Vietnam ended, and Kukrit asked the Americans to leave their Thai airbases. He also established diplomatic relations with Beijing.

Throughout his career, Kukrit had a reputation among leftists for being a “conservative royalist,” which from a political standpoint was perhaps true (see e.g., Thak, 2018: pp. 2–3, 147; Larsson, 2017: p. 534). Support for the constitutional monarchy was at the heart of what Kukrit did as a newspaper editor and politician, and he was without question a royalist. In my view though his status as a “conservative” is a bit more ambiguous. In a country that has such strong traditions of authoritarian right wing military rule, such a royalist conservative can also be a democrat.

At the heart of Kukrit’s more academic interests was always Thai culture and character, which he usually described in literary, rather than political terms. Among his more popular characters was the dog “Mom” who lived in Bangkok during World War II; and Mother Ploy of Four Kingdoms who lived in the palace of King Rama V (reign 1868–1910), later raising sons who grew up to have different political views. A novel Many Lives was about the Buddhist karma of eleven boat passengers who died together in a drowning accident, and another of his earliest books Red Bamboo was about an impoverished village, which was torn between the corruption of Bangkok elites, modernizing Marxist ideology brought from outside, and the Buddhism offered by a learned village abbot. Later books included histories of Southeast Asia, stories about his pet dogs, literary translation, Thai history, elephants, the Vietnam War, a history of the Jewish people, commentaries on classic Thai literature, and many others.

Outside of his politics and literary career, Kukrit also played the Prime Minister of “Sarkhan” opposite Marlon Brando in the 1963 film “The Ugly American.”Footnote 4 The film critiqued America’s development role in the fictional Southeast nation of “Sarkhan,” a word that entered the Thai language via the English language film, and in Thai today refers to any weak corrupt nation that is subordinated by one of the great powers.

Kukrit’s newspaper columns in particular are known for their impishness and humor, while his novels are known for the quality of the plot, and entertainment value. Farang Sakdina is different than the better-known works of Kukrit, though. Farang Sakdina is instead more a work of abstract political philosophy describing the historical origins of political tensions in the mid-1950s as Thailand maneuvered between the Great Powers in the Cold War. Kukrit borrows from Anglo-American concepts—his enthusiasm for English-style democracy is clear—while adopting too a Marxist-style form of dialectical reasoning.

Thai politics and mid-twentieth century social theory

Mid-twentieth century development policy was implicitly theorized by Thailand’s liberal western allies by focusing on the materialism of development. Specifically development planners focused on the role of market capitalism, democratic institutions, and good governance policies. Leftist theorists from the Soviet Union and China meanwhile, were present too, and were explicitly wedded to Marx’s dialectics of historical materialism. Both sides of course assumed that their own views pointed to a scientific technocratic solution to how development policy should work. The Americans and their allies thus prescribed elections, and free markets for Thailand, while the Soviet Union and its allies prescribed class struggle, and state ownership of the means of production.

Kukrit in Farang Sakdina, though, is asserting a Thai alternative that both acknowledges dialectics, but also asserts assumptions rooted in concepts of Buddhist karma. In Kukrit’s formulation in Farang Sakdina, societies rise, deteriorate, and then rise again from the remains of what deteriorated—as a result the new is always a throwback to the past. In other words, the tensions that led to deterioration in the past, can likely to re-emerge later as the society reconstitutes. Unspoken cultural redispositions and habits (what Pierre Bourdieu would later call habitus) do not necessarily disappear just because a regime collapses.

Notably, this is, I think different from the “Thainess” (Khwam pen Thai) origins of Thai exceptionalism that Kukrit promoted particularly in his later political writings.Footnote 5 Also relevant perhaps is Herzfeld’s (2010: p. 174) warning that evaluations of exceptionalism should navigate carefully between the idea that any nation is unique, and what he calls “taxonomic reductionism”, which is an assumption that the various characteristics of any country can be reduced to one broader category or the other. As with Kukrit’s approach in Farang Sakdina, Herzfeld’s approach is dialectical, i.e., focused on dialectics and tensions, rather than essentialist.

The argument in Farang Sakdina does not reduce itself to Thai exceptionalism, but explains Thai and English political governance and kingship in terms rooted in culture, social ecology, and historical contingency.Footnote 6 If one must seek analogies in western social theory, it is probably closest to what Max Weber proposed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which the ethics of modern capitalist enterprise are traced back to ideologies of the Protestant ascetic Christianity. In other words, Kukrit in Farang Sakdina, like Weber, proposes a general theory of social development that is not rooted in the materialism of the capitalist west or Marxist east. Unlike Weber though, Kukrit’s focus is democracy and governance, not capitalist economics.

Kukrit’s social theory and Anglo-American “Good Governance”

I think that over 60 years and 14 Thai constitutions/charters later, Kukrit would likely reach the same conclusions about democracy and governance in Thailand that he did in 1957–1958. The positions of the Thai military and democratic institutions in 2022 are clearly derived from what Kukrit observed in 1957–1958. Despite the country’s rapid economic and social progress since then, the borrowing of democratic institutions and constitutionalism for use in Thailand did not work as promised by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the 1950s, nor does it today, judging from the number of new Thai constitutions promulgated, proposed, suspended, and amended since 1932. What was consistent though were the tensions between urban middle classes/elites, rural peasantry. The tensions continued in the 2010s when yellow shirts confronted red shirts, and the 2014 military coup was a result (see e.g., Sombatpoonsiri (2017); Baker (2016)).

Kukrit explains that when Thailand’s American and European development planners tried to create democratic institutions in Thailand in the 1940s and 1950s, they made the mistake of ignoring the very different historical trajectories of Europe and Southeast Asia. Moreover indeed, western nation-builders even today criticize “feudalism” in places like Thailand, Myamnar, Afghanistan, and Iraq because patron-client relationships are inconvenient for the implementation of USAID and UN contracts. Implicitly though they are simply assuming that liberal modernization theory created for Europe reflects universal principals. As Kukrit asserts though, the farang advisors from the US State Department and the United Nations in 1957 assumed what is now called modernization theory. Kukrit, writing in Thai,Footnote 7 warns the Thai public that this is a poor model for Thailand where political traditions are rooted not in European feudalism, but in Thai sakdina. Here it is in Kukrit’s own words:

This is because Western Farang feudalism and Thai Sakdina can be seen as being about the same thing. But this implies that they are simply equivalents [which they are not]. But as a description of an ancient society, Sakdina describes only Thai society while feudalism only describes the Western Farang society. Why do they have to be considered the same thing as the translation of the word Sakdina to feudalism implies? (Kukrit: Foreword to Farang Sakdina).

Kukrit (p. 145) also offers a way to understand European systems using “Buddhist dialectics” in which the regeneration of a political system occurs only in the context of the contradictions embedded in the dispositions and habits of what there previously. For individuals, this is a reference to Buddhist concepts of karma, a principle that Kukrit asserts applies to any political system.

Thus, Kukrit’s thesis in Farang Sakdina emerges from historical comparative sociology, and as such is a precursor to what is now known as post-colonial theory. In making comparisons, Kukrit effectively develops a contingent theory of political change rooted in Southeast Asian dialectical traditions in which social institutions are assumed to have tensions and contradictions. As a reasult they go through cycles of growth, stasis, decay, and then return to growth.

The Marxist challenge of Jit Phoumisak and others

Marxist arguments, emphasize “schema of social formations worked out for other societies” of Europe by Marx, Engels and their successors. Under such formula, the practice of history came to be one of searching out the “stages” at which Thai society progressed: slave, feudal, capitalist, and then socialist (Reynolds and Lysa, 1983: p. 80). This led to the publication of works about Thailand in the 1950s that started with a Marxist frame, and sought to explain how the succeeding ruling classes, i.e., the nobility in Thai feudalism/sakdina, and the capitalists in mid-twentieth century Thailand, dominated peasants and workers. Typically, the Thai revolution of 1932 was identified as the dividing line between feudal formations, and the beginning of capitalist/business dominance. This is the Marxist formulation that Kukrit is jousting with.

Jit Phoumisak (1930–1967), a student at Thammasat University wrote the most important essay of the genre, “The Real Face of Tai Feudalism” in 1957 for the Thammasat Year Book. The book includes, as Reynolds (1987: p. 155, and especially Jit 1957/1987) points out, a grab bag of French Orientalist scholarship, and theoretical Marxism from America and Europe. However more importantly, it includes compilations of data and definitions from Thai sources, which illustrate the nature of labor, kingship, land tenure, slavery, and business in pre-modern and modern Thailand. In developing his argument, Jit’s writing is reminiscent of Karl Marx’s (1867) Kapital, but with Thai data, rather that that from English textile manufacturing. However still, underpinning this idea is an assertion by Jit that Thai Sakdina and European feudalism were the same (Reynolds and Lysa, 1983: p. 85, and Piyada 2018).Footnote 8

Reynolds (1987) in translating Jit’s book, does dwell on the problematic nature of the word sakdina, which he points out came into common usage in Thai only after the 1932 Revolution when democratic forces, as well as the military, needed to explain what was bad about the old overthrown system. In this context, sakdina (or saktina) became a shorthand in the 1940s and 1950s for describing the noble titles, tributary relationships, social inequality, and absolute kingship resembling, at least in a superficial fashion, feudal England, France, and Germany.Footnote 9

Conservative royalist, and the search for liberalism

Kukrit is traditionally viewed by liberal Thai academics as a “conservative royalist.” Despite having good democratic credentials, his loyalty to a more liberal politics is questioned because of his stalwart support of the monarchy in general, and King Rama IX who across his long reign emerged as a popular “father of the nation,” despite the context of his decidedly illiberal military governments, which emerged after after 1948. These military governments of course ruled through force, and frequently engineered coups. They also encouraged a strong Thai nationalist identity in which fealty to the royalty was a central tenet of Thai exceptionalism. In this context, activists, and the more liberal academics question whether it was possible for Kukrit to be both a democrat, and a royalist.Footnote 10

Larsson (2017: pp. 536–537) describes Saichon Sattayanurak’s (2014) two volume history of conservative nationalist Thai thought as a “magnum opus.” Saichon used her books (and columns in the periodical Matichon) to describe the ten wise men of Thai thought regarding the nature of monarchy and “Thai-ness” (Khwam pen Thai) that suffused modern Thai institutions and culture for at least the last 100 years. Saichon places Kukrit at the center of this group of ten, because as Larsson (2017: p. 537) wrote: “Kukrit viewed Thai-style government centered on the king and on the Buddhist conception of freedom as a spiritual matter, superior to anything offered by Western-style liberal democracy.” As many writers about Thailand in Thai and English note, this ideology of Thai exceptionalism underpins today’s modern Thai state (see e.g., Larsson (2017); Connors (2008); Kata (2016): pp. 28–31). However, Saichon (2002, 2014, 2007) in her writing also points out that Kukrit’s writing was generally used to legitimate the present-day class system rooted in the older conservative traditions like Sakdina.Footnote 11

Farang Sakdina as a work of social theory

The basic methodological mistake according to Kukrit

Farang Sakdina is a work of Social Theory and Comparative History (see Goldstone (1991); Ragin (1987)). In form and substance, Kukrit’s book involves a deep understanding of English legal and political history, and the nature of Anglo-American democracy. However, Kurkit adds to this comparison an understanding from Thai social and political history, which means his theory is different. This is important because, as Kukrit points out, theories based only on Western data are not necessarily applicable to places that are non-Western. Indeed, Kukrit’s point is one made in any basic social research methods class! Kukrit might have written, “do not make generalizations beyond the parameters of the population sampled!”

As Kukrit complains, making generalizations beyond the population sampled is what happened when Marx, Engels, and others used data from Europe to generalize about a phenomenon in Asia that they called “The Asiatic Mode of Production” (see e.g. Treadgold 1987). This theory asserted that Asia was different than Europe, and had a unique form of despotism, an obviously Euro-centric assertion.

However, the application of European social theory to Asia is what the Western enthusiasts of democratic capitalism, democracy, and good governance do, even today.Footnote 12 Writing in a way that anticipates traditions of a modern sociological methods book, Kukrit points out that Europeans apply generalizations derived from European data uncritically to Asian situations which they never studied:

The history book about the rhythms of human society written by Karl Marx that every Communist reads points out that, at one time humans used the right over the land in Europe as the key to domination by the ruling class. But historical books in the past used the European historical events as a standard because Karl Marx wrote and criticized history with a knowledge limited to Europe (Kukrit Farang Sakdina, p. 188).

Kukrit’s tedious description of English feudalism in chapter 4 of Farang Sakdina

Ultimately Kukrit’s main point is that in England, the state was a creation of nobles who came together out of need for mutual protection of their feudal lands, and appointed a King to resolve disputes. As Kukrit notes, the farang King in this concept is the product of a proverbial round table, around which equals sit in a system that eventually became Parliament. The King is theoretically the first of otherwise equal nobles, a situation, which leads to a division of power between the central government, and relatively autonomous provinces, bishophorics, duchies, counties, manors, etc. Kukrit points out that this was long the case in England, and indeed formally became the case when the nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. However in Thailand, Kukrit writes, The King is supreme; there was no round table of equals. The Thai King appointed both nobles and assigned bureaucrats. He could fire them, too.

The [Thai] King was the person who was in the highest position; he, as a result, was the “boss” or “owner” of all the people. Next on down were the servants directly responsible to the King (i.e., the tenant-in-chief of the King) who also had a status as the master of ordinary people, but was. also responsible for making the land productive.

The basis of this kind of society was inherited from an ancient world. Before sakdina, it was believed that each person was mainly free and that the King was the head of such free people. The army, in turn, was made up of the free (thai)Footnote 13 people of the nation who held the weapons of war, and the courthouse was where such free (thai) persons came and adjudicated cases. …

[So] in the ancient societies of Thailand, ever since the Thai people were found in Thailand, the land was the treasure of the whole nation. [In contrast] British society developed into [farang] feudalism and developed the concept that the land must be owned. The free [British] people must own the land [as individuals or private corporations] …. A type of freedom emerged in England in which land ownership was central to the very definition of “free”Footnote 14 (see Kukrit Farang Sakdina p. 134).

Kukrit then makes a point about Bourdieu (2009) would call habitus, meaning the unspoken predispositions and habits underlying social institutions, including those of government.Footnote 15 As Kukrit points out, effectively, the habitus of English governance have origins in local landlords who elected one of their own as King. In contrast, in Thailand the King asserted control over the local nobles, and then replaced them with his own nobles and bureaucrats who were personally loyal to him. This results in a different set of unspoken predispositions and habits. For example, in the decentralized English system, land is central, and the peasants (villeins or serfs) belonged to a specific piece of land, which was owned “in perpetuity.” With this came land surveys, and eventually the creation of land as a commodity, which can be bought and sold, with whoever purchases it also acquiring the perpetual rights. Thus, in England, nobles and peasants, and their heirs, had rights to the land “in perpetuity,” i.e., forever!

The feudal manor was the English unit on which peasants lived and served a local noble who lived in the large house, and was sovereign. The manor would even have courts and other institutions needed for the government of the peasantry. Only when specific issues involving the “King’s Peace” or land disputes between manors would the King’s own judges intervene. As Kukrit emphasizes, there was no analogous system in the sakdina world of Thailand (see Table 1 for a comparative summary of England and Thailand).

Table 1 Summary of differences highlighted in Kukrit’s Farang Sakdina between English/farang feudalism, and Thai Sakdina, as specified in Farang Sakdina, by Kukrit Pramoj.
Full size table

However, in the traditional Thai system, farmers were personally loyal to a noble who was appointed by the Thai King.Footnote 16 The farmland was in turn assigned to the nobles and “their” farmers by the King’s servants. As long as the peasants (and their nobles) used the land productively, they de facto “owned” it. However, neither noble nor farmer held the land “in perpetuity.” Rather, unused or unowned land reverted to the crown for reassignment.Footnote 17 And, unlike in England, there was no assumed right of inheritance and perpetual rights—everything in traditional Thailand went back to the King upon death. One result is that unspoken and unwritten predispositions of governance in Thailand are focused on the center and not the geographical sub-divisions such as parliamentary constituencies, counties, bishophorics, duchies, and baronies as is the case in England where all entities were also held “in perpetuity” under the land laws of feudal inheritance and primogeniture.

Thus, Kukrit’s Farang Sakdina is ultimately several stories in one. First, as described in the Introduction (and in Chapter 16) of the book, Farang Sakdina is an assertion that Thailand is different than Europe, because of different historical contingencies. However, the “meat” of the book is still in the detailed description of English feudalism written for a Thai audience.

Thus, much of Chapter 4 in Farang Sakdina is a long description of English feudalism and how the legal structure emerged, starting in pre-Roman times, during the Roman times, and the later independent kingdoms of the pre-Norman England. Kukrit then describes how after the Norman invasion when William the Conqueror established in England the formal laws of feudalism that he brought from France. These were eventually extended into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In describing this change, Kukrit engages in lengthy descriptions of the relative rights and responsibilities of the different ranks within English feudalism, emphasizing that unequal relations are reliant on sentiment between master and servant, who recognize mutual (and unequal) responsibilities.Footnote 18 The fact that predispositions and habits endure, i.e., what Bourdieu (2009) later called habitus, is also central to Kukrit’s argument.

By emphasizing the enduring contradictions (habitus) of Thiland, Kukrit implicitly re-emphasizes his ideas about Buddhist dialectics, i.e., the generation, decline and regeneration that underpin a social habitus, which also includes fixed ideas of political hierarchy.Footnote 19 Kukrit then applies this dialectic approach to the farang feudalism he saw in England, noting that since feudalism is not a static system, but one in which contradictions are always wrestled with. The contradictions in England he writes, started as far back as the pre-Roman times and continued through the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods until feudalism emerged full-blown with the Normans who first arrived in 1066. At that point, Kukrit’s analysis gets even more detailed as he describes the tensions between the Norman conquerors and the conquered. This culminates in the insistence of the barons and dukes that King John sign the Magna Carta in 1215, which codified The King’s very limited authority to collect taxes without permission of the nobles, except for three specific reasons, as Kukrit emphasizes:

  1. 1.

    The knighthood of his eldest son.

  2. 2.

    The marriage of his eldest daughter.

  3. 3.

    His own ransom.

Kukrit’s point is that it would be nonsensical to place such restrictions on the Thai King. The Thai King in Ayutthaya had absolute authority, in a way that an English King did not. The elaborate legal structure of English governance emerged hundreds of years later, but still with particular predisposition and understanding of property in land and humans. The English system is still symbolically elaborated in a heritable system rooted in feudal traditions. Courts emerged at each level, but for most people who were villeins/serfs, the only court was the one at the feudal manor. Local courts retained authority over criminal acts (including murder), and the higher-level courts only accepted cases involving land disputes among nobles, appeals from lower courts, and eventually crimes, which directly challenged the King’s Peace.Footnote 20 Power was at the local level, and the English King’s authority was restricted—he was the first among equals, not the omnipresent demigod wielding the sacred moral authority of baramiFootnote 21 found in Thailand.

As Kukrit emphasizes the center of this English system was the land: Control of the land, laws about the land, and the land courts were present primarily at the manors. Only in the event of appeal, did land cases go to the King’s court. It was over these limited cases Kukrit writes, that political change occurs—as “contradictions” resolve themselves. English feudalism Kukrit wrote did deteriorate and die, and did so after the English Civil War, and Industrial Revolution. However, even after these events the remnants of feudalism created a new society that would eventually create the democratic principles of twentieth century, while still retaining the habits of feudal law, and decentralized governance and a specific conceptions of private property that remain today in England, remnants of the predisposition and habitus of feudalism. In other words, to mix concepts from Kukrit and western sociology, it might be said that just as the cultural habitus reproduces itself from earlier periods, the karmic contradictions of previous societies have social consequences today. This logic of habitus/karma has consequences for the present in how Kukrit sought to understand the situation in Thailand in 1957–1958 when he wrote in Farang Sakdina.

… the substance in the body is still the preparation for the production of a new body. It is a normal thing. So in a society with any type of ruling system, regeneration [i.e., karma/habitus] must occur. For instance, in an absolute monarchy system, there must be tension with democracy, and within democracy, there must be a tension with communism. Even in the communist system itself, there is such a regeneration that is called a “reaction,” …(p. 145).

Following through with this logic, Kukrit wrote the following in the Forward to Farang Sakdina.

So if the various traditions of democracy are good, the problems in Thailand today must come from another place. What other unknown traditions [habitus] out there occurred in Thailand’s past? The problem must have come from something else, not democracy. … What is the basis for all these democratic things falling apart? … Is it through the continuous poverty and craziness of people that constitutionalism has worked only for a short time in the past? This story has been told many times but still happens over and over and over again!, Farang Sakdina).Footnote 22

Ultimately, then Kukrit asks, why should the British model be a good precedent for Thai democracy even in 1957–1958? His answer in the light of the political machinations of 1932–1958 was that it was not. In fact, English feudalism seemed quite irrelevant to Kukrit, who asks how can principles developed to deal with the historical, geographic, and political contingencies of England be applied to the very different world of modern Thailand? For example, there were few land shortages in Thailand,Footnote 23 so the means of production were the people, and not the land. So, when tensions emerged in Thailand in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it was not over land but between the monarchy and democracy. Or rather perhaps monarchy, democracy, and the military.

Kukrit’s theory: Buddha, Marx, and Zones of Refuge

In the concluding chapter to Farang Sakdina, Kukrit offers an approach focused on dialectical tensions, which also draws on assumptions of Thai Buddhism. In describing how socio-political change occurs Kukrit notes that

The [English] feudal system is a social system. Underpinning [English] feudalism are conditions and doctrines, some of which cause conflicts within the system itself. These conditions and doctrines, if analyzed from a perspective of dialectical materialism, must have “contradictions”… Such pratikarn (contradictions) were tools built into feudalism, which directed and restrained the growth of the feudal system and remained in the proper proportion ….

This is the same as in our body, which is also a pratikarn, which is why disintegration of the body occurs (see Kukrit Farang Sakdina, pp. 145–146.).

However, Kukrit’s points about democracy, governance, and Buddhist dialectics is not Kukrit’s only modern social theoretical point in Farang Sakdina. Kukirt also points to what Scott (2009) calls “Zones of Refuge” as being important. Kukrit (see Farang Sakdina p. 141) notes that the population in Thailand could easily escape until at least the late fifteenth century, because the Ayutthayan courts and police did not have the resources to capture runaways in the sparsely populated countryside. This problem was also described by Ester Boserup (1965), and earlier social theorists (see also description in Waters (2007): pp. 33–57). However, Kukrit also goes on to note that the Thai elite of Ayutthaya (until 1767) and Rattanakosin (after 1783) were less successful than the English in “capturing” the peasantry. “Outlaws” were probably less common on the crowded island of Britain than in Thailand, where the surrounding mountains hid the uncaptured groups of Southeast Asia. Indeed such groups are still found in highland Myanmar today (see Waters and Panyakom (2021)).

Thus, Kukrit points out. that when a landlord/noble became too oppressive in Ayutthaya, the villein/prai could slip out of his grasp, stop paying tribute, and ignore levies for soldiers. Kukrit does not write of what the actual destination was of the peasants who escaped from padi agriculture, and the sacred halo (barami) of the King. However, how such escapees “hid” in Southeast Asian zones of highland refuge well-described by Scott (2009) in his book The Art of Not Being Governed.

Thai Sakdina and the modern day

More recent literature about Southeast Asia points to the role such sparsely populated “zones of refuge” played. Scott (2009: pp. 22–25, 58–59) writes that the nobles and landholders at the center of a Southeast Asian “mandala” had trouble maintaining control over areas distant from the center. In developing this model, Scott emphasized that the authority of the King diminished with distance from the palace in the capital. Or, to borrow Kukrit’s words, the contradictions shifted as distance from the center increased. In large part, this was because it was relatively easy to escape into the mountains where they established settlements and did not pay fees, provide soldiers or corvee labor, and were not subject to the other obligations of sakdina. Escaped peasants were free in mountainous “zone of refuge;” but this involved an implicit loss of security. In the highlands, there was room to run, even as escapees were also vulnerable to the torches of sudden raids (see e.g., Chirot (2012): pp. 17–51, 141).Footnote 24 Kukrit’s insight regarding this of course precedes that of Scott and more recent writers.

Finally Kukrit acknowledges that feudalism and sakdina, even though the systems are today archaic both in England and Thailand, are still relevant. The systems were officially dominant for 700 years in Europe (roughly 1066–1789), and almost 500 years in Thailand (roughly 1450–1932). Moreover, while both countries emerged from grain-based kingdoms, they were different, and not equivalent as Kukrit points out. Again, most importantly sakdina is not “rights over the land,” but about rights and responsibilities over humans.

It is true that during the time of the great city of Ayudhya, we had the principle of government that referred to rule over the land. Namely, each city governor controlled the land. The villagers (prai ban) who rented their land were put under his control and needed to pay a levy to him. This rule was transformed by the system called Sakdina—officially set up from the reign of King Trailokanat of Ayudhaya [in 1454] and continued until the current era of the Rattanakosin kingdom. (see Kukrit Farang Sakdina 186–189).

As Kukrit emphasizes, the two different systems left imprints on their respective social, political, and legal systems, which effect how they developed modern institutions. England was bequeathed after its Industrial Revolution with a decentralized government emerging from farang feudalism, and a representative Parliament more powerful than the King. In this context, four united—but separate—kingdoms of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland federated, even as counties, duchies, bisophorics, etc., all retained some local rights. Regional political identities persist today in Great Britain in ways that, for example, the Lanna Kingdom of Chiang Mai does not. In particular, UK sub-units have their own parliaments and councils, while governors appointed from Bangkok rule the modern Thai provinces.Footnote 25

And like England, Thailand expanded into neighboring regions, incorporating kingdoms in the north (Lanna after the eighteenth century), and principalities in the northeast, south, and central parts of the country (see Chaiyan, 1994: pp. 17–33). However, in doing this, local institutions were co-opted by the center in Ayutthaya (before 1768) or Bangkok (after 1783). Thai Sakdina also spread the principles of social order founded on loyalty to the King and central state, and obedience to a centralized hierarchy. Landholding was less important. Today’s habitus of personal loyalty to the Thai King are seen in the Thai national rituals undertaken by schoolchildren, the playing of the national anthem at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on radio and television, the emphasis on “Thai-ness” in school curriculum, insistence on the central Thai language, and the truly national mourning after the passing of King Rama IX in October 2016.

Thus, today in Thailand there are rules rooted in what Locke’s version of natural law called “pursuit of estate” are weaker than in the Anglo-American world.Footnote 26 In Thailand, hierarchy is still rooted in personal proximity to the King and the political authorities. In the case of Thailand such traditions are rooted in Buddhism with its karmic cycles. Again to quote Kukrit.

This is the same as in our body, which is also a pratikarn, which is why disintegration of the body occurs. But the substance in the body is still the preparation for the production of a new body. It is a normal thing. So, in a society with any type of ruling system, regeneration must occur. (see pp. Kukrit, pp. 145–146).

Personal loyalty continues to bind in Thailand, including at election times, perhaps more so than the material economic interests highlighted by the Marxist or capitalist theorist. Such personal loyalty can trump property rights, and party loyalty, which tend to be emphasized to a greater extent in the Anglo-American world. Even today in Thailand, the King’s government can reassign land to a follower most likely to use it well for the benefit of the kingdom as a whole.Footnote 27

The word sakdina was used in Thai demonstrations against the authoritarianism of the military in the Thai government in 2020. The word sakdina was used not only to critique the role of soldiers in Parliament, but also put focus on the visible symbols of deference that permeate Thai society. Civil servants, including teachers, police officers, district officials, and other authority figures, still receive deferential treatment from common people, and a level of corruption and opacity expected. When issues of equity and transparency are challenged in the name of good governance, there are inevitably a contradiction with older habits of deference and hierarchy.

In this context, regulations involving university and secondary school uniforms and haircuts for students were highlighted in the 2020 demonstrations. As in Kukrit’s day, the word “sakdina” was used as one of derisive critique—a complaint by the protestors that the habits of hierarchy and deference that ostensibly disappeared with the pre-1932 Revolution, were in fact real and persistent in twenty-first century. In the same way, demonstrators in 2006 wore shirts asserting identity as a Prai/Villein (see Naruemon and McCargo (2011): p. 1006). This is of course the same point that Kukrit is making in Farang Sakdina about how contradictions drive history. Cultural habits are persistent, and deep within Thai culture, and set the stage for the democratic reforms possible decades or even centuries later.

Conclusion: the dialetics of Sarkhan?

Farang Sakdina is one of the many books, articles, and columns that M. R. Kukrit Pramoj wrote during his long career. A textual analysis of what makes Farang Sakdina special are Kukrit’s clear statement about social theory and political change. As such a work, Farang Sakdina reflects a distinctly Thai Buddhist look at how political change occurs creatively, mixing in theories of karma, contradictions, and dialectics. This mixture is both unique to Kukrit, but also a statement that can be thought of as a progenitor to latter day post-colonial theories even though Kukrit’s book pre-dates Said’s Orientalism, and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Like Post-Colonial Theory, Farang Sakdina is an explicit statement in response to the American, British, and Soviet advisors peddling theories rooted in the materialism of European philosophers.Footnote 28

Another difference though is that Kukrit wrote in Thai, for Thai people. Said and Fanon used the colonial languages of French and English, and as their own post-colonial approach would predict, were more widely read as a result. Kukrit was also not writing about the effects of western culture, and the types of hybridity, which is described well in the crypto-colonial literature that Herzfeld (2010, 2012) develops about Thailand. Rather Farang Sakdina is asserting that due to ancient historical trajectories in which the west played little role, the nature of political change is fundamentally different.

In writing Farang Sakdina, Kukrit is not addressing an English-speaking audience at all. Had they read it, how would a global audience have reacted? Would USAID have developed different policies? The answer can perhaps be found by re-watching “The Ugly American” (Burdick and Lederer 1958) the 1963 Marlon Brando film in which Kukrit Pramoj played the supporting role as the Prime Minister of Sarkhan. The themes of Farang Sakdina and “The Ugly American;” are surprisingly similar despite very different approaches. The shared message was that opposition to American policies about a particular type of democracy, does not equate with Communism, or any other bogey man, but are legitimate expressions of national political habitus/karma. Using the sharpness of Kukrit’s scholarship, Farang Sakdina actually proposes a way to understand countries like Thailand, where a “feudal” history, which includes a strong kingship and weak property rights, is a different type of country than the “models” of farang feudalism, and on to the present day where it is called “good governance.”