Feudalism, therefore, to take one example, was for Charlotte made up of a clash of the residual system of absolute religious monarchy, and the emergent system of capitalism— with important echoes of more archaic tribal caste, and faint foreshadowings of later individualist humanisms. The clashing of these forces shifted over time, until the Renaissance of the sixteenth century ushered in the age of capitalism. Capitalism then was composed of clashing elements of the residual feudalism, and an emergent future order that was only now being defined in their own time, which Charlotte called democracy. And now, Charlotte claimed, they were, on Mars at least, in the democratic age itself. Capitalism had therefore, like all other ages, been the combination of two systems in very sharp opposition to each other. This incompatibility of its constituent parts was underlined by the unfortunate experience of capitalism’s critical shadow, socialism, which had theorized true democracy, and called for it, but in the attempt to enact it had used the methods at hand in its time, the same feudal methods so prevalent in capitalism itself; so that both versions of the mix had ended up about as destructive and unjust as their common residual parent. The feudal hierarchies in capitalism had been mirrored in the lived socialist experiments; and so the whole era had remained a highly charged chaotic struggle, exhibiting several different versions of the dynamic struggle between feudalism and democracy.