The neo-liberal ideology identifiable behind most of education and social services reform rhetorics in Europe, accentuates choice and personal freedom (hence the stress on learning rather than teaching, and construction rather than transmission of knowledge and culture). However, as the practice of choice policies shows, this emphasis masks sharp diversification of educational opportunities. Choice, deregulation and privatisation of learning thus contribute to the questioning of the basic tenets of public schooling (as they do in relation to „public sphere” in general). This change may be grasped by the use of such concepts as „re-feudalisation” (originally in Habermas, 1992). The paper attempts at expanding the notion of re-feudalisation, coined to describe the erosion of open debate in public spheres, and link it to other concepts and imaginaries concerning social structure. For instance, in the debate on welfare policy we can read about 'Neo-Philanthropy' (Villadsen 2007). Fantasies of feudal forms of power and responsibility are nowadays notorious in popular culture – in political fiction books and in virtual states on the internet, where images of „Empire” seem to outnumber those connected with democratic or republican regimes. In the paper, a brief analysis of one of such political fiction stories (Dukaj 2004) will be provided. The question that seems to be most urgent in the light of those fantasies is that of the emerging demand for building consent and recognition in the societies of rigid class divisions. That gives the notion of re-feudalisation a more acute meaning. It means that a new gentry – the class of inherited privilege (Bourdieu 2006) – tries to learn how to enforce its authority on the others, starts to seek forms of responsibility for the others, and fantasises on gaining respect from the others. On the theoretical level, the analysis will be linked to the idea of ideology understood as fantasy of a „fully reconciled society” as constitutive in the process of building political identities (Žižek 1989, Laclau 2007).