Oriental Despotism

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For the political concept, see Oriental despotism.
Oriental Despotism
AuthorKarl August Wittfogel
CountryUnited States
PublisherYale University Press
Publication date
1957

Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power is a book of political theory and

People's Republic of China
, though they were not themselves hydraulic societies, did not break away from their historical condition and remained systems of "total power" and "total terror".

The book was both welcomed as an historically grounded analysis of despotism that warned the West against the expansion of Communist totalitarianism and criticized as a Cold War polemic. The materialist and ecological theories in Oriental Despotism influenced ecological anthropologists and global economic historians even though some of them found fault with its methodology and empirical basis or questioned Wittfogel's political motives.[1]

Background

Main article: Karl August Wittfogel § Biography

Wittfogel, who was educated in German centers of sinology and joined the

Hegel.[2]
During the 1920s and early 1930s he debated with orthodox Marxist-Leninists who followed Joseph Stalin's dictum that all societies evolved through the same stages of historical growth, which Asia must therefore follow. When he was freed from a Nazi prison in Germany, he came to the United States with his wife in 1933 and made several trips to China for research. Wittfogel's interests in China and immersion in Marxist analysis led him to conclusions on the theory of oriental despotism that differed from Marxist tradition. Marx held that historical development outside Europe did not follow the pattern he saw in Europe. Europe, he wrote, developed through a process of class conflict from an ancient slave society to feudalism, then bourgeois capitalism, and from there to socialism and eventually communism. Modern Europe, in Marx's classic formulation, was created by the conflict between the emerging bourgeois and industrial capitalist classes, on the one hand, and the Ancient Regime of feudal economy on the other.[3]

Wittfogel suggested Asia was immobile because rulers controlled society but there were no slaves, as in Marx's slave society, nor serfs, as in feudal society: there were no classes, no class conflict, and thus no change. This proposition did not explain how rulers gained their absolute power and why no forces in society opposed them. Wittfogel asked whether there was an explanation found only in these societies. Marxists in both the Soviet Union and in Western countries explored these questions as important in themselves, but with special heat because both liberals and conservatives in the West wanted to decide whether Stalin's Russia was an authentic communist system in Marx's sense or whether it was itself an example of oriental despotism. One historian of the concept remarks that for Wittfogel, "the analysis of Asia was actually intended as a discussion of political relationships within the 'West'". [3]

In the late 1920 and early 1930s, orthodox theorists in Moscow spurned Wittfogel's views because they differed from Stalin's and Chinese Marxists rejected them also because they implied that China did not have the capability to develop. On a trip to Moscow, however, Wittfogel met the young Chinese scholar

pastoral societies that survived in arid Central Asia.[citation needed
]

Publication

Beginning in the 1930s, Wittfogel pursued research projects that formed a background and preparation for Oriental Despotism and published articles presenting aspects of its argument. He finished a manuscript in 1954, but for several years publishers turned it down. Perhaps the topic did not seem attractive or perhaps the political atmosphere seemed hostile to a book with a Marxist argument even if that argument was strongly critical of the Soviet Union and the communist government in China. Wittfogel may have had to supply a publication subsidy to Yale University Press.[citation needed]

The structure and argument of the book

The book has ten chapters:

Reception

The initial reaction to Oriental Despotism in the American press was wide and warm. Reviewers noted that Wittfogel had been working on these questions in some form since the 1930s but that the book was important for understanding the post-war world. The reviewer in

The Geographical Review advised that "every geographer concerned with Asia, and every political geographer whatever the regional concern, should read it". He hoped that "historians, political scientists, deans, and college presidents will see it as evidence that ... 'most of the world' is just as important as traditional focus on North America and Western Europe." He added that "the book makes impressively clear that there is a great mass of despotic practice in the most populous parts of the world that cannot be transformed magically by democratic catalysis." Yet "environmental determinism" is "explicitly denied," as Wittfogel speaks of "the opportunity, not the necessity" for agromanagerial despotism.[9]

Area specialist scholars, however, questioned the concept for their particular regions.

Qajar Iran. [11]

The British anthropologist Edmund Leach objected that most of the hydraulic civilisations of the past were in semi-arid regions where irrigation "did not require a despotic monarch to build vast aqueducts and reservoirs; it simply called for elementary and quite localised drainage construction and perhaps the diversion of river flood water into the flat lands on either side of the main stream." Leach further objected that Wittfogel did not deal with India, the state which Marx saw as the ideal type of "Asiatic society", and ignored the other states of South and Southeast Asia, which were all "hydraulic societies."[12]

The sociologist

Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt questioned Oriental Despotism in regard to Islamic societies. He saw the earlier oriental despotism theorists and Wittfogel as "precursors, or manifestations of what would later be called the 'Orientalist' approach," which Edward Said accused of imposing this type of analysis on Islamic societies. [13]

The reception among scholars of China was especially skeptical. The

Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty, took advantage of accidents and timing to become absolute ruler. Mote was especially concerned to explain the limits of power and the limits of terror, which he believed Wittfogel did not appreciate. Thus "total power," Mote wrote, "while not a meaningless phrase, must be understood in the context of a complex historical situation." It existed in Ming China, but even then it did not mean that totalitarian power was "omnipresent and omnicompetent." If this power concentrated on any single objective, it probably could accomplish that objective, but by the nature of the cultural environment, it could not accomplish many of them. [15]

Gregory Blue of the University of Toronto commented that "despite its analytical sweep and evident learning, Wittfogel's model made it difficult to understand why government involvement in Chinese social life seemed to have been distinctly limited during the imperial era (221 B.C.E. - 1911 CE.) or how Chinese society could have ever flourished at all". Wittfogel's reading of China as a hydraulic despotism, Blue speculated, also aimed to undermine John Fairbank's "Grand Alliance distinction between 'fascist-conservative and communist-progressive forms of totalitarianism'..." [16] Another historian of the Ming dynasty, Timothy Brook, wrote that historians were burdened with the task of responding to Wittfogel's charge that the dynasty was "despotic," one that he did not think was justified.[17]

Perry Anderson objected that the concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production was too broad to be meaningful:

A ubiquitous ‘Asiatism’ [sic] represents no improvement on a universal ‘feudalism’: in fact, it is even less rigorous as a term. What serious historical unity exists between Ming China and Megalithic Ireland, Pharaonic Egypt and Hawaii? It is perfectly clear that such social formations are unimaginably distant from one another. [18]

Anderson continued that “this vulgar charivari, devoid of any historical sense, jumbles together pell-mell Imperial Rome, Tsarist Russia, Hopi Arizona, Sung China, Chaggan East Africa, Mamluk Egypt, Inca Peru, Ottoman Turkey, and Sumerian Mesopotamia – not to speak of Byzantium or Babylonia, Persia, or Hawaii.” [19]

Wittfogel's biographer Gary Ulmen replied to these criticisms that to focus on "hydraulic despotism" was to misunderstand Wittfogel's general thesis. In fact, Ulmen continued, Wittfogel had considered a number of alternative ways to frame his proposition and there were many more demonstrations of the theory than "hydraulic" despotism. [20]

Wittfogel wrote in 1960 that the People's Republic of China was not a "hydraulic society," but that it represented a "stronger form of oriental despotism." [21]

Influence

Oriental Despotism was influential for its methodology and its findings.

Hsiao Kung-ch'uan, for instance, used Wittfogel's concept of "beggar's democracy" in his massive study, Rural China .[24] Frederic Wakeman saw Wittfogel as the defining influence in the group, but the historian Alice Miller disagreed.[25]

The water-control thesis encouraged the development of the field of

Robert McCormick Adams, Stanley Diamond, Morton Fried, Marvin Harris, Angel Palerm, and Eric Wolf.[27] Wittfogel's work encouraged the development of cultural materialism, for instance in the work of Julian Steward.[28] These scholars tested and challenged Wittfogel's conclusions. Robert McCormick Adams, for instance, found that the archeological evidence in Mesopotamia indicated that irrigation might help consolidate political control but did not by itself cause despotic rule.[29]

The political geographer

The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia ,[30] which cites Oriental Despotism extensively but not uncritically.[31] These thinkers, Blaut charges, share “the most fundamental error,” that is, “to believe, or assume, that one type of environment produces a particular type of society and the latter then persists down through history. Culture changes...." [30]
In the 1930s, Wittfogel's work was translated and used by scholars in Japan, but after the war not so much attention was paid.[32]

Political implications

David Price, a scholar of Cold War social science, declared that Wittfogel's writings "become so mired in his personal anti-communist crusade that it can be difficult to disentangle his anti-totalitarian vehemence from his theoretical contributions." Price argued that Wittfogel took advantage of the fact that he was one of the few Asia scholars to cooperate with Cold War investigations and that this cooperation protected his Marxist analysis from criticism; Wittfogel's ecological materialism escaped criticism even in the

Cold War heightened fear of Communism because he was accepted as anti-communist. [27] The scholar of political ecology, Paul Robbins, notes that Wittfogel, having been accused of being a communist sympathizer, protested loudly and accused Owen Lattimore and other colleagues of being communists; he wrote Oriental Despotism in the midst of this political struggle.[33] Gregory Blue called final words of the book — "not with the spear only, but with the battleax" [34]—the "Spartan view on how Greeks should fight Persian imperialism" that "represented a highbrow version of 'better red than dead.'" [16]

David Landes, a Harvard historian of comparative East/West economic and social development, struck back: the "hydraulic thesis has been roundly criticized by a generation of Western sinologists zealous in their political correctness (Maoism and its later avatars are good) and quick to defend China’s supposed commitment to democracy. Wittfogel is the preferred target." Landes explained these criticisms by saying that "almost all these critics of the water connection are courting the favor of an umbrageous regime, dispenser of invitations and access.”[35]

Notes

  1. ^ Robbins (2010), pp. 56-57.
  2. ISBN 9780429855344
    .
  3. ^ a b Stanziani (2014), pp. 17-18.
  4. ^ Rowe (1985), p. 264.
  5. ^ Chi (1936).
  6. ^ Wittfogel (1957), p. 124.
  7. ^ Mote (1961), p. 1.
  8. ^ Mote (1961), p. 2.
  9. ^ Jones (1958), p. 306.
  10. ^ Offner (1981), p. 43.
  11. ^ Abrahamian (1974).
  12. ^ Tambiah (2002), p. 211 ff.
  13. ^ Eisenstadt (2003), p. 418.
  14. ^ Mote (1961), p. 5.
  15. ^ Mote (1961), p. 36.
  16. ^ a b Blue (2000), p. 22.
  17. ^ Timothy Brook, Chinese State in Ming Society
  18. ^ Anderson (1979), p. 486.
  19. ^ Anderson (1979), pp. 487 n. 4.
  20. ^ Ulmen (1978).
  21. ^ Wittfogel (1960), p. ??.
  22. ^ Needham (1959), p. 59.
  23. doi:10.1163/18765610-01904003
    .
  24. ^ Hsiao (1967), p. 108.
  25. ^ Miller
  26. ^ Robbins (2010).
  27. ^ a b Price (2013), p. 936.
  28. ISBN 978-0759101326. pp. 671- 674
  29. ^ "Hydraulic Civilization" Encyclopedia Britannica (Online)
  30. ^ a b Blaut (1993), p. 83- 90.
  31. ^ Jones, Eric L. (1987). The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. Cambridge University Press. e.g. pp. xxxi, 9-10, 203, 206, 211
  32. ^ Masubuchi (1966).
  33. ^ Robbins (2010), p. 57.
  34. ^ Wittfogel (1957), p. 449.
  35. ISBN 978-0393040173
    . Wittfogel., p. 27.

Sources

Wittfogel's writings on Oriental Despotism

Major reviews

Further reading

External links
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